All the unborn infants have shopping lists
There’s an inflammation of naked mole rats in the turnstile

A man at a booth on the sidewalk wants to sell
a pair of scissors to snip at the excess of this day
to reuse the strips of Wednes-,Tues-, and Satur-
as tickets to an exhibit for an installation of barbed wire piano strings
suspending a pastiche marionette who plays Ella—
a man-made cubist and a hobbyhorse of a surgeon
who historically deems the appendix as unnecessary

The shoulderless sun can carry the world
The heart of the world is weightless from this window
and all it wants is your body

You can go there
with your cart of hot dogs and scarves that gravity craves

I try to kiss your feet once in awhile
You try to touch your toes
and ask,
What do we put underneath this?

Neon by Cedar Mannan

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.
Therefore the Master takes action by letting things take their course.
Lao Tzu

This is what we are referring to when talking about a breath-centered yoga practice. Often a yoga instructor’s cadence becomes, “inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…” until it becomes ambient sound and our ears habituate as we no longer pay attention. And at any given point you will hear the instruction: “coordinate the movement with the breath.”
Yadi yadi. Yada yada.
It’s plenty easy for your mind to convince you and your body to do a lot of things. The converse is true too– you may convince yourself that you have no control and you are possessed by your body by addiction or greed or whatever other deadly sin you might think up. These two things are true (and not just because I’m trying to promote the concept of non-duality either).

Try this: cat/cow vinyasa
inhale, cow
exhale, cat

Fair enough. Now breathe normally. Let the cow happen as the breath comes. As though the transition is in fact a function of the breathing mechanism. It is.

We are being breathed. The atmospheric pressure outside of the lungs and the pressure within the lungs is what causes the diaphragm to move up and down. Respiration is an autonomic function. You do it while you sleep.

And cat comes because you exhale. Bring your mind into your breath. The song is the breath and your movement is the dance. Freedom within choreography. Moving and breathing in a yoga practice is a celebration of being alive and capable–
bringing your mind into your experience
and being there
with yourself
the whole time
to witness,
to act,
and give thanks
just for that.

Now, try this:cat/cow vinyasa
(do this simultaneously)
inhale=cow
exhale = cat
(let the postures and transitions become synonymous with the word “breathe”)

The movement is fluid and the breath is like a river…always flowing…. Sometimes it settles
as in a lake
and the breath suspends
and the mind stops.

If we try to force our bodies to do things without first giving ourselves space to breathe, we will never be able to live in a place of ease and stability. If we fight against the currents around us, we end up defeating ourselves. If we try to hold on to all of our possessions, they will possess us. If we strain, we restrain. If we take shortcuts, we don’t understand where we are.

Practicing restraint in yoga is not about denial, it is about transformation. There is no need to bottle up. To be frozen in our emotion. Become a Master by moving with the energies that nourish you. Support yourself without gripping. Trust yourself. Use self-authority by receiving guidance from all that you are and can be. Pain and pleasure follow the same rules of nature–they each will come and go. Inhale. Exhale. Birth. Death. And the spaces in between. Before and after. Let’s take more time and find more space and live a little now and then.

Thanks to individuals with video cameras, like this tourist in Times Square last summer, we can bear witness to the world.

You don’t even have to be on a bike in NYC to see this kind of unrighteousness. I was shocked when I first moved here, but now I know that you ALWAYS have to advocate for yourself. One cop stopped me on Houston for no reason. He just saw me on a bike and wanted to ask me where I was going. I felt like he was going to ask me out on a date. Another common thing I’ve witnessed constantly: cops spittin’ game to flirty girls.

I also have a summons now for riding about 10 ft on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. I live on a busy one way, but the cops still suggested that instead of riding on the sidewalk, I should ride against traffic. Yeah. What’s more baffling is that there were about four of them posted right there in front of the bodega, “on patrol,” and I’m thinking, “YO, you’re across the street from Marcy Projects and you don’t have anything better to do than to give me a petty summons for cruisin on an empty sidewalk? I guarantee someone’s there’s a carjack happening right now.” Sure enough, one week later my neighbor is jumped and beat down near Myrtle-Willoughby by 6 guys, knocked out for nearly half an hour, bleeding internally, while they walk right in to my building and steal all their valuables right across the hall. Where were you then Mr. Officer? I know–mere chance, indeed. But when the kid finally came to take the report, my confidence in his competence rapidly deflated.

Most of the cops that I’ve seen (like those directing traffic) hate their job so much that you can clearly see an emotional recklessness unleashed in their gestures and yelling throughout the day. Many of them are just kids, yet they don’t have to be in order to show their insecurities. They are no different from your average worn unstable and aggravated New Yorker, they just tend to have a more destructive outlet of power when they put on their cowboy costumes.

