being honest today

i am constructing a web of individuality. every strand a success, every inch something to be proud of. but the nature of spider webs is such that they do not survive storms. and we, the spiders, are left with spiny shreds of effort, empty homes and beings.

rewind. yes, i am the spider. there are no metaphors today, no carefully constructed words that i can fathom using. and i want to give up building my web. i want to abandon the wreck i and we have made. though we and spiders try to begin anew, some things cannot be repaired.

I marvel that ruins are tourist attractions, magnetic pulls for us who love to see the destruction of peoples, worlds, hopes. so it is possible, even probable that i may leave these ruins for you, out of courtesy. so you can pass by on your way to a theme park, the ocean, a convenience store, and thank God you are still whole.

panic attack

she is the kind of woman who makes her bed every morning,
a meticulous habit perhaps borne of insecurity; things must be just so.
but the rest of her apartment is littered
with empty food cartons, newly bought shoes, holed socks.

Today she does not make her bed, does not feel the
burning need to be in order.
She leaves her bed sheets crumpled in a corner, her blanket
at the edge of her bed, nearly on the ground
and gets into the shower.

and she does not understand the weakness gripping her,
the haphazard buckling of her legs,
there is no real need to shave
so she does not waste time.
She cannot for the life of her
come to terms with
the reason her chest is heaving in panic
under the consistent stream of water. But she is shampooing her hair,
conditioning her hair,
scrubbing the dirt off her body methodically
as she does every day out of habit, routine, nothing more.
confined in an immaculate sadness that something so
comforting as a warm shower
cannot penetrate her heart, and warm it as well.

Out of the shower, out of the uncontrolled madness of water
swirling into the pipes, she walks to her unmade bed,
silently gets in, and prays for sleep.

the contents

she, a romantic,
cannot bear to dispose of
markers and pens that are no longer inked,
each one a history record of words.
newspaper calendars, wires, faded sketches of magazine lovers,
the minute details
of an ocean, dry shells, and grains of sand
from other continents where she
tried to find her dreams, tried to bring them back
in the form of porcelain kitsch souvenirs.

with hair in her eyes and bare feet,
she writes her travelogues in faded pen,
memories of beloved places
she’s travelled to build up her immunity and the strength of her heart.
but she cannot cease
hoping that one of these days she’ll slip on an island ferry, that
the words will tumble out of her palms
and be swallowed by silent waves.

driving

yellow lines mark the living room rug,
where we’ve separated our
lives into lanes,
left to pass,
right for cruising, auto pilot
conversations: we are all fine.
and the shoulder for me to stop in illness
and vomit over the rail.

cataract

I am thieved of words,
a crime not given its due recompense, while
we are pushed out into in the opacity of
a dark sky dotted with specks of faith.
I am paddling, slowly, willfully through the depravity of
time tied with shallow breathing
and wrinkled
silk scarves around my neck, dangling
threads of the exotic.

I cannot morph into exoticism, this is not my way,
will not indulge in the imagery of deserts
and white robes.

But these grains
of faith greet us from
a distance, on nights without clouds or perverse city
streetlights scraping our eyes and
the sky; a layer of cataract
over the stars, and I am wondering
if the next brilliant light in the sky, the next sign of hope
is actually a distant passing helicopter,
a speck of dust on my eyebrow.