The mem'ries live inside my dreams
illuminating white and black
Your shapes and figures, blotted out,
the pen of time does not give back.

There are some days, my eyes go dark,
a rush of sin creeps through my blood.
the good in me was left inside
the man I was before the flood.

I try so hard to keep reminders:
the things you'd say, your endless laughter.
that life is made of little joys,
that death is but the final chapter.

So as you cross that endless sea,
returning to the other side
know that you are not forgotten
for you will always be my guide.

A sail is made to catch the air
and guide it toward our meaning's end.
We drift across the sea without
the ship we build to sail within.

In calmer waters, steady winds
we amble toward the beacon light
the stoics take their stock by day
and count their blessings through the night.

When storms kick up and waves arise
a simple choice will oft appear
to beat our chests and curse the sky
or patiently befriend the fear.

And if our journey brings us to
where water and the ether meet.
'tis better death to leave a mark
than wallow in our own defeat.

It matters not which crew to bring
which lands to claim, which hearts to win.
We drift across the sea without
the ship we build to sail within.

The moon glows full

not knowing she glows 

brighter than the sun

Through stumbled words and choked desires,
I call for you, o ghost of pyres.
To light this match and set ablaze
the destinies we've made a maze.

Our ropes and weaves go through and through,
the obstacles for me and you
and to this day, we never touch,
but tell ourselves it's far too much.

So light this twisted web of thoughts,
this laundry list of painful locks.
Burn them 'til they glow no more,
til' ashen white enshrouds the floor.

I'll search for you when it is done,
our molten cores conjoined as one.
And I as you, and you as me,
shall live into eternity.

The Invisible Voice

My dear orator,
your voice hangs upon the air where listening ears
are moved and shaken by what has already settled in me.

How long has it been since the beginning?
Since the time we built this city on the rocks,
and rolled the soil in lines of coke and rum
How long has it been?

You paid me a visit today
with a face that couldn't decide
whether to regret or pity me.
Instead you brought flowers and stared at my tree.

Every gesture is a wish
that life wasn't so determined to finish us all.
And I don't blame you
for what life did to me.

For I was your silent instrument,
your mirror, your machinery,
your knight in denim and a cotton hoodie.

Your dream was my dream.
and dreams only stop at death's door
to say "hello".

There's a special place in my heart for you

that's bigger than it really ought to be.

But there is no naysayer, no bulldozer, no act of god

that could convince me to make it smaller

Lif Finds Kip on Pangum

I crept up to Kip's tent and rapped on the wall to see if he was awake. No response. With much hesitance, I moved to the entrance of his tent and pulled back a flap. He was sleeping deeply, his long, deep breaths filling the air with moisture. I carefully inched toward him, but in the darkness of night and untidiness of his floor, I struggled to find my footing. I tripped and caught myself, loudly. Looking up, I saw him half sit up; his face was startled and his eyes suddenly went wide, but remained beneath their translucent lids. He was still asleep.

"Hey, you're awa-"

"You're not .. go away." He stammered, still dreaming. The dark made it so we couldn't see each other so I had to use something else to wake him. I reached in my bag for a torch rock, and had almost pulled it out when he shouted again, "get out!". I caught a glimpse of his wide eyes in the light from the open flap as he jumped out of his bed and lunged at me. I tried to dodge but the tent was too narrow and he knocked me back outside. I felt a strong grasp at my left ankle, and I struggled to free myself, but he only clutched harder. He was clearly awake now and not at all himself.

"Kip, it's me," I pleaded

"You can't fool me with her voice. Who are you?!"

I reached for my torch rock again, and this time my fingers clutched it, just in time for him to pin my wrist and back.

"Who are you?" He demanded. I was speechless, my face against the soil and my arm lodged against his.

"Answer me!"

Trembling, I spoke what I could between breaths.

"It's. Me...Lif"

He paused quietly but held his grip. I felt him take my other hand and he pulled my wrists together, binding them with the same one-handed grip. He used the other to check me for weapons and found my dagger. It clung to my hip as a child as he fumbled with the scabbard until it was finally wrested from its sheath with a quiet cry of metallic glass. A shot of adrenaline filled my abdomen, making me struggle my hardest. He hesitated, and then quickly moved his arm around my torso with the dagger to my neck and his other hand still holding mine behind my back.

He said "get up" in his gravest voice and I carefully moved with the knife. Once we had stood, he rotated me to the left and we proceeded to walk silently in-step toward an outcropping with brighter light. We stopped in the center and he removed the blade from my neck.

"Who sent you?" He continued his interrogation.

"I came here on my own."

"Someone is paying you"

"What? No one is-," I blurted out but broke down.

With a big push, he released me and pushed me to a safe distance away. I stumbled but didn't dare move. The soft lowlight of the artificial night showered the tree branches and leaves with pale blue. I suddenly felt infinitesimal and numb: a speck about to vanish in a place so far from home.

