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A Biography of Divergence

Never mind the jewels he stole, the fat wallets  

    he pick pocketed. Never mind the glut of hookah 

          smoke washing over the bar he frequented. Never mind 

            the endless weeks of rock n’ roll — a rollicking lifestyle 

              of sex and drugs the public thought was his, the philosophy 

              of wild abandon he was accused of proliferating. Never mind 

            the thick register he updated meticulously during day, the journal  

          titled Bullshit he wrote into at night, vigorously with a fountain pen, 

     mostly after drinking gin. The landlady tried to verify his background 

through a detective agency. She received intelligence that no family 

                with his last name lived in the town he claimed to be from. Was he 

               a trickster, a spy or simply a man who wanted to go by another 

     name? Never mind ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ tune 

he whistled at a dive bar inside an international airport, never 

                      mind the generous tips he left bartenders, the proposal 

                    of marriage, in exactly eight months time, he made to a woman 

he had just met on the flight — what was he thinking? Exactly. Not 

         much. The silver mace presented to him for being man 

                    of the match at a football game was stolen from his house, 

                      then auctioned off in another country as memorabilia 

possessed by a controversial spiritual guru. Never mind the nights he grieved 

    for his dead wife, sitting his pug on his lap, stroking his fuzzy wrinkles  

          and nuzzling in despair his sad smiley maw, pouring his heart out in ways 

               he had never expressed in words, the song of consolation offered to him 

                   as a sequence of sprightly pant-howls piercing the chilly night air. 

                    Never mind the lives preceding his, the slow mount of mortality 

                      in the amorphous distance, the fickle mind’s incumbency through echoes 

                      of time, tumbling through gallons of space, the collision of animal cells 

                      accelerated by environmental disasters— did he find  

                    what he was thirsty for all this while? Nope, never 

                mind the bounty of lives he led, these lives belonging 

            to a bunch of fourth graders from an all-boys school 

                who once served punishment by kneeling down shirtless 

                        at the basketball court for a couple of hours, 

                             discussing briefly among other things 

                               their favorite shows on TV. They never saw 

                              each other again, or rather never knew 

                             if they ever saw one another, 

                       as their school closed down the next 

                  day after state authorities found 

         it was heavily contaminated 

with radioactive chemicals. 

A Personal History of Vulnerability 

                chest grew clammy inside broth 

                     soaked blanket    once wind settled down  

                        took shape in my throat the tuning fork 

                        of voice    oh dear after I glimpsed the eclipse naked eyed 

                       around a rope of teeth wound a maroon riot of lips    arched 

                     in a painting the man usurped subject    the mermaid predicate 

                 inside me the eggs of fish aghast    to stony bone they were cast 

            by the man’s sharked arrows of moonless tusk    why must He clamor 

      to always conquer   why should He not bow    my child mind out of all  

planets liked number seven Uranus the best    preferred fission to fusion  

  when I pronounced Uranium the walls of my vocal cords learned to split 

     it seems from technique comes ascension but my  

        undulations aren’t interested in enduring the test  

            of bloody time    I think about pleasure or triumph when I’m not  

                under pressure    soon guilt demands testimony  

                   in a witness box    it moves like a cat on the surface  

                      of a glassy lake    a notorious mirror reflecting your arch 

                         enemy: your vertical body   in a tub of tomato chutney I spice 

                            my carapace of skin tags amber   how you fish out from my  

                              hollows a love for the neo-noir genre   I make mementos  

                                of every equation we solve together    we eat calculus  

                                 alive    either shred time in our hands or piece 

                                 together breaths to punch holes in distance   our prayers  

                                in the cave had no words only numbers   I ate dosas daily  

                              for a year or two    a slow burn of meat masala brought 

                           me to my dark apple knees    only in your spyglass the small  

                       of my back dappled big with blotchy scabs   the key 

                   to loving knees is admiring joints right away   while massaging  

               my coconut oiled head my mother planted on it small tufts  

         of story to keep away the white mice of dandruff   one day the ultimate  

     opportunist of a mosquito made sure I memorized the color  

of blood    by sucking on my lump of stubborn flesh that God had 

    categorically carved out for the pink slurpy suction of one particular 

         lover    in one corner sits holy ash in bottles beside naphthalene balls 

             unable to mask the L-sized doom in my wardrobe    bring me 

                a smattering of all that my plate deserves    the entire menu 

                  of midnight flavors    let your avian lips scoop antibiotics 

                    into my infected mouth    then slowly lift my sides 

                     of speech    those flaps billowing over rusting girders  

                     sour buds bubbling to run industry of babble    the bitters 

                    leap at you like beagles after a bouncing tennis ball  

                catch those rowdy babies    they go to bed when rubicund red 

          before you leave    turn my taste to rum