Poems

Summertime happiness

Gradual, gentle bench swing
specks of light onto concrete
Exclamations from train rings
somehow aligns with upbeats
of ABBA, like a super trouper,
AirPods + feet go pitter patter!
Gusts and rays are super duper
Enveloping passersby's chatter

Streets full of well-dressed girls
adorned with delicacies, trinkets
& cotton candy ice cream swirls
like a quaint, flamboyant nimbus
Beads of sweat on nose bridges
glisten like the seaport sunset
beyond busy, insistent pigeons
Baby steps back to cozy sublet

Sage green crochet tapestries
Bangs on green roller unfurled
Duck on my desk says happily
You and me against the world
Adulting is allegedly daunting
until the world is your oyster...
Waves by the harbor, wanting,
whispering, feels like a hoister

Overflow

overnight, silly me left
my computer on overtime
which became overtly frozen
even as I kept trying to override
overcome with the creeping doom of
overmorrow’s overnumerous things due
I trudge into the small overcrowded clinic
where overall has mostly upside-down smiles
of people who too overlooked the initial warnings
and now face the results of overestimated conviction
the technician overall looked quite gloomy as he peered
at the many jumbles on my overcomplicated system screen
in the dim lull of overlapping opened tabs and frantic clicking
“It’s an oversight,” he mumbled with a slight shaking of the head
a sympathetic but firm confirmation that it’s over, way beyond repair
technology is overrated, I thought as I tried not to listen to the growing
overture of late assignments and lost money that began to play in my head
running again and again in jittery regurgitations, which went slightly overboard
when all nice things of the week are now overcast with endless angst, just waiting
for the new to arrive, a fresh start, another muscle to hopefully not overuse this time

sometimes stuff is just an overwhelming
overarching tune that’s never really

Slow Steam

Across from us, an old man glows
glows faintly with the candle
on a mango cake, almost childlike
I glance at you, a quiet knowing
I won’t be here when yours flicker

The navy cloth embroidered with gold
whispers beneath steaming teacups,
reminds me how deeply I am woven,
threads warmth beneath the cool air,
everything, everywhere, all at once.

Your hand slips into mine, light as mist
thirty pounds lost, you say
medicine creeping through veins
blink back the sharp salt that rises soft
as I dive farther, stronger, across seas

Around the table
chopsticks drum a frantic tongue twister
clatter dim sum onto shared plates
Love swollen in the fullness of forced bites
mine joins the chaos/care chatter

The city’s pulse drips with sweat
frowns glisten under smog-thick skies
crowds simmer with exasperation -
I evaporate, tangled in lineage
sticky rice, now foreign

Longing coils sweet and sour
The home I crave decays
fading at the frayed edges
until familiarity dissolves in smoke
the memory a distant heatwave

I watch my childhood drip away
Boiling water melt into jasmine tea
strong, sputtering, my tongue burnt from
words that fade into the relentless heat
You offer a bao, I clutch the thinning air of now