2009: Wishing you and your family & friends many blessings for this winter holiday!

At the end of the month,
the hand sighs and flexes its digits
like a dog shaking its paws
and body after coming out
of a labyrinth of dreams or from a bath
under the summer sun
with the kids screaming
for the Rainman to come again
another day.

At the end of the month,
the planner looks hectic,
its nerves had been frazzled
with cross outs and scribbles,
colored and shaded with various signs
of importance like some fire alarm
of a woman going through PMS,
and signed with proud check(mate)s
to end the month's (Scrabble) board game:
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

At the end of the month,
I came to realize that poetry
is the fragrance of everything
physical and anything impossible.
It is a rendition of the poet
reliving an inspiration
or a memory tucked under the pillow.
The poem itself will never be
an endangered rare species* if
we all choose to keep celebrating
its world just like the Greeks did
with their lutes and laurels.

For every end of a poem,
there is birth to another
just as the night becomes sunrise
becomes sunset.

4/30/08

* In response to Shuntaro Tanikawa's "One Poem."

(Written on the back of an information page re: application process to obtaining a nursing fellowship)

And I can't believe
I had stopped breathing
all this time
and finally exhaled
with tears springing
from my eyes

and asked myself
where did water come from
if the world came from
the big bang (or whatever
that means)

and so gravity punched
a hole through the center
of my body
like a bullet through
a paper doll's head to be
hung up like an ornament
on a Christmas tree

with strands of beads
around my neck.
I think I'm feeling
just as drunk as during
Mardi Gras with those glasses
of champagne or shots of jello
(or whatever it was I had
in my hand that night)

with some sleazy smooth talker
slithering around my body
hungry for "some tender lovin'"
as he called it.
Maybe he was a lonely
old soul desperate to be loved
and probably didn't get any
because he was an orphan
or his mother was a prostitute
or his ex-girlfriend was a sadistic
psycho bitch
or I'm just making up reasons
to figure out why I'm here
at this club,

and it is just as loud as silence
when I'm doing yoga or meditate
like those Buddhist monks
who can float mid-air
when they get on that spiritual plane
and discover that the world
is just inside their mouths,
and they tell you that they can feel
your every thought, pain, and happiness
shifting, burning, grinding, howling
like a lone wolf to the moon,
its song surpassing the questions
of identity of the night owl.