stoplights

 

It's years too late

           before we admit 

           to seeing

               cracked concretes, jilted detours-- bumps so unbearable

     lost

               having ignored the signs, lights and pedestrians

               and we wonder

               why it seems that

                                     after all these thousand hours spent maneuvering

                                        impossible alleys

                                        collisions

                                        a lover not knowing

                 after all these hours believing

                 we'll get there, just in time

                            we seem to never arrive. 

I ran this scenario over a hundred in my head.

The period in all these tangled sentences, where starts and ends

are everywhere and nowhere.

Though the string of hurtful words we’ve thrown and kept

were enough to hang ourselves and the rest,

No number of threats

and rehearsals

 

can prepare for the broken words

last spoken.

My mother in law raised seven men.

She toiled in the kitchen, warmed

potatoes in huge portions

dashed with salt and self-doubt.

My mother married two men.

The first one fled at day-

he gave her a daughter who ran away

with a man no one has met.

My grandmother disliked men. Especially her own—

A man who was in love with fifty women,

his shaft failed at the end. On his deathbed,

he asked for the hand of the first woman he failed.

My mother in law is waiting

for the leaves to turn green, for the oven to beep,

for a son to sleep. My mother takes a call

from a daughter she never sees.

For long, she embraced a thought

perhaps

all loves shall hurt. Both women does so in silence,

as my grandmother did

when she felt on her palm

a man´s last heartbeat.

doors open with a hand of a ghost, a ghost

long gone and walked

count the sun with your hand, 

and the only words you know,

and the only people you say hello

 

the rumblings in the gut is louder

than the street below. 

How do you know when feelings have ended

I have been here before, but I don’t remember how it was

Is it the same game of tag, pulling in the heart

Back then, I wanted to fall in love, create a storm in my blood,

I want a fire that shoots beyond the sky. I was mad. Until now, I am mad.

So I told him I’m on my way—away from him.

And now, I am here again in the act of shredding the strings of my gut—

what is to lose, what is to stay.

I have been lining those strands that weaved me in, untangled them carefully

so I can see but I am blind. I have tied myself fatally when I’m no magician

to pay for the shards of glass that I broke on my way to you.

And now I walk barefoot on them

—away from you.