I’ve Got Mail

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see
              - Emily Dickinson

This my note to you,
is penned in a heartland mountain
between New York and ‘Frisco,
Alaska and New Mexico

rolling my body on your roads.

To nourish a chill in me,
adjusting autumnly,
I boil myself tonic soup
with herbs packed from a medicinal hall
bought at home,
slurping it while listening
to Ferlinghetti scream foul about his coney island.

I am parole in Alcatraz,
free to roam its tide pools but forever away from
heavens,
panting like grecian goddesses,
witness your cadillacs and sedans eat gas food,

my own howl is

sandwiched between my confucian bedspread
waking up to continental gothic
which I landscape with island gaze, lacing it
like sea-foam whitening edges of sallow skin,
with kindred red coursing
as those in my kin black, coloured, indian, white,
the same red, which if bled,
will streak scarlet contours on pure blue skies

and I learn  enough english nursery rhymes
to start rapping with hip words,
frontiering an american west with singaporeanness,
romancing you to land Lindbergh-like,
celebrate a Columbus day parade
in my coney island re-emerging as Atlantis
on a pacific rim of my wondersphere.


No longer burning with holy love,
with my malarial fever
wearing your classic cut jeans
I cross your Brooklyn Bridge and Golden Gate,
Beloved of Bronx and Shanghai alike.

On a Yangtze linked to be the Mississippi and the Nile,
in a junk I fashion from tropical rainforest,
sails stolen from cotton clouds
stitched together by nerves ripped from my brain,
steering wheel gripped as my own skeleton,
I cruise bays the Big Bang hands to us for safekeeping,
several times ship-wrecked atop a skyscraper
in the middle of the new millennium.

Water –
Water everywhere:
my unquenched
throat

Howling

How do I sail from here,
when the outside drowns me,
wandering lonely, light as ash?