"Turn around," he commanded me. I took a moment to compose myself and then did as he commanded.

"Kip. I came here on my own."

"Lif?"

He recognized me but still had to check he wasn't hallucinating in the lowlight. He approached me with dagger in hand while rummaging in his pocket for a torch rock. He held the rock up to illuminate me and I saw his face turn from apprehension to relief to sadness. He dropped the dagger and embraced me as I released my body into his arms.

"Lif... I'm so sorry."

All I could let out was a short moan-sigh but I felt that was enough.

Lif and Mel Lament

Melna came home, making her usual sounds of habit. The opening doors and untying of boots I had grown fond of over the years did not help me today when Kip's chair sat empty. I mustered a "welcome home" and got up to prepare our last meal of the day. She walked into the room and returned my greeting without a look, instead grabbing a cup of water and moving to the grand room window to observe the waking torches of faraway homes. I continued washing the grains and chopping the roots I had picked that morning.

She chimed in after a moment, "He really left then?"
"This morning... Yes."
She paused, still staring at the torches and sipping.
"So stupid," she muttered.

She turned and with a slow and heavy pace, she approached the kitchen. She set her cup down stared at my work.
"How are you?" She asked me in her concerned voice.
It was an unexpected question. I stopped and took a few seconds to think of something to say, but she saved me before I could answer.
"You don't have to answer that right now, I just–"
"No, it's okay. The truth is... I just haven't thought about it too much. I've been too focused to think about it."
"Too focused? You're never like that, Lif."
I smiled a little bit inside, but I know Mel sensed it.
"Lif, I'm nervous too."
She stopped my chopping with a touch on my shoulder and took my hand.
"You and I have to keep going. So that when Kip comes home he–"
"If he comes home", I reminded her.

I went back to chopping and she turned and went back to the window with her cup. I knew she was thinking the same thing.

The Capture of Lif

I could hear footsteps approaching in the distance, but I couldn't bring myself to leave his side. Were it me, my present self, I still wouldn't have left. I felt his stuttered, unconscious breaths on the tips of my right ear in between the beats of his heart echoing in my fingers and prayed that they didn't stop.

The footsteps came nearer, and I clutched his shoulders tighter, closing my eyes to hear him better.

The footsteps stopped, and a man yelled out to me with an commanding tone, but Kip's breaths were louder in my ear than anything I could have heard in that moment. The man called once more, some sentence with words I didn't understand. There was a brief pause while he waited to see if I would move, but I didn't. The silence was cut by the sound of a gun rising, and more words, louder words.

I realized then that I couldn't protect Kip if I died here, so I opened my eyes and stared at the stranger with the gun pointed at me. He had rough skin, and a large leather hat covering his head and ears. His eyes were not afraid, not angry. Instead they were resolutely absent, the eyes of a man who had given up being happy long ago. He had a partner; too young to be a spouse, too old for a daughter. She had a similar hat, and a long, thin spear that was taller than she was. I knew my words would only do harm, so I looked into her eyes, and spoke in that silent language that animals and children use.

  She turned to the man, and beckoned, "Apo..."
  He ignored her, and kept his eyes fixed on me. She approached me, remaining suspicious. With just a little bit of effort, she grasped my arm fully, and pulled hard, but I struggled, intent on staying with Kip. She pulled back, this time much harder, and hurled me off of him. I let out a cry of longing and fear, and she quickly gathered my arms together behind me, and lifted me up to stand. She yelled a command to the other man, and suddenly we were walking back where they came from. I turned to look back at Kip, and she pulled my shoulder to keep looking ahead. My arms and legs, my inner fight had turned off. My eyes were burned with salt, and my skin red with the cold. I could still feel the heat from Kip's breaths on my right ear, and for a second almost believed I could hear them too.

I was born once, and with the birds. Naked in the spring, black eyed and eager for mother.

When I flew, it was upward, toward that endless unreachable blue ceiling. The sun, laughing at me from his distant chariot.

And when the stars arrived, they burned in me where the innumerable goals burn. Reflecting on my insides to make me as wide as the universe.

As a bird, all I know is to fly.

And I will never be done flying.

Calcination

Fire, that immortal blacksmith,
forever forging its shimmering blades.
They rise from the darkness, cutting and separating,
destroying an impurified husk
to leave just what will be essential.

At first it turns black.
Black like the soil beneath our feet
where everything we know came from.
Black like the hidden corners of my mouth
where the words i meant to say never moved.

But this too burns and turns to ashen white
Its structure surrendered,
a mound of remnants, homogenous and unpatterned,
a gentle chaos with no identity,
dead and stirring with the wind

To Kip, undeterred

It's bitter cold out here before the sunrise.
The power lines are humming with the lake a distant 40 yards off,
and we're here, sitting in your car at 5am,
wishing the world would stop spinning.

