Braving the Storm
you writhed on the precipice
rain lashed sky
drowned in pain
tears didn’t quench fever
raging hot against the winds
your sight, lightning blinded
no sense of impending torrents
I, a shrinking oasis
vigil for your cloud-dark mind
sanctuary, anchor
a hurricane
I transgressed darkened skies
rushed around the eye of the storm
battled unseen
screamed into the vortex
you swam alone
time brooded
clouds dispersed
morning sun licked up night’s tears
pushed through
your eyes opened
Fashion Statement
At the trendy hair salon, heads held for a new veneer, that changeling time, each person feeling slightly ridiculous in rollers, clips, caps, twisted coil coiffures except for the woman next to me out like a light, chin on chest, as intrusive fingers comb paste through her hair.
We glance, conspirators of style, wondering if she’s tired or drunk, but the boyfriend comes in and coolly wakes her while I’m spun in different directions-kaleidoscopic visions of hair and mirrors.
She’s not yet done but the beau’s getting bored waiting for the do and doing what he does through endless cuts, tints, shampoos. Bam! He’s down as if felled by those spacey out-of-this-world helmets they place over heads to dry. He knocks down a chair and pink plastic rollers fly, his feet in the air. They right the chair first, pull him to sitting but he’s gone to another world and no one’s at the helm.
His girlfriend in dye yells, Chris Chris what’s my name? Get some water. What’s my name? Flesh on flesh resounds–Smack! Smack! Smack! Like a blow against the one fashionable front we are trying to present in the face of this transgression.
Slap Slap—he’s not up yet−he’s down and out so far out that they carry his body into the back to see if they can evince a statement on fashion or states of mind. Call an ambulance! No fashion crisis–he didn’t faint at the sight of her hair or the price of having it done on 4th Ave.
In the back the dryers whir, drowned by the screams the cries the repeated slaps. Paramedics arrive sporting the same utilitarian do. Is he dead? The gurney’s wheeled in. Sophie comes over from her cafe next door. They were at my place, what’s going on? Macabre humor from the stylist who threw cold water on the man already blue: Oh they say it was something he ate. He choked on life, stuttering to a stop, trying to find the vein that leads to paradise.
It took the aesthetician smashing her fist into his chest, maybe breaking a nail, to get him breathing again. Perhaps after pumping up in the bathroom, shooting some alien liquid into veins, while foreign substances changed his girlfriend’s hair but not her condition he remembered his way back. Trying to bide time seeking a place better than cool. A momentary bliss before being blitzed as they zipped him off in the limousine for crackheads, the white one with those beautiful, flashing ethereal lights. Not yet heaven not quite heaven but it was so close and so good and so real while we sat paralyzed pretending to be untouched, and the memory was snipped, shampooed, permed and dyed out of us.
Singapore
The first signs
McDonalds, 7-Up, Pepsi
Sky high shrines in neon
Roads lined with palms
Sunday, every day and all year long
Civilization
In the hot wet blanket calm
Trunks with gnarled finger branches
Open languid through midnight heat
In the harbor
Boats quietly bob in sleep
And straight-backed buildings
Sprout clean as crystal
From evening-swept grounds
Cars glide smoothly silent
In air-conditioned coolness
And somewhere
Neatly manicured people move
Between the Lines
Your face is opaque
revealing nothing but pages
words about him though long clasped
in clay’s cold touch.
Through you, I glimpse his life
emotion’s dark soul.
His pages, still laden with heart-stone feelings
speak an ageless thought
though plaited into one era
of Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love.
His hand has grayed your words
not with light of ideal life
nor inky with evil deeds
but a shade entwined in the thread of living
I don’t know you either
but through his fiber
woven amongst the pages
that twist through my mind
braid your fingers to the words
I have touched a part of your life.