Mayalu Press

Kin burn like Kindling

I grew up playing in the ruins of a house

Bua failed to build again.

Its floor is red clay

the ceiling was a raft.

I remember drifting in Sali with him.

 My slipper, lost in the current

He swam after it and I stayed back.

The regret is still there.

The child who has only seen the ruins

cannot understand the child who 

burnt it down.

Kin burn like kindling

and Sali is always red in the aftermath

like the mark of a different god

singing his soot-stained face.

After October, tika will stain 

every other forehead

that stoops under what’s left 

of our doorway.

Their eyes will see

that the floor is red clay,

the ceiling was a raft

and somewhere in Sali drowns a slipper

under silhouettes of newspaper kites

made with his fading craft

that he still dreams at work

of bringing back.

~ཨེ་ཀོ་རོ་ཀན་ཆ་ཏ་མང་།

I Have Hurt So Many People in Quiet Ways

Yesterday I did a bad
thing due to a lapse
of goodness.
I am afraid I could be broken. Good people don’t hurt
people. My fault
lines could shift at any time
and strike-slip the quiet.

I’m never quiet.
I’m a bad
dog. Time
collapses
on every fault.
Silence hurts.

I have hurt
so many people in quiet
ways. My fault.
Maybe I’m a bad
boy. Running laps
to kill time.

Thank you, but you cannot fault
God, not this time,
for ruling a child Bad.
You do not understand how much I hurt
everyone always, every moment. Even in the quiet.

Every night I kneel in the laps
of angels and tell them my crimes. I relapse
into that old vault
of small sins. Disquiet
the settled dust, the memories that have already been given their time.
Every night I tell myself that if it hurts,
I could not, I could not, I could not be bad.

In my quiet shower, I scrub myself clean. I lapse
into good and bad, black and white, at fault
and out of time, I have hurt.

–KMN