tinfoildresses

  Rizwan Akhtar

My Languages

 I dream about my ancestors in Arabic,

who planted  stories in sands and pearls,

wrote love tales on the fronds of fig's trees

danced in Oasis and left me wondering.

I talk in my father's language

chewed with betel leafs

and sung with tapering candles

before and after the Mutiny—

people were hanged in words

expressions were concealed in letters

streets were lonely and long like the Urdu dirge.

Now I struggle with another one

one with which I swam all the oceans,

has double-edge teeth

it bites out of  loyalty and betrayal—

and makes me claim

the bastardised foreword of a vanity book—

so, sometimes I mesh it

with my personal pronouns

sprinkle some home-grind spices

then words bob out of my grip

like a little child

on the platform

and haggard goes the mother,

so I am often

prisoner and custodian

straddles with its fortunes

falling and running

across the English Channel.

The Melt

 The snow spread like a blank white page

and sun like a reluctant reader

flipped it-

the light illumined the thumbed earth

and became a mirror

undressed from night's frozen stare

the hidden creatures raised their heads

from this egg-white plate

the smothered grass divided in little spongy hordes

challenged the white colour everywhere

the melt down began

and the early morning pedestrians

started cursing the pitfalls on the pavements.

 Eric Burke

Two Poems From the Store

The Scholar

        (A Misprision)

He wants to sound like Achilles

weeping by the sea.

He wants his desire

to sound as natural, as innocent,

as inevitable.  He wants his wife

to understand the urgency of desire,

the shortness of life.

He wants her to give to him

as Thetis gave to Achilles

(for no woman ever has). So

     He continues down the aisle

with the intensity of a thousand

Nereid aunts accompanying him.

Observing Her

She wants a man who is soft

like a woman's belly,

soft to his children,

soft to himself.

A man who dances,

sometimes by himself,

round and round

in constant circles,

round and round

when his wife does not desire.

She imagines this man 

is Jewish,

or Catholic -- maybe Italian,

or East European -- maybe a professor,

or scholar, or grocer -- in any case, 

a kind of communal    hermit:

sufficient unto himself,

and gracious, oh so gracious, 

to all who enter his life.

Christie Casher

BARRIER BEACH

In my town, where every other house stands on stilts,

wooden risers break into pieces during summers

when riptides submerge jetties under the ocean

and the boardwalk— a memory, a pile of planks

The ocean overflows into the street, the bay

meets it halfway. Beech Street submerged—

the Gino’s Pizza sign still lit, but the neon icon

of the Lido Kosher Deli burned, the metal wreath

on the roof of Laurel Luncheonette missing leaves. 

We learned about destruction early, our dock

detaching and floating towards New York, fish

swam in the garden, seaweed wrapped our tomatoes,

Sometimes we tasted low tide instead of air. 

What seeped through the walls never went upstairs.  

HALF A LETTER

I erased you completely

         eradicated the leavings

             but still you hung in the air, 

                 hard smoke in my mouth.

                     Now the midnight calls return, 

                          I’m running, late to work,

                               still wanting every second

                                  of your body and my body

                                      splayed across each other            

                                         in this consonantal divide. 

 Jane Choi

The fate of time

Round and round.

I determine your fate one hour at a time. I am two hundred machines.

I have been glared at in awe.

I come in many shapes and sizes.

People find me amusing and sometimes people find me to be boring.

Why am I turned on all day long if I bore you?

You turn me on and then leave me on.

You make me burn on the inside.

I just don't understand.

Why do you continue to torture me with your watching?

You watch me, but then continue to pay attention to the finer things in life.

Tell me what am I doing wrong?

I am sometimes off tune, and yet you continue to play me.

Sometimes you sit in front of me and make me wonder.

Are you ready to play me?

I yearn for you to play me.

Just press me and go with it.

Howard Good

ALMOST NIGHT

I step down off the bus and back into the world. The

landscape smells as if it has just been painted. Red

fields stretch away on either side. I can’t imagine what’s

growing. By the time I hurry into the village, I’m

frightened. Everyone I’d passed on the road, man or woman,

had the thick, unfinished features of a convict. I find a

door in the wall, a place for a drink. There’s only one

other patron. He might be a slaughtering angel. He looks

at me over the rim of his glass as if he were, and I know

then that, despite the time, it’s almost night.

