A Year Ago Your Hair Was Flowing

A year ago your brown hair was flowing
Your green Tigerlily eyes glowing like the Indian ocean
A year ago, the new year started full of hope, clean slates and plans
A strand of pearl future holidays, eventual birthdays on a delicate tomorrow chain
These past 365 mornings became a cruel century, displacing a former era
Ripped sheets in the beginning of a story
This new reality, heart poverty,  a missing seat at the table

Juevinile hopes full of reunions, fingers crossed under blankets for parental communion
Snowflake good-night kisses, flurries fallen upon closed eyelashes
Safety is an illusion, a brittle mirage that
Cracks the early chill dawn with a sigh and you're gone
Icicle memories, tears frozen like broken clocks
This bitter legacy torments me in the darkest January

Fall through the ice, knees to the terrain, drop the receiver, knife in the belly pain
Screaming to the spinning horizon your name- God with Us, barely a decade
Seasick on landlocked ground, in shock and confusion we drown in disbelief

Grasping for summer memories, last souvenirs of you here
Recall which songs merited your quiet content, the times that you giggled
In my lament replay videos of you laughing, devour your chuckle
Inhale traces of scent memories that still linger
Hell is being helpless in paradise without you

Our heavenly flower girl, eternal tween
Dropping us celestial love gifts like the petals in a wedding procession
Fragile flower sprinkle us more hallowed tokens to treasure
How you left this world, jubilant hibernation, blissful slumber
(I won't speak of the maternal betrayal)
Cherish how angelic you slept while I watched you dream

Sense you everywhere nearby, a hush, a gentle whisper
You wait to comfort our winter with Spring

Mourning is a Radioactive Mirage

I.

Your dance of harmonic tremors in the rift zone are over
In the deadlock of destiny young fern fronds grow, singed and rusty

Upon the graben valley between two warring fault lines
Goddess Pele devourer of land and Kampapua'a, feral hog former husband

Igneous insanity from breathing deleterious gases

Her paroxysm fractures creation

Pele struck her fluvial daughter but no volcanic sacrifice was necessary

Collapses the cliff swallowed by the ocean

Losing her was like a Polynesian paradise obliterated by an atomic bomb

II.

God's tears fall in mammoth, obsidian raindrops

The soot avalanche mixed with debris formed in the dust cloud of Kilauea's explosion

Sonic boom hit by the shock wave flash in my soul

Radioactive numb my brain to the core

Blister my crater center, engulfed by the island gods' legend mushroom cloud struggle

Unexplained angelic failure to stop the gushing molten magma

Heaven and earth mingle

Glittering strangely like a mirage with bits of broken rainbow

Ring of fire around our shattered trinite hearts

A prayer cloud eleven miles high, flames of rage rising into the stratosphere

Navigate mourning in a tailspin flying blindly

Radioactive wasteland

All that remained, a lapilli path of stone to the kukui doorframe

Power Outage After Dinner

The night before I found out my niece Emma was killed, I  watched these two fireflies while on holiday in Anda, Bohol, The Philippines.

Power outage after dinner

Stars obscured in this foliage 

Embrace the raven black, its only night

Jungle eclipse fills the cottage

Then two fireflies flew in from between the thatch roof cracks

We two from our bed admire 

Their cold light frequencies whirling jubiliant lights

Synchronized phosphorescent couplet mystery

Little flicker souls glittering circles above our head, 

But beetle lifespan is like a breath

One glowworm fell like a fainting petal on the cold concrete floor

A luminous snowflake  or scintillant beating heart

I watch it immobile, still radiant

Surmise her partner lost its lightening

To the absinthal darkness

Mélange and Martyr

This is about my niece Emma's tragic death taken by her mother, before my ex-sister in law killed herself.

I.                     MOTHER PRESENTIMENT 

The afternoon condensation hangs like a catechism in the air

Do I dare lift a finger to burst the humidity?

Like an embryonic animal sac born intact, embrace the monsoon

Beyond this perfect mother-daughter holiday pact

Do I dare anticipate for one last langniappe?

Mother devotion so endless and yet I wobbled near a precipice

Grasp I had one final rapture reserve

Beyond beginning or end

Grope the enclosing cloudburst

Like a mist or fog, a leaden shadow umbra

Motherhood’s veil is her daughter in early morning’s bloom

Reconsecrate her to the One

Envelope us in garland arms full of fuzzy bees

Free me from my self anathema

II.                   DAUGHTER DELECTATION

From my bamboo castle precipice

I survey the xanthous flower perennial highlands 

Above their thatched villages and metal roofs

Over their children’s polyphonic voices singing rehearsals

Over packs of barking dogs

Beyond flying fowl

Consider farmers below burning refuse

Scouting the single motorcycle light like a firefly on the muddy road

The earth spreads out like a patchwork quilt before my reverence

All the ocean horizon and every far-off island my vigil boon

Regard my aunt, or maybe quondam cousin

Mourning maiden kith writes a crambo in her refuge

My lucida peace reigns from this celestial mansuetude