You are staring at the blurred lips of the waves passing us by
And I am staring at yours.

You’re trembling on the Galveston shore.
The dipping sun illuminates our shadows harshly
On the polluted sand.

It makes me feel small.

My eyes ache from insomnia
And I am so tired.
It feels as if I’ve run a marathon
In vain effort.

Perhaps the meaninglessness of life
Is what gives brilliance to this moment
Because that one moment belongs to me alone,
To what I’ve learned.

And I’ve learned so much
About life and the nature of the universe
Yet still all I know to do
For a friend crying in despair
Is sit beside them uselessly
And recall old conversations.

To what extent are you willing to believe in useless things?

If we don’t, would we have anything at all?

I am watching rich people watch the game
From the best seats in the house.

Am I jealous?
Probably. But I don’t regret where I sit now,
Where I’m watching my best friends scream
At players in Spanish and Swedish and French
And the elderly woman in the next booth over
Is unleashing her wrath upon the referee

The best seats in the house
Are right here,
Sixteen bucks and a few cans of Dr Pepper.

I tell him that I want to skip
To the coda, to what comes after
The age of white men; after, one by one

The satellites drop from the sky
And you can no longer see me
You can no longer hide the past

Although Andrews change from Jacksons to
Garfields, animals drop from millions
To hundreds and I want to
Skip to the coda now,

To the beautiful promise of a new tomorrow
As the stars pass in front of my eyes
And my friends do, too

Until the moon is all that is left,
That beautiful bird.

we spent our thursday in an occupied country
and the sheep lent a certain charm

to the broken streets
where children once played football
and the nice man on the corner plucked the guitar

so pardon the silence
and the cigarette smoke

still, every dawn an announcement screeches;
another citizen drops dead

across the bright sea

wait for me
out on the street
the light is playing colors on your hair
which you died red, you dyed red

i missed you last thursday
but i didn’t know,
i didn’t know

who were you
before you headlined
head lined with dirt

       and

                appellations                   ?

listen: crows were perched on telephone lines like epaulettes
and the doves cheered the ringmaster
through the sun, we shut our eyes.

A government official gives a speech (maybe)
omg that guy’s inciting violence (probably)
and sweet mother of pearl
that guys hot! (definitely)

//Query: What the hell am I doing here?//

And the internet:
The dead-est of the dead
The most rigor of mortises.

//God is made of sulfur and metal pipes
Which hang from the sky 
In torrents//

And I’m a madwoman,
A red-pill swallower
A conspiracy gobbler
An anti-corpo depresso wallower
to process        global globally       trauma..a..a..

//I love you! like your cat loves human flesh
Like human flesh loves to decompose
And the bathroom is on your left
Invest in a better wi-fi plan.//

And I guess I am depressed
Or at least I should be depressed
I should feel something (definitely)

But are we all not just a copy of
A copy of

We disappear into the cave beneath the falls
Surrounded by the smell of urine
And graffiti I can’t read.
We avoid the hand railings
Along the stairs.
The landing has half an inch of water
The drain clogged
With cigarette butts and Starbucks.

I complain the whole way down
And then complain some more
Because we can’t go further down
Descending deeper into the falls’ belly.

It’s weird that I am on the other side of the falls
(The side with the big green lady)
When I remember being eleven
On a school trip
Surrounded by the fresh spray
And crisp air.

Where’s the dream? I want to ask,
Now that I am on the other side.
Perhaps it was inside those two towers,
The ones I saw in old photos from the 90s.
But if the dream really was in there
What would that leave for the people outside?

On the flight home to Texas
I press my nose against the window.
The tarnished green skyline
Is on fire with the sunset
And it is speaking to me,
Telling me of secrets,
Of the secret,
The best kept secret of Rome:

All roads never led there at all
And maybe the entrances
Were portals to deeper things.
A way out.

He’s got a scrubby look to him,
Unshaven and sad.

It doesn’t matter if sometimes
His accent pushes through
Or he slips back into Arabic
Because he doesn’t say much anyway,
Just stares out the window
As his mind flies off to the peaceful
Beaches of the Mediterranean,
Or to that Uyghur restaurant down by the bay

Or to the softness of her hair
The gentleness in her face
And how the ocean breeze
Felt on his skin.

“Aren’t you going to pass out a worksheet or something?”
A student asks finally.

He shrugs.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says,
“But I could if you’d like.”

They all shake their heads vigorously.

Another student raises their hand
And inquires about his absence policy.

“Absence is the only policy,”
He responds, before
He kicks his feet up
And reaches into his desk
Digging through workbooks
For a cigarette.

He whispered that I am a valley of high mountains
As I stood on its summit
And the world held still on a deadly winter

And the glaciers I had climbed 
When I scaled this mountain last
Had faded and settled into the flowerbeds.

But be silent, I warned him
Who was on the summit with me.
Because your echoes may break the mountains
And it might all come to an end.

And as he looked ahead and spoke
Of the filthy world below

I held the snow in my palm
And prayed on it.

And he talked and talked

As I gazed at my hands
I was no valley, for I could not see the mountains
In my fingertips.
Where the artist saw a valley,
I, the poet, saw blood, only blood.

And my cries broke the mountain

And there was blood, only blood!

I remember when I used to make earthquakes, too.
Every step a stomp I would
Bite the rock into pieces I could chew
My emotion turns to a foliated list of reasons
You might want me dead by next Jummah afternoon.
Then we whirl into a cyclone of suspicion
You of me and me of you and both of us
In a turntable, dancing stoically to a rhythm of risk and rage
And anger and pain
Our traditional dresses falling off into
Dark walnut down the drain.
Our nations paint colors on our chests:
Yours a flag, mine a bloody stain.
And my nails dig deep into Japan today
But my fingers stay home, filled with 
Flames, with names
With gravel and spices
And I wonder if perhaps the grand directors
Have miscast my part;
If I play a ghost in myan gulli, is it
Inevitable
Or is it art?
Near the Line of Control,
The ceasefire holds
But little else does–
It was 12 o’clock at noon
And there was a good sun somewhere.

I learned how life works 
Through musical chairs in kindergarten. 

I was always the first one out. 

The music would stop, and all would 
Turn their large, wondering eyes up 
To me, awkwardly mid-walk between two 
chairs. 

I’m out, I thought. But why? I could feel  
The rage and embarrassment begin to boil over. 
Perhaps I was not fast enough 
Or maybe I just simply couldn’t anticipate
My teacher’s next move?

There’s not enough chairs! I bawled,
And they laughed.
That’s the point, they said, 
And I sat down at my desk, dejected.

I watched as they circled, like vultures
The carcasses of the chairs,
The chairs which were spaced out unevenly,
I realized, so that more chairs were in the middles than the sides. 

It’s on purpose, of course.
The game won’t work if everyone has enough.
So I might labor to produce
Ever-more comfortable chairs
Which become thrones just for
The chance to buy a small wooden stool.

And it’s all too often
That my classmates mistake effect for cause.
My friend developed an odd addiction for comfortable shoes
To cope with the blisters and calluses
That come with a life of constant standing.

Then they’d point to the shoes
And blame those for my friend’s status.

Your ability to take a seat in the game is irrelevant
If your father owns a chair factory.

And none of the above will ever happen to you
If your daddy’s rich.