The point is not to arbitrarily hate on cops or just anyone of authority. Rather, it is to require accountability of injustice. I believe there are people in power with integrity, self-control, and a decent set of ethics. Even though we can answer “Obama” to every drama as much as we like, we know that it is our responsibility to advocate for ourselves and each other. We are all we’ve got. And you don’t need to pick up a gun to start a revolution. The only piece you need is your voice. You’ve heard before that “your word is your weapon.” But your every action is your affirmation. Let it be known.

In the city of Fabiola, the armature alternately dissolves and integrates. Its light evaporates as a rope soaks up kerosene to burn within the lamp’s bulbous chimney glass. It brightens with the food of more rope.

The sky is a blueprint that dangles contrails. They seamlessly disintegrate into the solid blue that masks the stars. The funeral pyres remain for mulch. No cars run off the pipeline. Can’t you see? Not through the particulate matter, like that which covers the nightness.

In this particular matter, in the township of Fabs, light switches remain a mystery–dissociated from their antiquated uses. Historians and archaeologists sit around the conversation pit; drinking hot clover madhu; playing with “Scrabble” tiles on a “Monopoly” board. None of the original intentions or rules that govern, like that of the light switch, were retained, recorded, or deciphered. The principal spirit or goal, however, has been preserved: to play a game. As long as these professionals have something on the table with which they could occupy their eyes and many dexterous fingers while employing the muscles attached to their fine lips, then they could keep the criticism of outsiders at bay for a time. After all, there are no other inhabitants of Fabiola, who express any expertise on the origins of monopoly, much less the meaning of scrabble letters with numbers on them. Some have a faint notion that they might pertain to something called the “Periodic Table.” But periods, whether related to time and punctuation, or elements and chemistry, are generally beyond the concerns of common folk. They would rather enforce their faith that the conversation pit figures are engaged in crafting important plans for Fabiola’s future. Perhaps literacy and cultivation practices will be taught or ways to detect mines in the “no-colonization field.”

Fabiola is rich. She lacks a lot of the elements typical to a traditional city. Most notably, she lacks hatred. Her inhabitants know neither the meaning of this word, nor the implications it has in alternate dimensions. For the reader, examples might include: rape, diseased blankets, starvation of nutrients, decimation of species, and ego hunger. Due to the absence of hate, there is also little comprehension of fear. Many outsiders might accuse this township to be of little consequence–accomplishing nothing. On the contrary, they manage to maintain healthy levels of body heat, fat, and water.
They survive on little food and darkness. Their chief nutrients hail from clean air and stillness. They use and revere their legs so highly that artisans sculpted and dedicated public sites to pieces of substantial and muscularly articulated columns of legs. One popular site is located at the center of the town square where the townsfolk surround the celebrated appendages and dance before sunrise every morning. Then they stretch out on the cobblestones to roll around massaging their fleshy and fabulously-used proteins. Shortly after, they soak their feet in a nearby stream and gaze at the continuous morphing of their faces reflected. The deeper they peer, the more rocks appear and the sense of cold and wet passes and charges the electricity of their skins. Thus, forgetting all about their limbs.

stop the dolphin
on the sidewalk
blue five feet
coin slot saddle
and red fishnet
the leopard lost
his coat tail swinging
red satin lining
five thousand gold buttons
bone not included
the chameleon wears Louis Vuitton
and Krylon splashes
the bonobo clutches
the remote watching
the discovery channel
monkeys’ procreating
pushing buttons—rewind
fish fillets magnified
in the bowl swimming
in circles
vienna sausages wiggle
and hot dogs snuggle
in the aquarium thirsty
for dripping mustard
the nuggets take a dip
sweet and sour
under supervision
from mother hen
sitting on her scramble.
we step out
seventh ave south
nowhere to eat

Lolo
wore flip flops in the garden
carved canyons in his soles
saw clearly beyond cataracts
made Filipino expletives
ukininam at the mahjong table
shuffling made the gamble sound simpatico
like the tango he danced on the piano

Lolo
called us from the trees
with peanut butter toast
fed us with his thick cracked fingers
nails like moons
kamayan style

Lolo
read Are you my mother?
to the audience, a page-turner, age three
in his lap and when you fell
he spanked the concrete
with vengeance
for a scraped knee
handfuls of coins convinced you
shhh—you were his favorite

In the morning basement
he hacked a toilet cough
for yesterday’s phlegm
in the bathroom where his dentures slept
where we split his menthols
and flushed them like love
we could not reciprocate

kill oak gall. Jackal
dolls bawl in
mess hall.
Ah !
ritual alcohol
non-habitual. I
waterfall

default to
thrall crawl

no wherewithal. I
drawl to
downfall. I
anchor

ancestral temple I
follow falsetto to
steeple to
people to
purple pall. Je
suis pas mal. I

Overhaul big
basalt ball
bearing to
Nepal. I
maul dhal
enthralled
by witwall craw
FAUGH!
I
am
salt
to
this
call.