Christine Hamm

The Dad Parade

 how they disappeared each morning

in silver or blue cars smelling

of old newspapers

before we had even fought

our way out from under

the heavy dreams of sinking boats

and black lakes, of the family

cat stuck in the oak at the edge

of the park and us wearing

mittens and no pants,

with no way to climb

without falling down and down

Colin James

 SAINT JOHN THE COMPROMISED

Approaching your home

            from the seaward side

            always required

            expert knowledge of the terrain,

            or luck.

            The pungent smell of hibiscus

            and burnt oak,

            the cave's mouth kissed

            lips and moss.

            This contentment of grief

            belies a certain obligation.

Jason Jones

The Spider's Craft

A spider composed an epic poem outside my bedroom window,

beginning with a single yellow rose and ending with another,

and it was a critical failure. The plot, consisting of

eight hundred and fifty-six woven strands, was far too intricate

for any single mind to comprehend. But regardless of its

reputation a few daring scholars took the challenge and unknowingly

found themselves trapped. Their legs

at once grew heavy; their eyes bulged from sockets;

and veined wings sprung from their shoulder blades.

The more they struggled, the less progress they made

until they found themselves paralyzed.

"This is harder than Finnegan's Wake!" one professor

chirped with a high-pitched inhuman buzz;

and without their support the public didn't pay attention. 

I once tried to read the work myself, but with a deep-seated

belief in simplicity (and a touch of laziness), I skipped 

from one flower to the next, skimming its center

with the agile tip of my index finger and without seeking sense.

"How natural," I buzzed. "Far too fine a piece for

the dust motes of institutions and dim light of hallowed halls."

Ross Hamilton Hill

Early Shift

Half-light of dawn, the sea impenetrable.

A sullen sky reduces everything to semi-tones.

The reds recede, the few lights, the neon:

white and yellow walls relieve the scene.

A woman throws a stick for her dog.

Reading over a shoulder,

a moon rocket takes off on page one.

The bus winds slowly up to the junction.

Workers enter like penitents.

The young aware of their outfits.

The old, almost in uniform, discuss the 'League'.

The windows rattle as we stop at the station.

Karen Kelsay

Confessions to an Aspen

Tonight, you came in the form

of a shadowy bough, sweeping across

my bedroom wall.

Long ago, I ripped you like a sapling

from my tornado-life, never

hurling an afterthought

over the silent destruction.

Your siblings have matured into sturdy

trees, strong enough to hold

all summer in their boughs.

One is a sycamore, the other an oak,

the third, a silver birch. Their roots

sink into the earth and interlace

around me. I think you were an aspen,

my nameless one--fine and delicate.

A daughter who may have carved

her dreams into this rough-bark world,

the way you scratched your initials

inside of me.

 Alan King

What's Going On

It's been years since I've heard

that voice, since we last saw 

each other on a night like this:

stars hemmed to the sky

like the glittery sequins of a dark

form-fitting dress. Even then, I wanted

to be so many things -- the cursive 

script of light in your long wavy hair,

the iridescent glow glazing your 

olive skin. And weren't we so determined 

to keep our friendship we disregarded

any possibility of something deeper?

Driving through your old area,

each street takes me back to 

that night outside the record shop -- 

you in the Soul Train line, and me 

wanting to be the imaginary hool-a-

hoop your hips were working. All I have 

now is a missed call, and your message.

I don't know what to call this current

tugging us both after so long,

when I'm minutes from calling you

before a friend breaks the news

of your engagement.

Message In The Moon

for HT

Streetlamps flickered while

you tried to make it home before

your folks worried and went out

to find you. In 3rd grade

we were oblivious to neighborhood

pedophiles lurking after dark;

or the candy-apple Maxima, a .45

aimed out the rear passenger side

window at anybody walking,

then the car peeling away after

realizing it was the wrong person.

That evening -- daylight fading into 

a peach sorbet-colored sky -- I pumped

my legs to get you home before curfew,

wondering then what the moon 

tried to tell me -- sliding its light

over your bare limbs -- and the hunger

to know if the sugar-cookie brown

of your skin was sweet as the Cotton Candy

Bubbalicious you were always chewing.

And what did it all mean, this drumming

in my blood; something inside me opening

like the tapered head of a tulip?

That evening, when you climbed

on the back of my mountain bike, I might

have been rickshawing a dignitary the way

the humming bird in my chest fluttered

with your arms around my waist; my body 

trying to decipher this language of touch 

when the closest we'd come to first base 

was sipping off the same straw. 

