Monologue of a Woman Whose Voice Breaks Like an Earthenware Void of Water

I.

Perhaps, the beginning of my brokenness
is when I start asking some questions
from the navel of dream and reality.
I question nature and truth.
I dare heaven and spirits.

Why is kismet an unheralded outbreak of fire on housetops?
A raging storm that stills the flow of peace?
Why is death a dasher of the hope of moon love?
A hurricane taking away gelees before the setting of sun?

Until the reality creeps in as of a morning dawning
taking me through nights of insomnolence
where my howls drown the owl’s.
I already start tearing out by day
before the society pours me out
like a mouth-rinsing water.

Then I feel the thermae piercing and pounding on me.
My home is turning slowly into a hearth.

II.

Caught under the chisel
like a prey clenched down by a sabertooth
after I have passed through the forge in the hearth
I realize I am to become a making of grief,
then a mere cast and a foot-ridden garment.

And my brokenness, a thing to un-smith.
The gangrene of my soul this black cladding
cannot conceal.
Now, I am not together.
A hammering is enough to undo me.

Still breaking down after a score of years
I cannot dance to this music of time.
I am not picking up a cap or a crown.
I am picking up my pieces.

The Coastal Boy

many large waters confluence with my tributaries.
waving and waving, and waving
and I become the Moses ashore a naked Nile
that is as famished as the dry ground under Egyptian feet.

and so when I know this is the place I come from,
my mind curdle like a pebble tossed and
lost to the grip of the mire.
and I herewith suffer the face of a troubled reflection—my identity.
perhaps, my nationality.

here by the sea I stand with my briefcase of grief.
where every night serves everyone.
a night last year, I was served the heads and lines of some fries
crushed in the sea by giant trevallies who used sharks to ambush them.
now, I am served white paper
that orchestrates a key of well-cooked ‘la-las’ conflicting with ‘do-dos’.
now, I am served empty shells and fresh fish bones;

perhaps I will be abraded by the water soon
and become a poem for another coastal boy.

dinner became a meal none could skip
—as impossible as skiing or surfing barefooted—
when waters became a thing that troubles.
but I am just this coastal boy who would love to walk the waves.
how can this be when I am previously a Moses from the mouth of a Nile?