I see your face in the wishing well

And your hollow voice reach upward to my paling heart..
Wild thickets have finished their pricking
But I barely feel the blood trickling down my legs..

I’ll bleed ten thousand times over and I won’t
Feel…until you are reached
You who are like bright clouds
That slips gracefully through the space between my fingers

That’s the way it is
That’s the way it has to be

I dream lighthouses upon long branches of tall trees
while voices speak to me from the dead earth
I’m spinning in my own visions
And find myself in an open sea

Day broke and in the still dark castles of my dreams
I grow again the green, green fields and embrace
This picturesque heart of you

I flip through suspended memories
To find that you are yellowed and aged
By the camera I’ve stopped using…

I almost broke the potted purple irises when your letter arrived. I remembered the passing breeze and colorful British fall. 
When I stepped onto the train, I noticed a stout man who resembled a dwarf,
whose chest heaved up and down while he slept while I giggle at his fat, heavy breaths.

I couldn’t wait to tear the envelope apart and see what you wrote,
You, putting no name on the return address but a Batman symbol.
I gripped my hands onto the thin, transparent pages,
not wanting the sentences to end.

I loved every word, always filled with useful sentences,
every one of them practically mattering in the end.
Not like mine,
telling you every small thing I did,
the kind of coffee I drank, the brioche I ate.

The Janitor’s Expenses

Somewhere between the yelling, somewhere between the defenses,
the something inside that he had was the same something inside that I had,
the Asian guilt, the
loving guilt,
the appreciation- guilt,
that made us hurt for our parents
now,
because we saw our parents and their gritty American Dream,
the same one that the Asians next door with their
high-ceilinged houses and Lexuses have achieved.

I was angry and accused him of never seeing beyond himself.
He answered me with yet a wrong answer, equating what his self gain with being released from his parent’s caretaking.

“I am not doing this for myself!”

“Then who exactly are you doing this for?”

“MY PARENTS! Did you know that my father had to work two jobs just to put me through school? I didn’t go to the 30, 000 dollar per semester art school my brother went to. My dad had to be a janitor the graveyard shift at Vanderbilt just so I can go to a STATE SCHOOL.”

I never accused of him of not making his parents proud.

I pictured his small, tiny-framed father, hair receding from his forehead, squinty eyes
never without a gleam,
dirty water washing off the broom,
gliding through the halls paved
with money.

I saw what he saw, felt what he felt.