UNTITLED (WHAT I'M THANKFUL FOR)

not the pumpkin pie; not the turkey; not the cranberry sauce or the stuffing; not the rice and chicken gravy's thin skin; not the beer or the wine or the margaritas your sister likes so much; not the smell of it all, the smell of grandma's scalloped potatoes or of grandma herself; not the tablecloth; not the special forks and spoons; not the beautiful wine glasses that shine under the expensive chandeliers; not your mother's pretty patterned blouse; not the rings on her fingers, or the way she hums along while cooking; not your dad grumbling stretching out like a fat cat next to a window with sunlight pouring in; not the sounds of doorbells and the beeping of cars as they lock; not doors opening and closing with creaks like the tick of a grandfather clock in the foyer; not the sounds of clothes on clothes during extended and close hugs; not the drive home along the highways of ohio; not the mass of dead trees that lay on the high hills; not the unheard tune sung by somebody in their cars while stuck in traffic; not the shaking of fingers while writing; not the tastes not the scents not the visions; not the feelings, not thanksgiving, not the forgetting of how to say 'father' in korean; not dark nights snuggling, not words or meanings, not sense, not nonsense, not logic; not reason; not science or god, just life life life life.

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

do you think a duck gliding across a pond, moving with the current as if pulled
by an imaginary string, really gives a flying fuck about the economic status of
somali refugees travelling in a midday sun with their burnt and boiled feet
somehow withstanding the heat of some white sand covering a vast desert located
only a few degrees away from the equator?

does a deer, a buck or doe, stop in the middle of chewing the dewy grass of a
meadow to ponder how a black man locked in a jail cell for thirty years will
ever be able to buy a navy blue hyundai sonata and a fifty-inch widescreen
television with which to watch the vikings, or that diamond ring for his lover,
or the college tuition for his beautiful teenage daughter?

or what of a mammoth.

would the last mammoth on earth truly have given a shit about a fifteen year old
transexual filipino kid fiddling with the belt buckle of an american tourist who
was on his paid vacation for sitting in an office and working speculations for
an investment bank, who was still fat from the avocado rissoto salad and the
clam and mussel bordelaise and creme brule?

really, does a wily fox or confident lion, or a squeaky mouse chased by a cat
care at all if a poor mexican boy starves to death next to the lifeless body of
his parents in an abandoned trailer sulking at the side of a bumpy gravel road
left behind by some greasy greedy liars who ran away with their money under the shadow cast by a morning sun across the boundary, across the border?

are there any animals that care, out there?

if so,

might i ask ...

where are you?

CHRISTMAS IN WASHINGTON

I.

it happens on a thursday while i stand soaked in an afternoon rain underneath a few indelible clouds which deny and reject stray autumn rays too weak to push their way through

and the weight of a passing bus bears itself into a puddle showering dirty water all over and i am waiting patiently for the white outline of a hollow man to signal me across so i can meet her

and even through suffering through the uncomfort of cold wet clothes sticking to warm skin i can still mutter to myself that it's all okay, i'm okay;

i am mostly water, anyway

II.

what i do know:

sharing isn't in our blood.

we weren't born selfless.

no one has to teach us how to take and
want what's not ours;

we weren't made to remember all the
people we meet on the street,

especially the foreign souls we don't
love or know,

for more than sixteen minutes at a time.

and the settlers (make no mistake) they didn't leave for anyone else
but themselves, and maybe the children playing in the vast unpolluted
pasture with their hoops, sunday afternoons after church, blonde locks
overflowing tight white bonnets

they didn't roll forward onward across the new found land passing
families whose wagons were burnt and broken, whose exposed rotting
flesh were made a meal of by ravaging birds for

anyone but themselves:

they just rolled on by, not one look back;

they didn't even flinch


III.

now that you're gone i recognize that this moment and experience can't be translated into just any language (be that the spanish spoken in some particularly green valley of southern andalusia or the ukranian spoken over vodka in a tenement house, or the verse and rhythym of your fluttering eyelashes when you'd sigh in bed)

sharing is not what we do; memories experienced alone shouldn't be shared (they won't mean the same to anyone else), so i want to keep them for myself

hold onto them, just like i hold onto this one:

the image of a tiny shiny aluminum gum wrapper falling out of your patterned purse gone unnoticed to all the passerbys

how it flew away into the wind on a fall evening as an early twilight erased the shadows

how it was like a paper airplane off to some ignored destination,

how you walked away and got on the bus, disappeared into the orange glow of tall street-lamps

how you hummed to yourself, staring off into the distance through the tinted bus window and how you went off

without a sound

to washington