On my way to work I saw

Jolo 25 years since

Sorry, Fatchie, Sorry, Jack, Sorry, Mimi, Sorry Susukan.
But I have no love lost for Jolo.

I wasn't there when it went down the river.
And you weren't there either.

None of us was there.
So now look it is spewing us

Black stagnant waters staring back at us every which way we look
Bubbling with hate and malice

Be that our hearts would go that way, too.

They took what was given (for Berkis)

What we cannot midwive
They birthed and made live
In the pit of their breath
In the wounds of the heart
In the violence of their words

Oh the hate in their eyes
The daggers in their voices
They want my blood my blood
And call it love

Oh their brutish need
Their savage hunger
And yet they went
For what was asked of them

For what they could give for it
For what they could take from it
Which could only be stolen
For the hope they long lost

For the love they never had

I'd rather be the pup

the poetry of cigarette a reprise

You won't learn anything by me

A young writer came up to me today. You write so well, she said. What is your technique?

I felt diluted. Like I really wasn’t the talent I or she thought me to be; just someone picking her way and learned a trick or two along the block.

I said I actually don’t write so well, and I am not a writer. Are you?

But my God, was she tough. She just cast her eyes down and smiled, then knitting her brow as though she was in some harmless guessing game, she again turned her face to me. Wasn’t I glad she isn’t pretty: her cop-out, her get-away. You saying I just wait for the Muse, if she finds me worthy she will find me?

Oh no darling I’m not saying anything!

This is an effort to save that young writer. I am a just a teacher, not a writer, and this is what I have to tell her: Don’t follow me, I have lost my way. As for writing, It cannot be taught. It can only be bought.


When my best friend got married, how my walls went tumbling down. Mimi was my confederate. In life, and in Literature. She drew and wrote poetry and run-on essays, and my, was she good and was getting better and better by the day. So when one day she took the notion of carrying the neighbor’s baby like she wanted to know how it'd feel to play cradle and coo, I just knew she was going to leave me.

Now she’s a doctor in the KSA. I sometimes imagine her going crazy, making doodles inside a stonehouse harangued by an oversized baby. If she ran into a surgeon who told her, You know you’re different, she keeled over. Even of the husband she was rather proud to have procured for herself, she’s run out of things to say. I’m only happy here on payday, she last told me.


Danny was a classmate in college. Quiet but articulate, I once thought he would make a brilliant poet-revolutionary one day. Imagine my dismay when he ended up an officer of a giant pharmaceutical company and stole my pitch in service of corporate money. Charged, he told his girlfriends at FB that he was still going to pay me even if like I said there's no such thing as free lunch in Cuba, but to please please, he loves his wife and family.

And so when it was Karen Kay’s turn to marry and have a baby, I just said Damn. Now there goes another. Into the gully. You cannot marry and be good by me.

I once caught Uma Thurman on telly telling Oprah how women’s lives are interrupted by motherhood. The host cut her. Don’t you ever say that, went Oprah, emotive and sincere-like, hurting in behalf of martyred humanity. You would think Motherhood was Art itself and that great beauties like Uma would do fine serving time in the scullery. Uma, then divorced wife and single mother, blinked and smiled, all artifice. Thankfully it wasn’t her show. She had erroneously used the word “ruined”, too strong too sharp, a taboo for such a dull magazine show.

Are you learning anything? If you are not, then I’m a good teacher, you Go.

I saw you last night

I was at the coffee shops looking for this book I just took back from a friend who refused to read it because I asked her to, and I couldn't find it. Instead, I saw you. You were in a corner table with this nice workaday girl in heels and make-up and it was like a whiff of breeze blew in my face. I saw the You I never knew. You looked all your years, and you looked easy, almost happy: a hair and two loosed about your face and weren't you laughing! I said how good must you be going around these days, surely you didn't miss me, maybe didn't even think of me. Then I started telling myself that that woman you were with isn't half as good as me and can't hurt you as much.

I stood there a good while just staring at you until another customer elbowed me. I picked my way out of the coffee bar.

Back in my room I thought of the last thing you told me. What did you ask? What it is that I wanted? Did I tell you what? I wanted to call. I told myself that when you are so happy like that, surely you wouldn't mind being called, being clawed at, even if I were a crow back from seven hells. I said I will call because you asked me not to bother you anymore and our relationship had always been set that way: you ask me one thing, I give you another thing.

But I was rather tired. I don't even know how to write now without being crazy and unclear. So I didn't do anything. Just set about to packing my things because I was supposed to go to the province, visit my Grandmother's grave. Then when I lay down in bed, I got so irritated with the water stains on the ceiling that I got up and started scraping them off, first with my fingers, then with a knife, until I started thinking about the cost of paint and Vulcasel and nails and everything that will glue things together. Then I thought about the cost of going home and seeing nephews and nieces and relatives who don't really care about grandmothers and one crazy relation.

At the day's end I settled for the cost of paint, because I said right now it's all that I have, this room and roof above my head, for there is nothing to have really, there is no You, there is no Grandmother even, no family, no friends to turn to. I had better keep it, the bed and the roof above my head or I won't feel right about so many things else. So there: I canceled most everything I wanted, kept to the economics of bare living, and now I feel done.

I am ever so done.

So here I am still in my room with the bareness of bare, preserving nothing and telling myself not to waste love, to not exhaust love, since love is done.