Out of Season

Mosquitoes stick my skin

with a thirst larger than 

their slim straws, leaving 

tiny pyramids swelling along 

the Giza Plateau of my arm. 

And something in my blood 

keeps them lingering the way 

obsession drives a stalker's pulse.

Nature's freeloaders feeding

even after the flowers have shown 

their bright blouses, then disrobed 

like exotic dancers; and even after 

the trees shed their green weight 

with Winter coming on the back 

of a chill that swoops

and spins like birds of prey. 

Oddity

As if each set of arms

were grown for a talent

I neglected, or for each time

I've turned down gigs

at churches. And don't God

always take a humbling

hand to those who shun

him publicly? The morning 

I woke like this, I wondered 

if I'd gotten myself into a whale 

of a situation, like Jonah. 

Now my change cup sits out

like a spare palm, like that

of the blind man outside 

the gates of a temple

called "Beautiful" -- only

instead of ignoring me, 

people gather to watch

what must be a circus act --

no bearded ladies or fire eaters,

though; just me outside 

a metro station, playing 

for mere coins -- one set

of hands holding an acoustic 

guitar, another angling a flute 

to pursed lips, and the other 

rapidly smacking congas.

Spirit of Washington

My brother Drew said the boy

must have smoked it before screaming 

and punching a wall at the back 

of the movie theater, when gloved 

hands rushed him with tazers. Two pulls 

left Jay naked in the woods behind 

our high school, howling at a milky- 

white eye set in the dark sky;

was that what made Terrance lay 

across the double solid lines, 

then laugh as a neighbor swerved 

to keep from crushing him?

This boat made of rolling paper 

and herbs dipped in fluid used

to preserve dead bodies,

far from a cruise liner 

sailing the Potomac. 

Jennifer LeBlanc

December

There is a certain year when you have watched

the progression of time and nature of existence,

when you suddenly comprehend some of truth,

when you begin to make connections and sense.

What this life is made of, what structures breath,

it is skeletons of everything we know so well—

it is the single branch stemming from the tree

deep in the winter months, shelled in ice, and

it is the body of a young child, found dead—

then, when this comes, something we do not know

well, we are shocked into attention, we understand.

We understand that we take our monotonous steps,

that we huddle ourselves inside harmful protection,

the comfortable oblivion of house with picket fence,

the more gentle caress of family, good town, money.

You have to listen to the song twenty-one times over

before you can repeat the lyrics and notes perfectly,

before you know the bones of what you are singing,

and you then comprehend the meaning, the essence. 

David McLean 

it was mistakes 

it was mistakes like stones in a forest;

and the tragic hero who never sinned,

whom we could not even call stupid,

just wrong once like all of us,

inventing love and planting trees,

not stupid, not sinful, not arrogant or mad,

just dreaming that the erratic blood

was the seed that might believe in us

might say we were enough,

that was tragedy once

Steve Meador

Garcia y Vega

There was an incredible simplicity to his business

accounting. A pair of Garcia y Vega cigar boxes,

one marked In, the other Out. The colorful lids belied

the raw, red hands, purple thumbs, toothpick-sized

splinters and fierce labor of pole barn construction.

Bad weather provided no excuse to stay home. Holes

were augured in frozen ground or dug by hand when

the tractor broke down. We slogged through Super Glue

mud that gripped boots, ran for the truck when lightning

sizzled the air and skated on clay slick as glycerin on glass.

Friday afternoon grungy guys gathered round the kitchen

table as pay was doled out, slowly revealing a white bottom

in the box. Someone rolled his bills and clenched them

between his teeth, "Ain't nothing like a fat green stogie!"

We roared, ignoring the dissipating aroma of success.

It was the dwindling In and the profusely bleeding Out

that allowed me to obtain the grants to go to college.

Years later, when antique cigar boxes became the rage

of collectors, the boxes seemed to hold more value than

my grandfather's pole barn business ever did achieve.

James Meetze

PET SOUNDS, OR A BETTER CHANCE TO STUDY PRACTICAL CETOLOGY

It is the whiteness of the whale, the blackness 

of the whale that below fireworks 

each evening, must become a colored 

and toothsome smile. The whale 

in captivity on the bay sings 

to his audience like his mother sang 

to me as a child.

It is a manifestation of culture, 

this connection between singer and who sung to. 

My wettest neighbor, I know thy dialect

whose clicks and whistles rile children to their feet.

The open blue sky today, like the small blue pool

without enclosure. Do you perform to be free?

