goddamn it has been a long month.

which is why i only got 8 days into the poetry project before giving up. too caught up in too many things to keep it going. my personal life is all a shambles, my school life is overburdened. and to top it off, i lost a month and a half of work on my thesis because the file got corrupted and is completely irrecoverable. luck loves me.

but imma keep my head down and bull through. i can’t wait till i finish, graduate and go apeshit. go back to the gym, get prepped for a competition at the end of the month. god i’m going to enjoy feeling tired from physical activity.

i’ve given up on the poem-a-day project for the simple fact that my everyday life has to take priority… and because i realize i really really hate posting poems that aren’t polished. such is life.

wish me luck.

i’m the type of poet who writes in great spurts. and i am currently hella blocked, so no new poems until i can get over it. because of this, here’s two old poems, slightly done up to presentable. appropriately enough since it’s a horrible, nasty, get into your bones wet and windy day, i’ve decided that they’ll be love poems. as happy as i ever write ‘em.

big smiles.

even when you want to cry.

oh… and if’n you’re interested, i should be there and it’s dope as heo… the apia summit. a great gathering of artists and just generally dope people. and dude, it’s in the bay area this year. how dope is that?

—————————————–

jokes

the imperfections of our bodies
give shattering testimony
to the perfection of the moment

shared knowledge
of sex
being too sacred
a meeting
to be had
without laughter.

touch is a ghost, is
a memory, is flame
and salty sweet moisture,
is the tracery
of sparks

touch whispers,
touch grips fluidly
and straddles
the fault lines
between
pain, pleasure
playfulness.

no self consciousness, not now
when we lose track
of limbs, the parts
yours that become mine
mine that become yours.

for an instant
entwined, no
me without you, identities
defined only in relation.

and then i rolled off.

———————————–

untitled

my fingers walk the outline
of your silhouette, trace the tightropes
holding our tenuous miscommunications,
trusting in our unspoken tensions to hold us up.

we sequester whispers in the corners
of half-hearted smiles

it’s weird what you remember at odd times. as i was writing the original draft of this piece for yday, i was thinking about what my father told me… that back home, there was no meat anywhere to be found, relatively little of any other veggies, because he grew up in the hill land in the middle of vietnam. like hill peoples in other parts of the world, his region was poor as hell, the lack of fecundity causing the folks out there to depend on daikon to feed they families. like the irish with potatoes, they found a hundred hundred different ways to prepare daikon, it was fundamental to their cooking, to their way of life.

along with this, came the memory of my asking him how the hell the vietnamese managed to shrug off the yoke of french rule way back when. my father told me vietnamese are goddamn good in a fight, ’cause we’ve been fighting since light dawned on people, since lac long quan and au co went their separate ways. conflict is what we’re good at. we’re stubborn, we’re tough and we’re broke, so we can always make do. he went on to explain that this is also the reason why we can’t rule ourselves for shite… and why when you get a lot of vietnamese people in a room, give them alcohol, there will inevitably be at least four-five fights by the end of the night.

oh my people.

btw, fuck vivid dreaming. i had one of the most bittersweet dreams last night. woke up with a broken heart. shit was awful. i want normal people dreams.

i will be slamming tonight, 6 o clock at the bowery poetry club. you should roll through if you have time, i’d love to see your faces.

also, my team, Ronin Athletics, will be completing at Naga today, so wish ‘em best of luck.

april 3rd

daikons, donnybrooks, processed meat

dolan’s eyes widened
in incredulity
as i folded three weeks worth
of now-clean laundry, crammed it
into just one sports bag,
my smirk replied, if you think this is good
you ain’t ever seen asians on a road trip.

i remember my father and mother insisting
that because we were an american family
we’d eat meat with our meals, that their children
would have what they didn’t,
so the taste of spam, canned tuna and eel
eggs and devil ham
wreath my childhood like the aroma
of my mother’s heavy hand with the garlic

my father’s family back generations
could not coax anything but daikons
from the stubborn, war-weary womb
of their hills, so they made a hundred, hundred recipes
for daikon, depended on it
like the irish on potatoes, because hill folk
can always survive

i was too lazy to go to ikea
to buy bookshelves
so i made my own

… in a gas station bathroom
my friend david made good use of the wall street journal
after too much wack-ass chinese food

the vietnamese used rifles scavenged
begged and borrowed
to rise against the french, had no uniforms
‘cept what they could scrounge,
no armour but faith in the cause
with such they beat a power

david’s uncle hates his life
but will not abandon his family, his job
as a line cook in a pho restaurant
so every night, he drinks a bottle of cheap cognac
till now his face is splotched red
with cirrhosis, his sweat reeks with fermented sweetness
but he has never missed a day of work, his children
have food every night, clothes on their backs

they call ‘em field expedients
yah make do with what yah got
my life is full of ‘em

but you do what yah gotta with what yah got
it’s in my blood.

I’m at 158 right now… and ideally, i’d want to compete at 139. 17 days, almost twenty lbs, the problem is obvious. i honestly believe that i could do it, cut that much weight…

if i had the time. life is a busy beast. if it weren’t, than i’d call it empty or boring. grind-ful and drama ridden and crazy my life may be, but never empty or boring. so i can’t cut the weight. i’ve decided that for my own good, i’m not even going to attempt it. on some level, with the sheer amount of work i have coming up, between poetry and shows and school, i probably shouldn’t be competing.

but like everyone else, i need something to look forward to. some goal with which to ground myself in the every day and to work towards. some connection to put my head back in the game of living. so it looks like i am going to try and compete on nov 8th. but because i don’t have as much time for training with my horribly busy school and life schedule, not enough time to get into the gym, but hey. such is life. if i compete and do well with my schedule being like that, than i truly deserve to be where i’m at.

along those lines, this is the workout i’m going to try to do at home in mornings and evenings, in addition to going to yoga and training whenever i can. i’m going to try to sweat and workout a little everyday, so that the eventual 10 lb cut to 149 will be an easy, no stress cut. sitting in a sauna all day is not my idea of a good time.

5 gi pullups
10 front pullups
10 back pullups
10 seconds grip switch pullups
20 bicycle crunches
10 hindu pushups
10 hindu squats
30 second leg raise

three sets of that every morning and every evening should allow me to be in better (not good) shape for when tournament time comes in.

along those lines, i’m going to cut carbs, including alcohol and eat cleaner… no more mamoun’s or sweet sweet whiskey. try and eat healthy in general, cut out anything that’s really bad for me… try to go to sleep much earlier, if i can. it’s awkward isn’t it, that i need the spectre of getting my arse kicked to actually get my life a little bit healthier.

which gets me to the last thing i wanted to talk about in this post… how pain and competitiveness and the chance of getting hurt or getting your arse kicked is such a good motivator. it touches something really and truly primal in yourself that grounds you to the present and the real. it pushes you to do more, to reach for things that you normally couldn’t touch because you didn’t have the motivation necessary.

it’s one of the things that allows humans to be more than themselves.

which is why it’s dope.