"The End"

Each one of us is a story with a beginning we did not write and a conclusion we cannot predict. I remember, back in my school days, a young lady named Marissa who didn't like being a story. She wanted to be the author and force her story to conclude in a particular way. A way that made sense to her. Marissa even wrote a note, which ended with "The End." But that is not how her story ended. People still talk about it, changing the narrative, drawing new connections, discussing other possible endings. It should not have ended that way, some say. It really did not have to, others agree. I remember once Marissa told me how her grandparents met on the Titanic. The next day she said, I made it up. How happy she looked, for a very brief moment, for having fooled me.

Recounting a Traveller’s Tale

Traveling down a parched rural road
I came across a rank eviscerated trunk
Its ribs as though jutting from soil
Ivory stems doused in ebony blood
Blindly walking forward away from the bones
I looked back to the stories in paper
Odorless words like sanctions and bombs
While the merciless sun shone brighter
And the wind trying to twist away the news
As though I were in some Aesop’s fable

Years later when I’ve recounted the tale
Often enough like a sailor fighting off doubts
I can no longer be sure what I saw or whose

Story of Buck

Up close he looks like a bereft cowboy
Waiting his turn for some more campfire beans.
Except Buck is in an institution,
both hands on hips posing in line for pills.
No rope nor gun, and not atop a horse,
No cowboy boots, neither donning a hat.
Still Buck had been a true cowboy no less,
Who'd owned some sheep and cattle and a ranch.
But then one day his soft reflection asked:
Oh Buck must we eat flesh, must we not grass?
So Buck let the ranch and the livestock go,
And grazed each day along with cows and sheep. 
But soon the land owners restrained our Buck.
They dragged him to the doctors; shackled, tied.
These days you won't see Buck out in the field,
But here surrounded by the walls—sans glass.
So now snowed into sanity, Buck sleeps.

Dirty Eyes

I woke up covered all 
In fragments of a dream,
All sticky like the scent of skunks
That sprayed my storybook last night.
—Wash up!  the voices shrieked 
And pushed my head madly beneath
A pool of tears until I drowned 
Again inside another dream.

So tell me whose tears were that soaked 
The leaves I'd flipped through all last night 
With every flutter of lashes so moist.
So speak but make it soft and clean
And hold my hands and smile and joke
And only then describe my nightly scene 
The screens projected on my twitching lids 
The ghastly films my dirty eyes have seen....