Tropical fever

This land is nothing like that which I have known, the familiar, if faint, of South America--Central America's bite back. I am most adoring monks on motorcycles, orange flights with sun speckled umbrellas to protect their heads. Temples tickle the senses in Phnom Pehn, send all eyes up to the sky.

Of course, I have been feverish and seen very little of the city. What I have witnessed has been by tuk-tuk, a motorcycle driven carriage with padded seats. It reminds me, somehow, of a carousel ride, with the same pleather on cotton as those red seats that twirled. Here is instead a modified game of chicken that rules...there are no stop signs or lights; I have taken to looking away when we enter crossings, my eyes at the temples, eyes at the skies.

Men and women eat at street carts, hot stews and rice warmed by relentless sun. Women in pajamas dance hip-hop in street side parks. Taxi drivers wear real rayban sunglasses and boys smile with overwhelming reluctance.

My desire for coconut milk has already been satiated in these days; and I am certain in saying that my father would faint from the incredulous amounts of lemongrass in the national dishes. Frozen lime sodas and seafood stews make me swoon.

And still, the echo of the past remains. It is as eery and altogether tortured as a past impenetrable by us, outsiders. I stay so far outside of that world, no matter the ache it awakes inside--those ghosts awake and alive in the streets, in the airs, in a generation of men mostly missing, unmistakable.

Even with fever, this city opens up a world to glance within, of tropical fauna and gold turrets that cannot reach beyond the glare of ghouls.

Poison and Wine

The lyrics linger, fat with the words I cannot speak or even own. Rather than sorrow, I feel sorry in this melted, morning sun. So I melded my dreams, sharp jaws with no escape, now cracked open with crevasses to swim out of, just big enough. The bruises are everywhere, top to bottom, lips to toes--and most importantly of all--the in betweens. I wonder still how swimming pool slides morphed into floods and flights of tears? How bookstores beckoned with coffee-scented sweats, too touched by the salt we could not escape? Driving down New York City streets, locked inside... I see how, in those fresh water pools, kicked the only hopes, the only moments made out of our heads. To forgo fantasy, not feigned but a harsher hopeful than any lived day, permits a feast on a single past, so coldly cast in this gray goodbye.

Berlin

Its the sand I miss, a pool above the ocean where I could tip my toes. There beside antique shops and drunken Berliners, a most precious beating, burning of the heart. Why suddenly do I see myself there--the blue of silk and sweated nights I cannot look back upon without regret, a flash of flowers held to my heart, dry discovery that broke all of my pieces, in pieces, in pain. And yet, even with the trouble, those childish, "nymphet" eyes look back at me, to me, as they are of me. Alive only in lyrics of those I loved, so swallowed by the sea.

That sea, however, was built of concrete waves and wistful wildlife; it consumed me, pawed over my resolve, both buried and bled my reminiscing, writing, raw adolescent self. Still, I hear the music of those strings, a door unlocked first in downtown New York and later by Alexanderplatz, once too soft and purring for my taste.

Now, in the glimpse of photographs, almost foreign to me now, I yearn for a time I suffered through. I yearn for glass shelves of pastries and my first bicycle, being lost, of and in trouble, and yet so sure of love. Love that feigned or fainted on the pfaueninsel, love that shed my dreams; the quicksand sort of love that leaves wilted but still sharp spiderwebs to reckon with.