A kind of currency. Lingua franca. Electric voltage to jumpstart a body or fry it to a crisp. Everything is bark. Words. Mots. Palabras. Pesetas. Copper. Argent. What a verbal illustration. Tip dessin vert. Mint species. Poetry is green olive and foliage. It will buy you a lover. Keep you in debt. Make you use bills for scratch. Jot your bliss. Spend it. It is vibrational. Tonal. Clinking in your pocket. You’ve got some. Everyone hears it. Wants it. “Just keys,” you say. Honestly. We’re bound by an imaginary trust to compensate for a world we could never afford. A cent is more magnificent in its power than its form. The opposite is true sometimes too. Shells. Buttons. It attempts to replace all things it cannot be. Tender to feed children, who will always hunger. We want it. We want it until our change is perceptual. We see trees different. We learn the value of patching a deflated tube inside a tire on the shoulder of an empty highway. No promises, but to leave a memory imprinted on the grooves and creases of palms and fingers. We exchange notes on a history of dead men and wonder. Is it a means or an end to suffer? I drop my heaviest coins into the mouth of a washing machine to shake the debris from the skins that protect me. Spin. Slide on a magnetic strip. Data. Plastic. Rarely seen or held. Easily drained.

On the path with basketballs or the curiosity of an archaeologist picking twigs remnants from the trees and carbon and dance steps on resting leaves there’s a reason for boots berets and beards and repetition and interruption

night

the

bloo
d
y

Sa
murai

and

b
ee
t

sou
p
.

What can take place in an expanse is boundless
What I can feel on a Brooklyn rooftop lacking moonlight
is the shock of oxygen after life in a womb.

I can see how small we play
how inferior we convince ourselves to be
When we mimic the morphing of clouds
How great and divine is our capacity

I ask the urban ceiling to blind me tonight
to wash my eyes with the broad reflection of tempered street lights
muffling the hum of dramas and masquerades
An endless charade of conversation exacting how to do
and what to interact to whom we injure
and where to coerce a choked reality

What can we murder under the sky? What can we sculpt without textures and angles and dimensions of sight?
How complex a body is built to move and be moved
yet simple to witness majestic truth – time as space

May we not stop in a swamp of stagnation, but spread our intents as seed
to stretch and sprout the span of centuries
We suffocate under souvenirs and need to unfold contents
that fill up experience

I will let the lull of nothing kidnap me
I surrender to the extent of no extent
the parabolic points of infinity—a gong
an echo and perpetual flight into the depth
of absolute arrival to the tune of om
and I vibrate with perfect resonance when all is gone.

Be selfish with your breath & thirst
For pigeon-like companionship

Observing silent the secret
weapons holstered by our nametag-disease.
Hello motherhood & detention.
How are you crystal man & married eyes?

Your igloo box and plastic spork bags will be lonely someday
no volunteer to rescue you. No regret is patterned
fabric and other keys defy our skeletal ways.

It’s the symmetry of this monetary scale and street Dobroe utro Otkuda tys that light and utter the gum mosaic pink and green unbreakable dead cattle feet and sequin eyelashes all elements of a proper burial

Where contentment in placid stone and sand bottom ebbed by storm and soot.
Ripple asymmetrical
catch and release the exoskeletal film
on a lake the patina of our charge and circuitry
we concur our desire to fly finally, but shun the sacrifice
of wind and tail obsessing a skin we can’t quilt together
our stitch is magnetic
unlink and recollect what we spread on our photograph rooms
what we store in our castle buckets and light tables
when we all inhibit
shadows

Who can be as mangled on a park bench or a building ledge—
constructions of sandstone stacked in time
compress the stillness of pre-elementary sight.

Why we fight and chew our words
Expel & askew
Fall apart ceiling and open the floor
we should make a brick house while fastening the cellar doors the shingles the slats the foliage of owls feathering the A-frame
no wing and no chimney can balance this view

What I conclude about your edges is nothing new
only I coax old by living it through
no need for the surface gifts reflected off prescriptive lenses
return all that is given to a thirsty pigeon.

Masters of Circumstance never test fire
Clip yellow-leafed plants cradled legs in hands
Examining dead the skin mix with sand.

