A different man, long ago

thinks about settlers, thinks about change

i feel my mother's figure growing above me

with every one of my words that she doesn't listen

My papa’s papa used to run after the wooden cart of prasadam

Slow and slow I'll flow

call my name in need

you yourself love to pretend you remember your own birthplace

I always knew my mother was a writer.

She hails it as her best skill.

How can I call myself Australian

when I live on stolen land?

It was side of stage I stood, counting breaths, readying for the lights to fade and come up again

as surely as the sun would rise and set

Anything is un-trans-lateable

if you are a bad enough trans-lator

I can't saw wisdom out of a star if

you blink my words empty when I pray for you

From the 200 billion trillion stars in the galaxy, 

my father gripped one

Propped up on my elbows, on the stiff gym floor. 

Planks: a climax in the battle to stay healthy.

Hands that once felt too small to lift burdens

are now clenched into fists

The stories they tell me spill out a feeling that the spider web defines perfectly.

Sugary tears leak out of every crack and

Pen mark in the bathroom Wall

From the sky I saw endless gray rivers,

older than the cliché of arteries

My mother fries chicken for dinner

says she hasn’t seen real chicken in America

We think it was a lit cigarette

flicked off the wrist of a driver, racing past

Once under the light of dawn

there sat a singing lark.

You think this poem will preserve the breeze,

preserve the dark and oaky trees

Quiet settles like a thousand years of grief, and

it spills over in the wake of a firework's shout

Pollen stuck to his thighs, the man feels 

something unnamable growing in his chest 

Ingrain yourself in a wild honey: flail a standing ovation with petaled hands

moonlight kisses the clouds. It rings, the moonlight, like church bells striking.

"What's with the buckets?" you ask. "They're carrying something important." 

It began at the beginning in the middle of things; at the center of a galaxy 

The silence can be eerie

Dark, damp and cold

On a frosty October morning, I walk to a field

And lie flat on my back in the dewy grass.

I believe in

People Places,

A Place for every Person to

A poem is when a scattering of swallows suddenly form a perfect v.

A poem is the angle which makes dew on a rose petal look like diamonds.

Late afternoon. I never knew a whisper, soft and sweet, could sing

You're deplorable, horrible, despicable, ignorable. You reiterate, evaluate, desiccate . . .

Sweet Erin you lay far from me, 

In soils toiled by blight and blood.

Air sticks to my skin, 

like honey. mosquitos circle my ankles and wrists

I look at you for decades and your words

melt in this subtropical heat.

the first missile tears through the skin;

skinning the embers of a quenched country

i have come back

to the village i swore i would never see again

Sometimes I like to collapse infinity

into a single point in time I label "now."

In the thousand faceless poems I've read

the moon has never been named a "him."

And the sea has many teeth, far more than I. But if we are one 

then I have all the same teeth as the sea, then it has the same teeth as I. 

Thirty-two nights without seeing a start

Bright, shining, good luck, good luck for me.

The night comes with a special kind of softness,

where the music swells. 

I am an American boy

with a Mexican twin. 

We come in droves, frothing at the mouth and baying for blood.

Our enemy invisible, stretched across the world like the taut skin of a drum. 

I believe in the power of words to come flying:

swans whooping as they pass

I do not see the stars from where I stand

but I know they are there. 

They say 7 billion people stayed home today

2.2 billion children stayed out of school

Change is unexpected. 

Like the day I was told we were moving to America. 

People evaporate.

But not as quickly as water.

As we turn into ghost towns and ghost stories,

I memorize the steps, the corners, the edges.

125 miles.

I never imagined they could be so close. 

Don't you swat at a fly. 

Don't you mindlessly shoot that harmless creature to the ground.

you have learned there is both good and bad about where you live.

you have learned the stubbornest people on the planet are Southern. 

My words can be a sense of comfort, a feeling of being understood, a thought, an awakening. 

You have never known those shores or those 

people or those words that sound like a memory

Mathematics: prove me

with your trig identities

But if I visit Chinatown and look hard enough, 

I can see the traces of our history left behind.

Shirk your sense of responsibility. 

Leave your guilt at the door of progress. 

At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds, 

first on one foot, then the other, in unison.

I wasn't alive in '93, when cryptosporidium poured

through the water like liquid lava

I believe in justice, 

in our voices, in theirs

It is like a curl of smoke, 

Crowning the feral embers

Have moths ever burned like Icarus, 

encased in what they love

Green are the strands of the winner's laurel;

green is the step of his podium as he stares over the crowd

In the jungles of Aklan stands a statue of a man I've never met.

Stands a monument to a face I've never seen.

Waterfalls of cream and white, 

with leafy laced foam

It begins with patter, like the impatient tap

of painted nails, the rain thrums on the roof

"Quark querk arck erk,"  

That's what the tui said.

Soft sliding susurrations, light lift of page, 

A sigh, a huff, a breath, murmurs in the murky quiet

Below

the cherry blossom clouds

I remember

That sun-kissed evening in 1914

I knew Chinatown best on Saturdays, 

the November kind

Why does the sky appear black from the airplane

even though its sweltering noon on the ground?

Jeepney Smoke seeps through the iron rail

to keep him bloodshot. He burrows in the neck

I drink the elderflower air, 

poured by the 4am sky

for two cents, the man 

answering will reach into the ocean