Do you believe?

It is not an idle whim that you salute

with a spyhop or a splash, it is your mechanism

that makes you. By definition a nationless patriot

but here we are to be toneblind, the theory 

of color a tercet: red, white, blue.  

How you are painted so, no Tyndall effect

be done, but with inverse agitprop and corporation.

Our soapbox theatre, O do you hear?

The ear of the whale, what does 

it translate from the cheers and spectacle.

Every day the jets ascend, their rhythm 

like waves booming upon the valley, the noise 

a constant and birdsong from a cage next door. 

To be captive, to make song of captivity,

to smile or appear to smile 

because that is your face. The whiteness

and the blackness of your face you smile. 

A stable of whales—Orcinus Orca—

we know your stage name: not blackfish

nor seawolf, gentle hunter of the seas.   

The head not a Roman chariot lashed aside

the Pequod, but torpedo targeting the sky.

Do you speak to one another of openness 

of instinct, or is it so removed, so 

please and so thank you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if glassine replica

were universal as I settle down and into

my work with words to equate ideas

of freedom and captivity. Am I where

I should be? Is the ocean in your bones?

The souvenir form a trapped echo, or

resonant slogan so purely American

as a foamy head. To be drunk on patriotism

in a tank. In the bleachers around the tank.

I salute you. 

HOME ADDRESS

A good way home, a page to carry

letters home in

or a sound like heat builds

for want of happiness.

A home a good ways still down

the coast/this page toward home.

A fountain without water waits

to be filled with splashes.

Left coast where home is long and good

as a page still warm

with words trying to approximate it.

+

Why not notes divided into houses

sixteen & four together, building

together, accumulating sound

or heat, how through the window 

heat approximates gold not words for 

home on a coastal veil.

The fountain isn’t even a fountain

but to be spoken of as skyspray.

A good home, a membrane to live through

to put words on anywhere

maybe here, maybe sunshine, maybe then.

+

To write to make a place good

to hear sun coming through the neighborhood

or assign a letter to a shadow—

purple mountain’s majesty for Now

—then a desire’s consolation.

A coastline flecked with starlite.

Like a fountain of light, stars dropping

down from space into all of us.

To be home and be good, to turn the lights 

on enough to feel that relief

of having a bed to read, then sleep upon.  

Edwina Petterson

Dress Up to Keep Up

I have dresses of black & of blue

I have dresses that shouldn't fit you

I got all dressed up

but no one was there

my tresses were curled

but no one did care

I dressed all in lace

& painted my face

& even my fingers & toes

But when I got there

no body had dared

even to powder their nose

next time I wore sneakers

& jeans with frayed cuffs

but everyone else wore mink stoles & fur ruffs

I tried once again

to fit in at the beach

I covered my biscuit

and wrapped up each small peach

but the others had their druthers and came naked

the sun had a feast

burned melons and cheeks

and all of their biscuits got baked!

I WAS RAISED AS A POOR WHITE CHILD

BY A DIVORCED WORKING MOTHER

MY CHILDHOOD WASN’T MILD

I GREW UP IN A CITY OF VIOLENCE & HATE

THE 1ST TIME THEY RAPED ME, I WAS BARELY EIGHT

THE KIDS ON THE REZ THOUGHT I HAD IT GOOD

I’D GLADLY TRADE PLACES WITH THEM, IF I COULD

OUR LIVES GREW MORE VIOLENT

AS WE PROGRESSED TO HIGH SCHOOL

WE CARRIED KNIVES 2, THOUGH IT WASN’T TO BE COOL

SOME OF OUR FRIENDS DIDN’T MAKE IT-THEY DIED

WE BURIED THEM THEN FELL TO THE GROUND AND WE CRIED

WHY DON’T WE LEARN TO HELP ONE ANOTHER?

OUR NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS WERE OUR SISTERS AND BROTHERS

AS WE SURVIVED, WE FORGOT HOW TO CARE

WE ALL MOVED AWAY AND LEFT NOBODY THERE

TO SHOW THE NEXT ONES ABOUT KINDNESS AND LOVE

ABOUT PEACE AND FORGIVENESS AND GOD UP ABOVE

WE HAD FAMILIES AND CHILDREN AND BURIED OUR PASTS

TILL THE MONSTERS WE MARRIED TOOK OFF THEIR NICE MASKS

AND HURT OUR SWEET CHILDREN WITH VIOLENCE AND SEX

AND THEN LOOKED AROUND THEM AND ASKED “WHO’LL BE NEXT?”