"it's getting cold," you say, and I grasp your hand. 

The diesel smell has dissipated, but I still smell your hair in this stillness.

"Do you know the reason I call us by our celestial names?" I ask.

Years ago, you told me a story about how vast and distant everything is in space

How things move with a great clock marking the time.
And as it ticks, we all dance to its beat.

You and I were always off time, eclipsing and countering each other.
We never stopped orbiting, and we still inch closer.

Someday we will have to pick:
explode from a slingshot or conjoin into one.

Hold tight to my gravity, and i'll hold to yours. 

And let's see where we land.

To Lin, after

I found your necklace the other day. It was napping on the bathroom sink with the toothbrush and the comb. It hadn't caught my glance in the night, but when the sunrise bent its beams toward the gemstone's faces, I watched it unfold it's splendor like a Phoenix from ash.

it isn't often that I get a reminder of those moments only you and I know of. After all this time, I still keep you hidden in places I forget. Just today, I was cleaning the bookshelf and I found letters you sent while you were in Cambodia. There was even one where you packed a little clipping of a rice plant in a bubble mailer so I could feel and smell what it was like. That was a special kind of love I hadn't known before, and the electricity of it all still puzzles me.

You haven't heard from me because I am changing, and in the midst of changing I've forgotten who I am and what is important. It wasn't fair of me to give us an expiration date. I drew the line and told you to prepare yourself for what was inevitable. I wasn't sure how serious I was until you insisted that the line exists. And since that point I've yet to fulfill my promise of letting you in.

I cannot divulge everything at once. Some things take months to explain and at this rate I'm sure it will take even longer. I admit that being so miserly with your patience is not fair to you, but please trust my saying that when the time is right, you will understand why I am not so quick to say what it is that troubles me.

Intro to Surien

I raised my head toward Surien. How it bared its twisted iron shell across the sky, perched in heaven like a black crown of thorns. I wondered at the people who created such a vessel. What must have driven them to leave the comfort of their planet and construct their new home from rocks they found in the desert of space. I thought about Palinan and if we might do the same if our planet's currents ever slowed.

As I got closer, i could make out some of the larger pieces that had been fused to the hull in a rush. And as we drew closer I could make out more and more of them until I couldn't count them anymore. It was ugly but altogether a marvelous feat of astronomical engineering. The crown of ten thousand asteroids stood before me, with vastness greater than my imaginination could ever produce. This was home for a great many people, and I would soon be among them.

Tawn

I write to you with beams of light.
And they have become a ritual.
I've learned to crave each glimpse of you
Between the accreting stars.

When shimmer swindlers beckoned for the sun you gave me,
I gave myself to them instead.
You had always given me enough and more.

Now empty-handed, my fists are full of the medium we swim within.

I beg the heavens for something improved but I find less at every turn.

I write to you with beams of light.
And now, from this other side, 

I can see what you have seen. 

I only wish you were here to tell me about it.

It's you, the one the night calls friend,

You, the girl with faceless dreams.

Perch yourself beside the moon

And you will see the girl I see.

Who can wake you as a rose

Nodding kindly with the wind?

The trees will find their fingertips

Before you bare your breast to them.

My fingers beat upon the table

Against the grains of time and space.

I watch you dancing in the minefields

And pray one day you'll find this place.

The Jiyu

    I wished my old tree good morning as I rustled my way through its branches and set my back down on the slope that its trunk had been building. The sunlight had just begun to lift the dewdrops, slowly making room for the songleaves around them to transform the new morning breeze into the music of the spirits.

   You cannot hear the first note of a jiyu's song. There is no grand entrance or catchy hook. It's more like a choir of thousands of distant voices all entering and exiting at different times with their pre-ordained notes. When you start to hear the song, you realize that it's been singing for a while, only your mind was not clear enough to focus on it. No mind has been or will ever be clear enough to know which of a jiyu's leaves sang first. Only the tree can know, and it will forever keep it secret.

Gutta Cavat Lapidem

That night, I went through my usual walk through the gas-lit tunnel that ferried me across the river between two lives. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto the mortared stone floor and it reminded me of a stone engraving from the barrows of our ancestors. "Dripping water hollows the stone". And as I walked alone in that desolate place, transfixed to the plip of the seeping groundwater, I pondered which of my lives was becoming the stone and which the water.

From up there, at the top of the sky, I could see - I mean actually see - the thousands of miles of water transforming and dissipating and collecting again. I could see the rocky earth and the countless trees and blades of grass borne upon its back, bathing in the warm starlight of sol. All this magnificence that was living and breathing, turning the soil and drinking the air: I could feel inside myself a part of every organism that was or is or will be a part of it. And only then could i hear the voice that had long been whispering to me who it was I would become.

we were blessed with beautiful imaginations

that we may think each other with us