Yellow Rose

Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues

Yellow Rose

When you giggle, when you laugh
I get to wash
My 10,000 years of male guilt

Look happy for me, will you?

Queen, sometimes I think
Does it matter
That we are not together

You could not be president without me
On my own, I could not become
A billionaire

Two high voltage careers
And one happy relationship
Has never been done before

This is a brave new century

Love is electricity
Work is magnetism
Together they make for electromagnetism

Love is oxygen, lifeblood
Work is worship
If you believe in love

You will believe in God
That you have to find on your own
Or not, it is okay to doubt

Mouthing it
Is of anthropological
Interest

New York City is so much light
It is actually sound
DC is charming

The progressive political religion
That will engulf the planet
We will help build

Infrastructure
Political, social, economic
Infrastructure

We are the New York Mafia
Here to take over
The world

We measure progress
In the dollar figures
On every forehead

Shanghai has the skyscrapers
But not New York City's diversity
We live in the capital of the world

You run its premier
Political
Organization

Your 5.0 world I marvel at
As it unfolds in your presence
And absence

People are clay to you
You make pottery
Out of them

They get happy
When they are
Relevant to you

Let me just
Watch
You

In the love department though
Our entire mutual past
Feels dense with love

There are threads everywhere
Threads that no third person
Can make sense of

In the most public places
Privacy
Is possible

It feels to me like
You waited while I
Worked through my private pain

Pain from institutional abuses of power
In Kathmandu, Kentucky
Places that are part of my identity

Like my fingers
The landscapes
In my mind like scars

I will not have it
Any other
Way

But it is not about the past
Although that it is
It is not about the present

Even if that is all we got
And it is not even about a future
That has not happened, none can predict

The loftiest dreams can go mush

It is that feeling
That finally it is
Happening to you

You have found
The One
You are not in control

The Pahadis and Madhesis
Are all the drama in Nepal
But they are like medical patients

To me
In New York City

Race is for real
But so is technology

It is time to shame the men
Into making progress on gender
Fundamental progress

Progressive men
Will have to
Comply

5.0 and 2.0
A war between the sexes?
I think not

Instrumental?
Relational?
Maybe a little bit

Look in th eye
Open your mouth
And talk

Experience
The extreme interactivity
Of face time

If that is the point
I am getting it
I am getting there

I am one of those
My people persons
I can't think just of me

That is
My
Predicament

My Third World people
They need the message of democracy
Without exception

The Arab countries
Have to become democracies
Before they start making sense

Mostly though
It is about
Private moments

It is that feeling
That chemistry
That communication

Of being understood
Of wanting desperately
To understand

To give
It
All

To
Touch





Yellow Rose
Yellow Rose To Reclaim
Yellow Roses To Keep
Yellow Roses

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.

I go so far as to think that you own the universe.

Yellow Rose To Reclaim

I have named you queen.

When you go through the streets
no one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
at the carpet of red gold
that you tread as you pass,
the nonexistent carpet.

Yellow Rose To Reclaim

At the Sounds Of Brazil
In a sea of women
Filtered by their taste of music
I missed you intensely
After having thought the chapter closed.

A Seattle woman said
She had a 5:30 AM flight back home.
I said, I hope you get plenty of sleep
On the plane.
And, by the way, nice music.
Have a nice life, I got to head out.

At the Leela Lounge
Some women from Law School
On Spring Break
Wanting to know
If I will walk them to the train station.
Was I chivalrous?

But I missed you.

That was indication
There is another chapter to the book
And another.

You have done me the favor
Of firmly saying
It is face time or not
I have been sinking deeper and deeper into the swamp
Of spending too much time alone
Too much time online, alone
To the detriment of my health
And basic social oxygen.

At moments of anger
We have taken turns
Of offering narratives
That discount the other.
Taking full advantage of
Not having hooked up yet.

The truth is
I never stopped liking you.
I have been moving towards you
Relentlessly
I have not meant to
Seek your permission.

Maybe 99% of white women
Follow the Miss 99% rule
Does that mean there is greater solace
Among 100% of Indian women
I think not, I know not.
What about white women who did like me
But who I did not click with?

I don't deal with race with you.
I deal with a world that deals with race.
It has not been you.

We share a religion
The progressive political religion.
I tried attending a Buddhist service
One Sunday on the Upper West Side
Upon invitation from a Japanese American young woman
From a Women's Unity Day event
Who met her NYU boyfriend in India.
I could not sit through
I could not focus on the mind
When I soar every day with group dynamics.
The difference is between a cell and an organism.

Long ago
You seeped into my subconscious.
Perhaps even deeper.
You did not ask.
I did not grant you permission.
You did not wait.

And yet you keep me away.

Every time you make your statements
You are right, you are right every single time
But by the time you are done making your statement
You end up alone. I end up alone.

You are used to being alone.
Make space for me.

You make it sound like there is
All the time in the world.
There is not.

When we have misunderstood each other
We have acted to prove the other right
I guess there are no short cuts.
We will risk becoming a laughing stock
To the world
While we have our lovers' quarrels
Before we are formally so.

I so wanted to take a look.

You wanted to shut the door in my face
Enough times
That I also would think the chapter closed.
Point taken.
Now open up.

Let's establish channels of
Communication.
There is so much living to do.
So much to talk about.

Or throw me to the dogs
Once and for all.
Talk to me no more
Through messengers and
Security guards and receptionists.
English is my sixth or ninth language
It is hard enough when you talk to me direct.

Don't touch me means you will touch my private part
I don't like you never did means
The event has not started yet, but stick around
Let's have a conversation.

You seek combat
Verbal jujutsu.

Take back your threat to become
Condi Rice.
You are not going to become one
You are going to appoint a few.
I was grossly misunderstood.
All I meant was let's meet outside of events.
But events are where we meet, my bad.
Why get distracted?

It is finally happening to me
Put me through
Another mandatory coat check.

Yellow Roses To Keep
Yellow Roses

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying ..... The way nets cannot hold water.

Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.
I think, I explore great tracts of my life before you.
My life before anyone, my harsh life.