I’VE RESCUED MY CHILDREN, BUT HAVE YOU SAVED YOURS?

WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND THOSE CLOSED DOORS.

THE HATE AND THE HITTING, THE BLOOD AND THE RAGE

PLEASE, CAN WE STOP?  CAN WE START A NEW PAGE?

THE KIDS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD, THEY ALL LOOK SO THIN.

THE TEENS, WHEN WE AREN’T HOME, THEY BREAK IN

I LEFT 2 EX-HUSBANDS AND 2 PRETTY HOMES

THEY WEREN’T WORTH THE SCARS AND THE BREAKING OF BONES

I DON’T HAVE MUCH NOW, BUT I HAVE SELF ESTEEM

I AM STILL BREATHING, AND I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS

MY DREAMS INCLUDE YOU

AND I PRAY FOR YOU OFTEN.

DEAR GOD,

PLEASE,

NOT ONE MORE FRIEND IN A COFFIN.

Rod Peckman

Jazz Night at the Veteran's Hall

Who was I to say?

But I said it just the same:

it was mathematics

let loose

just enough

to retain

the architecture

of 7 walls

a roof

guttering hearth

a door open

a blast

ing of holy scriptures

off a polished table.

The scribes scatter

wisemen chatter

stricken

like madmen

hiding devils

and hoarding whores.

A wall where? A floor overhead

a ceiling cut with footprints

shoeprints of such

exquisite taste, a dance

jimmied with grace

and surely a dance

of incurable incorrigibility.

The real beauty

of these mathematics.

The real beauty of the draughtsman

coloring outside the lines.

(Staring into her beer,

nothing.)

Theorems and proofs

summarily disproved

only

to crash bang and smash

dressed to the nines

and no worse for wear.

Contingencies

not planned or written,

never even accounted

for but lost

in red vibrations

retained

in blue striated strings

of inarticulate heart:

a hopeless chord

never found

as fingernails

skirt the edges

brave the ledges

of atonality

but bringing us back.

Always bringing us back

from a precise and urbane

feral drop

into a little death

of imagination:

and then

the ahhhh

of

resolution

For My Brother 

My brother and Brenda drive a long haul semi

back and forth and across again this country.

He may call me on Thursday from North Carolina

and Friday from North Dakota.

It is an upside down life but it suits him.

He must remain in the sleeper

for a prescribed number of hours

even if he can't sleep, as there are tight controls

over this interstate freight.

Maybe that's when he calls to share

something funny he heard on Satellite Radio.

Sometimes he plays his favorite bits

over my answering machine.

I imagine him, with that great laugh,

enjoying the respite from the mile markers

as they pile up, one green matchstick after another,

like portentous sentinels and not merely another .62 cents.

He is more than this idea we all have of a trucker,

though her looks and plays the part to perfection.

He is my brother, so different from myself

that everyone who hears we are related

shakes their head in disbelief.

But he is mine and I am his. We are joined

by the terrible beautiful history of our past.

The real difference is, he could never cry.

I feared him once, as my mother did,

his rage built upon the cruelty he withstood daily.

Swallowed now, this rage has found someplace,

perhaps the faintly lit ribbon of Interstate 25

outside of Casper, Wyoming, as white freeway reflectors

contort themselves in the wake,

a backward bend, their heads to the dry dirt

as the semi rolls by,

and a contorted big man

with a belly-laugh, eats his own demons

like the bacon and scrambled eggs he orders

at so many roadside truck stops.

Moving freight, my brother is a saint.

Grass Carp

The Asian Grass Carp, a herbivorous fish cultivated in China, eats up to five pounds of aquatic plants per day. They can reach lengths of four feet within a year, putting on an enormous amount of weight, primarily in the summer months. Imported and sterile, they were brought here to clear the water of underwater grasses that

frankly gives swimmers the willies.

I watch them often through my upstairs window

in the blue water which I know is really the sky.

Dorsal fins cutting their languorous arcs

between feeding, the gentle movement calming

despite their resemblance to sharks.

I sometimes wade to my thighs. I will them

to make slow figure eights between my legs. I will

them to gently clean the dead skin I forgot

to shed at night with their orange toothless mouths.

If my Yellow Lab on the shore had somehow

learned the face of puzzlement, she'd wear it now.

