For Kora Mao. Written in Columbia City, Seattle.

I feel surges of adrenaline when I comb my hair.
I feel the voices creep into my body when uncertain.
It isn’t the hold that keeps me there but the release.
It isn’t the hair that keeps me but the face.
Her faces as arches when the clicking stops.
Run the language of burdened eyes across surfaces.
We are all made from agate and granite made pink.
The sunset as mythological still calms us into sleep.
I wake and feel the residue of yesterday like a plague.
But the best memories are the greatest honesty.
And the best privileges exist within the lives of poets.
We wake and we part and we come back together again.
Brown sauce covers the dishes of my surroundings.
They hold staffs in their hands and wear strange hats.
I know little of the culture and its approprations.
There is both carelessness and emerging recklessness.
It helps to know the difference between the two.
I imagine fractured coins left to ruin in gutters.
I imagine streets made of shapeable materials.
Then the volcano erupts and everything is gone.
Except what is left in the system of ventilation.
It’s what we find inside the ancient tubes.
I wish I could believe any and all of these visions.
I wish the taste in my commute wasn’t sourish.
How many wishes are granted by the empty vessels?
The ones that speak within our strongest stomachs?
The ones that pour like blood and wax out of ears?
The ones that fuck along barbed wire planters
and beneath blue umbrellas beyond invasive fencing?
When the questions cease it is because the hum grows.
And when there is no inquiry there is golden void.
It is time to turn toward the frilly rifts
and examine, like Prometheus, implications of fire.