The intellect grows a peach a bit
Brain and dripping sweet a chin mimicking
The edge of what a human can face
A volcano inverted as ash
Before lava or blood before basalt

We suspend our bodies in burlap decisions
And dangle ripe in the trees burning
To bust open our guts to become spectral
Activity and savorily spent

I could have left a couple chipped
Dishes or a few finger dents
In the frosting or one yellowing plant
But at the pavers’ discretion
Without the courtesy of cones
We let the jackhammers fraction
Our tameless terrain

I know the remorse of an arsonist
And the quiet after the crackle
The twisted fate of a toaster taken up in steely flames
I know the accident of throwing inextinguishable matches
Of lovers and time and accidents
Like tricky birthday candles jinxing a wish.

Down the block “smoke signals,”
Cry emaciated dogs for scraps limping

Competition cocks fight a frustrated crow
Servants “live-in” an outside kitchen; cooks for household
Flips flop on a painted concrete floor

Sniffing fake flowers
Makes us sneeze from the dust

Shelf of knickknack Jesus shrine
Maria-Hosep holds him just
A plastic automatic; little boy gun toy

His story is breeding
Listeners bear witness

Lives shred
Op-ed clippings
Ash rains
Terraces saturate the confetti shower of shell powder-body shock

Terminate the masquerade
Pudding body cotton family holy is the matrimony
Tobacco brother pallbearer plow the rice ceremony

“Piñata rain,” the milkfish comment as they nudge oyster structures
Confidence the mortar stacked to self-sufficient order
Built better than the fatal footbridges over ponds for fish
Broken by beat of boots and boys off boats
Born of pallet scraps and friction hands flicking off the ash
Born to break by drops in forecast

Clouds distort the cloud reflection
Pacific bleeds and puffs clouds everyday
Evaporating back to a saline state

Ships sailing
Even when the wind stops blowing

Even though the natives of this town might agree
that this alone should inject a fluid sense of serenity within me
time was rupturing

and the most outstanding feeling
was not unlike when you are going about your day
and coincidentally you approach an acquaintance

A light of recognition grows upon their face
which you attempt to imitate
they begin to wave a little
kindling affection

You realize they were looking
through you at the man
now brushing past your shoulder

You recoil from your peak
just before plummeting
to the rise of the sidewalk crack
your collected shell disassembles
entropic seabirds startle

Pausing at the overpass
I fish a pebble from my shoe

I throw rocks from above
a sign that illustrates such
(except it should look accidental)
beside the highway
buses substitute ladders and sometimes hoses
incandescent eyes follow
crates of chickens buckled in truckloads
where a body a vehicle

Feathers and fires fan
stretchers and cameras summoned
bodies shudder
Help is on the way

In my periphery an officer’s shadow interrupts the scene
He firmly grabs my shoulder lulling
It is not tomorrow yet
today I notice all the houses
built of brick.

on the antennae when they meet
They make the sign of a t
then flee in the form of a flying v

the Tenant inside underneath
watches TV
does not see electricity does not
pay to view Sojourners’
Exodus Genesis Exodus

inside and under tenement rock
sensory membranes are battered lawn grass
to breathe here means to go blind
to adjust reception means to permit
transmission of pidgin language

no words just hunger no gestures
no songs but wings
mimicking the veins of the city
all that is leaving for far too many
not bombs but falling birds

it’s not You
rather how you will be
forgotten in beds of soil you turn
rich and rotten

every Sorry Thank you Please
erased of all our memories
anonymous feathers
formalities for stuffing our pillows
and we are all beaten cases
how we tried to find our fill
never meant by sense or will
for often said without a clue
what was meant by
how are you

So much blue clearly
To be had. Drink it up. Lay
One on me. Tell me something

Any order of words sounding
Any vision imagined sublime
Like skyscrapers submerged

Any version of titanium sheaths asunder on thirty-fourth
Street under blue street trees. Snails scaling the empire eating
Supper super blue-green algae. Transit fish in suits swim to suburbs

To the 56th parallel. So much skyline in the way of a seaweed
Salad plate. Lay your eyes on the rooftop landscape
A simulation of tropical visions in manageable proportions

Laying claim to topical oceans
From the 78th floor sightless to the local
View. Tending fishbowl gardens

Brimming rims, the masterminds’ topiary hairpiece
Atop Kubla Khan’s stately dome, King Kong’s pleasure pool
Pet sharks and streetcars drop shadows on the

Sidewalk floor by degree
And the sun sets early
And the evening breezes…

Frequently. Wind tunnels kick. Pushing
Shoppers, non-stoppers, strollers, steamrollers
Downtown downstream.

So much view to be had
So many angles cut waves
So much to stain the heart

And scar the options:
Stares or elevate 34 seconds
50 six floors seventy eight scoreboards billboards

Lay up to sustain the game play one-handed,
One button, one shot, monochrome, monotone,
Open. Standing alone where floorboards leak through sealing so much gray.