Into the water up to my neck, swaying for balance, I will

the two biggest carp to rise to the surface so I might hold

their fins as they slowly tow me to the middle of this small lake,

to the colder water where the bottom seems farther away

than its mere 18 feet. World of blue and of bright and of cool.

They will me to forget for just this one moment and simply feel.

They leave in gentle wakes so I can make my way back to shore

with terrestrial ineptitude and wasted energy. Breathing hard,

greeted with a look of relief (one she has learned),

my yellow lab licks water off my calves wagging her tail,

as my feet sink in mud until I reach high ground.

I look and see large swirls turn small and fade.  

And the water is glass.

In Labile Condition

Let's consider the word forgotten.

Let's pull up the thick cattail rushes in June and eat them like leeks.

Let's roll through the tan hollow blackberry reeds in February.

Let's not allow each and every puncture to be staunched.

Let's feel each thorn as thorns should be.

Let's make mountains out of molehills.

Let's stomp mountains down with the bitter souls of black boots.

Let's titrate this volatile chemistry to endpoint.

Let's both realize nobody rewinds anymore and songs are now a la carte.

Let's once again consider the word forgetting.

Let's come to the conclusion that homeopathy is a ruse.

Let's blow out the candles of our own birthday wake.

Let's play the tables and shiver at hazard's touch.

Let's remember what it is to forget.

Let's rejoice at the resurgence of Canis Lupus in the lower 48.

Let's feel sweat and wet sheets and pretend one more time.

Let's lose a precious thing and find peace in the pieces of lost baggage.

Let's sleep naked on the balcony but for socks for feet and socks as gloves.

Let's pass a digital thermometer between us on the coldest night of this cold year.

Let's put an ear to chest and really feel one another laugh.

Let's fade a brand into a faint recollection.

Let's give ourselves a solid 7 out of 10 on the scale of elegant parasuicides.

                                                            *

Let's watch the ducks in queue outside

the small disk of open water.

Let's watch as the birds will surely

surface again onto the ice.

Let's not allow even one duck

be forgotten diving the last

green weeds in this cold. Let's let

forgetting be more than frozen darkness.

Let's not forget to cherish

this mourning. Let's not

forget to rejoice as one more

breaks the clean surface.

Fariel  Shafee

From the Sky

> -------------

> 

> effervescing clouds

> grey and mutating

> stacked carelessly upto that dark belt of a 

> polar night

> with studded stars

> sparkling 

> 

> 

> 

> a landscape beneath me

> transforming from a mythic horn

> into a fatiged eye

> about to touch my uncovered toes

> to pull me back to the 

> scratches and scars

> now hidden in the heart of a 

> fractional dimension

> 

> 

> a shiny ribbon slithers

> in the midst of lifeless serenity

> curled up below in another world

> disappearing fast

> as I speed across those melting drops

> of densely packaged emotions

> 

> 

> now making space for that dazzling dot

> bright on a clean, dark sheet

> so perfect and so

> reachable;

> 

> infinity, neat and small, comes closer to me

> and the two point third dimension

> with its rifts and jiggered shoreline

> squeezes to store itself

> back into a matchbox

> except for a residue

> in smashed up hazy colors

> smoking through a tiny hole

> to caress my newfound world

> 

> 

 The Meaning of Happiness

 --------------------------------------

 An iota of insatiable need

was frustration,

and the background of acclimated pleasure

> marked the drop in

> minuscule 

> emptiness

> as an issue

> of drastic 

> change,

> in percentage.

> 

> And as he slashed the world around 

> and pillged the 

> battered souls

> to find the piece that would complete

> him,

> the gain in pleasure 

> came slow,

> and the dot of unhappiness 

> remained firmly,

> promising to approach zero, asymptotically

> but

> never quite gone.

> 

> He stood solitary

> in the end,

> 

> and the joy that came for granted, fell

> sharply, as all shattered, and a threshold reached,

> so the avalanche of fallen cards, at last, pulled 

> the stable pieces

> in his own entity,

> connected to 

> a component, far, somehow,

> now

> in ruins.

> 

> And the speck of being 

> in that empty world,

> appeared quite

> meaningless.

> 

Tanuj Solankki

The Neem Tree

Beyond my cramped balcony

that almost punishes my room,

a tree-like neem filter keeps

light from the sun,

and sound from the men,

away. I thank him,

this scaffold of wood and leaves,

for he is always

a lively friend in the night.

Guess we become one

when we both emit

carbon dioxide.

In the day

All he gives is life.