dust

Dust thou art

to dust returnest,
smirked the Indian 

immigration officer.

badge

In my dream
I kept swiping my employee badge
Outside my bedroom door
Over and over and over again
Trying to get in
Trying to get

Trying.

reflection

My mind gets but a few rays of your light
and the total internal reflection
sets it aflame, gives it
a reason to exist - for what use is a diamond
in a dark room?

Chao Phraya

The night river looked oily and golden.

The sun never sets on capitalism, she said, 
as we were rowed past The Temple of Dawn and the Golden Buddha, all the way up to the riverside Hilton and back on the back muscles of 

600 baht each.

It's immoral to haggle lots with the have-nots, she said,
and I bit back 18 years. Identity is logarithmic with age, so surely the last 7 years makes 600 baht only 20 dollars, not 1000 rupees. 

From the banks of the river Chao Phraya we heard Buddhist chanting.

I love being lost, she said later that night,
high on Euro trance, crammed in with 1000 other Thai Chinese desi white yuppies 

seeking refuge from sweat (affluence, that great equalizer); 

4000 limbs paying 200 baht each in tax to 

move 

in 

lockstep 

to one man's button-pressing.

Metaphor! I exclaimed. Our moves are boxed in,
Delineated by the beat. Oh shush, she said, dancing,
Miserable money musing is
Always best boxed inside idle conversation.

Radio

Reading All The Light We Cannot See in a perfectly-background-voluumed after-hours cafe in downtown Vancouver. The noise of students, workers, the homeless drinking tea and conversation envelopes like a warm hammock, the air-conditioning over-enthusiastic against the oppressively still night. In the book, I read about radios.

How miraculous it must have been, to tune a radio. You could be  anywhere, lonely, and with a cheap speaker and some wire and magnets tap into an invisible vein flowing through the air vibrating with music and debate. Cascading transports of magnets and electricity encoding packets of human voice encoding intelligence, companionship, ideas, opinions, thought. Science and engineering coalescing and enabling art and culture to democratize knowledge.

And then we invented the Internet. And broke the user experience of simply tuning in. Invented Chromebooks to bring the simplicity back and then decided to use that to track children.

The Internet is the ultimate achievement in the pursuit of humankind's dream to connect us all and we decided to hand the keys over to a tiny peninsula in Northern California.

...

Don't even @ me.

bar

pools of people unspooling 

onto pavement like streetlight

loquacious and laughing, lubricated eloquence
luminiscent fish swimming hungrily through the night.

Can the subaltern speak?

You only get words
If you're an nth generation immigrant
Where n is not  zero.
(Makes sense -
0 is nought
a naturalized number).

But
The words you receive are magical:
"Thank you (for leaving your home)"
From rupi kaur daughters, and
"Sorry (can you repeat that)"
From everyone else.

Constellations

A hugging couple nuzzles noses lazily
On the patch of grass near me
As I gaze at the batch of stars above me,
Linking with little lines
Fires that burn infinitely apart. 

The Past

The past exists
As a collective fiction
Like the law
Or democracy
Or LLCs.
It lives only in the fallible minds
of people.

Revolutionary Road

Encapsulation of suburban
Subhuman men and women
All their concerns trivialities
Their merry-go-around motions.
I feel chilled by the idea
That we can all of us be reduced to
Mice, our importance written away
By penetrating words. The veneer of
Relevance we clothe ourselves in
Is flimsy as parchment paper to
Ink. 

Old Leaves

All the days I had known you
Lay still and drying as old leaves
How was it that a single touch was all
It took to catch fire?
Surely you have touched me before?
As friends?
Perhaps our memories
Weren't old and dry then
As they are now. 

Rue Prince Arthur

These streets are cold and brittle. Every step reminds me of you, the slightly uncomfortable walks we took together, avoiding gravel and glances as we move from place to place, place to place, always moving, scared to be still. Still, the memory of the cold warms me, the memory of your lips that broke with blood and ice as you defiantly declared that last night you had taken scissors and cut off placenta-like morality, that you had bled all night, that blood demanded to be free.

Crisp clean and broken you were that day we walked for an hour through the snow, and that is how I remember you.