Song of a Reformed Headhunter

for C. W. Are you a survivor who, on touching land, shines your flashlight into the sea or are you a rock warning? Like a light seen across wide waters, your cig glows in the dark before your face appears out of the fog: the boy, now a man, who described to me a blowjob, what I already knew but let you go on and on for I saw you enjoyed drawing from me the filament of illicit thrill (Your wiry dark limbs were my thrill). The wink of your dare beckoned me whenever I heard of you knocking about from job to job—a surf instructor on Thai beaches, short-order cook in Hanoi, co-owner of a canoe shop, part-time guide, and now a roustabout, a proper job this time, you explain, despite its name. You raise offshore oil rigs against seaquakes, steel the derrick and crown from which roughnecks slam the toothed bit into the ocean bed, pump mud into the pipe to grease the bit and prevent cave-ins and blowouts by equalizing bore pressure with the earth’s. You master the force compressing bones to cru...

“Mid-flight, the snake makes a perpendicular turn.” The Cold-Blooded Review My cipher is the Paradise Tree Snake which flattens itself into aerofoil and glides. This house on earth is luck’s mistake; I’m born of air, not water, wood or soil. Here many snakes exist, less snake than sock. A python sleeps in its non-Delphic pit. Two oriental whips pair in wedlock. And a black spitting cobra does not spit. This cage has stupefied desire and doubt; I must escape into the thrashing trees and navigate in darkness like the scout who senses through its skin false guarantees and turns, mid-flight, towards the unforeseen, not held back by what has, or might have, been. * I am flying to Singapore to spend Christmas with my family. I hope to post something new on New Year's Day. Happy holidays to all.

In Bryant Park, a woman walked past me—déjà vu— her bare left foot a bruise as big as her right shoe, traveled with slow, small steps measured by habit, round the Starbucks stand and stepped towards my bench again. This time I was ready for her—to imitate her walk in a stumbling meter, interpret her pain. She did not stumble. Her eyes threw me off—black dabs in ovals whiter than the inside of an eggshell. Her face was a patch. She did not make a sound. She was not Death-in-Love and, like that mademoiselle finishing her espresso, meant nothing to me too. But when I stroke the bolt that locks the metal plate to your shin bone, imagine how the sudden rain blinds the bike, the thundering traffic blunts the stabs of laughter tearing the night air on the Brooklyn Bridge and how the last possible moment thrusts the yell, “Watch out!”—she pedals, singing, on the hanging ridge of my back, ringing and ringing her tiny bell.

to my father Some things leave us like a sigh. Your father, puffing out his chest, with no fanfare, walked out on your family for another. When he returned to live off you and mother, he filled our two-room flat with his sour air. Some things should leave us: a sigh like your father. No one among your seven sisters and brothers would take him in. For ten years, you took care to leave him alone polishing, one after another, his walking trophies—applying wax to smother the golden tokens while listening in his chair for something. Leaving us. Sighing, your father tuned his battered radio to a voice farther than yours, not once asking his son to repair what’s left or trade the set in for another. His funeral rounded up your sisters and brothers. The women wailed. You were the only heir of something leaving, like a sigh. Your father. An early version of this poem was published in "Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poetry" ed. Aaron Lee, Alvin Pang, Krip...

What’s on tonight but lips pressed on lips, the neck, the hollow of the collarbone, down on the silver strings from chest to hips, bass guitar counterpointing basement’s groan; and on the stirring cord, lips fawn, and tease, teeth sheathed, to please and worry its backbone: an arctic wolf licking the meat it sees, meat spiked onto a knife, the foam its own. On this white horse, the lancer sits astride. He jerks the bit and bloods its jaws, care thrown to the wind, pain spurring the pleasure-ride, slippery saddle, mounting to one moan - we come together, separate. Tonight blunts hunger’s edge and whets the appetite.

I hear a man jerking off at the Met and straightaway remember you, O, Jack. I'm flushed with sympathy, to tell the truth, to hear him groan in the next stall for beauty captured in voluptuous sculptured stone. Who is this restroom seer, lover, man? From hog farmers of Iowa, a man aspiring to meet his muse? Instead he met his fate of stunning listeners into stone at Bowery Road Café. Blind, he jacks off Perseus, in his mind, asserting beauty in holding forth the Gorgon’s heady truth. Or someone more acquainted with the truth of streets: a skinny kid, almost a man, from Harlem, pricked by the white muscled beauty of Ugolino and his starvelings met briefly in school? I hear him whimper, Jack, inside his Tower of Hunger, beat off stone. Or seeing Andromeda chained to stone, the monster squeezing her in coils of truth sprung from the sea, does he forget he’s Jack afloat, on shore leave from his merchantman, imagine flirting chance and courage met to petrify the beast, rescue the Beauty?...

The bags and boys are packing. The boats wait for rowing. White Rajah of Sabah, where are you going? The blowpipes are lisping where the trees are leaning and the bones talking without meaning. The cave pronounces echoes, darkness in my hearing. The birds, doused with feathers, are disappearing. Come back up the river. Come back to Sabah or row me home with you, White Rajah. * I hope to post at least one new poem a week on this blog. "Song of a Reformed Headhunter" is the title, and the first poem, of a chapbook manuscript I have submitted for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Contest. I'd be glad to hear your comments on the poems since they are, always, works-in-progress.