‘cause you wrote a confession on her palm when she wanted your name; better yet you should have written the plan instead

i. alternate ending

Twilight, spiked with sake for the gods, did not have the magic to have her take his memories.

The price that took form of losing each other’s name, at what purchase was it attached to, then? Certainly not the blueprints of his terrorism. Or the fate that befell a city bicycle that took her halfway to here, while having to suffer a trail beaten down for mountain bikes and people on foot.

She was confused. How could one hang on to sanity when your last memory before this dream-like dusk was of the festival of falling comet shards over windswept grass fields? True, their minds had taken turns at driving each other’s bodies, but as dancers do - weaving across the floor, deftly flowing out of each other’s way, guiding the other, but always with a chasm separating them, never together on the same precipice.

So she stood there at the lip of the crater, behind her the lonely green paradise it encircled, the rock shelter of gods. Before her, the breathtaking lake whose beauty she had grown to take for granted. The town she always wanted to toss over her slender shoulders, all of the first some-teen years of her life she could not wait to leave behind.

Death. Death was falling upon her world, her mind nagged at her. But her now-questionable memories confined her where she stood, the uncertainty stemmed from him living as her on that day she had already lived. It threatened to overlap and mock whatever is left of her reality. For instance, the question of how her hair got cut short that day: was her memory false now, had he overwritten this day but left it clinging to her like a phantom only she could see? Or, was it even the same festival day, was it even the same comet?

And it must have took him forever to get her up here. The exhaustion it taxed on her body kept her rooted where she stood and demanded she gave in, and it was just too easy to fall to her knees, and wait for the end of the world.


ii. alternate epilogue

She was not where the rocks from heaven landed.

But the lot death had taken from her, abetted by her psyche’s state of already skating over the slippery ice of this mind-switching mistaken for romance, had broken her. They found her sporting an empty gaze, wandering around the edge of the water where her town used to be.

No, she did not return to his city. They found her a comfortable bed where they cared for her and others like her, until weeks later when no one was looking, she went into the younger of two lakes and walked to the bottom to sleep and rest, knowing in three years he would come and restart the torment.


2017.feb.01

This was from last year, when I was still bothered by the plot hole in the ending of Shinkai Makoto's anime your name.

hum to the tune of sirens, move to the motion of flames

nearby, another inferno breaks out,
the latest city fire.
we select firemen, firetrucks,
from our collection of humans and human artifacts.
we send them scrambling through hopelessly
congested city streets, hopeful
they’ll get the work done before 5PM
and not add to my homebound traffic jam.

-

i’d like to think of these as eruptions.
disruptions on the cityscape norm.
i’d like to dream that one day these outbreaks
can be more like volcanic eruptions
from the ocean floor, hear me out -
wherein each one holds a chance to spew
a mountain into existence or maybe,
islands above clouds,
a continent in the sky,
a new world by installments.



2018.jan.29

second is the perfect place under a full moon

you were down, because,
you lost in the finals, again,
and no amount of chocolates, or flowers,
could console

and so i came over.

i told you not to feel that low, that,
“in the event of a werewolf outbreak,
you can melt your silver medals
into bullets. or shurikens,”
since you hate guns but
love ninja movies.

i thought a hint of a smile
crept up by the edge of your lips,
though not quite fished
out of the water, yet,

and so i said,

“that bitch who beat you (again) can go
find herself a stick, it’ll be handy
in the off-chance the werewolves
would like to play fetch.”

and so i got a full smile,
out of you, dare i think even
a little laugh, out of you,
you little perennial
loser you

and so i was glad.


and i was so glad
i could not suppress the howl.



2017.aug.09

other R

one day,

i stumbled
upon one of your stories.

enamored mostly by your temptress,
that tempest, your muse,
i wanted your muse
to be mine -

in my whimsical mind
in a minute built her a shrine, then a church,
in an hour built her a city of cathedrals -

and i wrote the end of a dalliance -

.:.

except, that once,
that one time, you stumbled
upon my story, and you could not,
no, you would not,
let it expire

you did not make your muse mine.
you did something special.
you made me hers.

.:.

brother, you were a stranger,
brother, you were nothing
but a scowl in a profile picture,
you were nothing but words,

just words, only words that did nothing,
except: promise
that we will get along fine
when we meet.

- never did - never will -

stranger, brother,
in your contagious amicability,
you dragged me
into a trek through a text conversation,
talk that yielded a treasure
hoard of discoveries obscenely larger
than the time
invested procuring.

you told me a secret.

the kind that i should not,
i could not,
i would not,
share with the universe.

you gave that to a stranger,
this stranger -
me -
why?

am i left to find an answer -

maybe it’s this:
brother, you were far
richer in terms of human
affection, where you were warm,
i know i am
a cold bastard

maybe, that one time,
you already knew you would have
so much to bring in
an afterlife so full that
you could afford to spare me change;

that you thought me empty-handed,
that i needed to be armed,
like with one of your secrets,
this secret -
to bring to my grave,

one day.


2018.jan.11
+ RIP RSH +

dust

the dream is to remain, retain
knowledge as soulless remains,
after this Armageddon

the dream, is to be conscious dust,
perhaps rust, upon shards
of a shattered Excalibur

the dream, is to stay awake, even
as heavens break, even
as hells overflow
and cosmic dirt settle
and remake the planetscape

the dream is for you and i
remembering the why, as to
our purpose on this earth,
whether it was to sink together,
into new oceans, infiltrate oysters,
be one pearl? or was it to swirl
around every wind pattern,
rewriting our favorite epics
in cursive, until we inflict
ourselves upon the new man
and terrify him into religion



2017.june.15

ocean

if i may coerce you into
partaking in my delusions,
today i invite you to think of
social media as an ocean
where each of us maintains a harbor
from which we fish bottles from the water,
each with a message, often
the caliber of garbage,
but in rare times we get one
that has your name on it, and
the story that comes with it
tells of your fall in your battle with cancer,
but it also tells of your valiance and defiance,
of you yielding no spoils to your nemesis
outside a small decimal in statistics,
and that way you will have at least
left me a little satisfaction,
instead of this mundane, ordinary, tasteless,
numbing experience of having learned
of your demise via a social media comment tag,
when we both know you were meant to have
an elegy bards would have
sold their mothers for


11.may.2017

spend your skill points on small talk, trust me

if words were solutions
to the complex problems between us,
that distance,
that void
that demanded to be filled,
was i,
out of my depth -
not knowing the right words
that could have pulled at you,
or did i need to find
that hidden combination?
was i close,
was i so,
far off -
had i the wrong things,
the wrong words?
had i the wrong accent,
the wrong language?
had i the wrong problem,
had you the wrong me -


2017.apr.17