January 24th, 2023 (1.)

I woke up again

before the alarm
gray light creeping
a sliver of crow 
not sure if the milk 
has gone bad
my cat needs fed
and nausea rolls
into another day

that special discomfort of standing in the shower

and starting to recall the two-ish years you spent in an

international pyramid schemey self-improvement empire

but even more acute

is rehashing the scores of people

you pressed, cajoled, and roped into 'learning more'

sitting most uncomfortably in fold up chairs lined in a row

or answering your mid-evening calls 

from a cubicle in a basement in mid-town

from close friends and family

to the sudanese bus driver at the elementary school you work at

and the prick-ish guy you kissed one time

rueful regret blossoms 

like steam on the window

and a lasting skepticism of self-sealing systems

even for a hopeless joiner like me

The Tyranny of Truth

Four years in,

and liberated into uncertainty yet,

my father broke ground in a paucity of thought.

Thinking can get you in trouble,

it's a hot compress on your scalp,

bringing your brain to a head.

I've assigned my role as thinking for him,

but what I think is his truth

is just my truth, for him, and simply

just my truth.

I read how you just can't take diversion away,

you sit at dinner and you can see

someone's history looming

and you see someone else 

barely bat an eyelid,

grab the wheel and simply

steer round a subject.

You can't slap those hands away,

if you want to stop an accident.

The truth is steered round,

it is elided,

and so it lives in countless dining rooms,

and if it feels so good to talk,

so it must to say nothing at all.

Our elders are deeper than most things I've known,

they have lived with everything they've seen.

And if I have to call what I am,

I'm just a shadow, generations removed:

My own father can't tell me

he sold cigarettes made out of

other cigarettes because he didn't

and his father could barely speak the same

because he did.

MoCA licks boots - so who's in bed with

who at the Malaysian Chinese Museum?

These, seriously, are my thoughts as I wonder

what pilgrimage is. 

Maybe it's best a stone unturned. 

Maybe that stone is not for me.

My grandfather was not so sure where he

came from, so he didn't go back near the end.

But somewhere in time, somewhere in China,

he is scouring the ground for tobacco

that found no breath to be smoked

the first time round.