What Leda Knew

All swans are grey at night.

Murakami & Chekhov

Why would he banish himself,
sore lungs and a revolving heart?
How can such an obligation
translate itself generations
and geographies later?

These questions teeter
on the ledge of a lingua franca.
all those actors and acrobats
circling Carnival Road,
they too have endured an exile
as alarming as an angel's halo
forked by a sleeping assassin.

kept

unrest tumbles
a sleepy head—a rolling ball
awaits being bowled
over by all those heavy pages.

in somnolent state,
I lift sheet after sheet,
a stone-washed laundress
barely earning my keep.

the shortening of all tips

lips parted,
severed pufferfish
in a Tokyo backstreet

we quip:
assassin or vigilante
you have not seen the world
beyond your nose

and so, my inverted lover,
it grows.

how uneven

a habit with roots
even when upturned
and yanked fiercer than a scalp sash,

persists. It knows no other way.
how odd this taiga heart
pumps sea scales
so far from a country
newfound.

home
is where your ruby rash, my rosy lips
redden a tri-lunar night.
your cult, my arms greening
curve like weed maidens drowned
but not forgotten.