Somewhere, there is an ocean. Inside that ocean

is my father. Inside my father is another ocean.

And inside it, thousands of yellow butterflies waft,

dancing and swaying in new wind. All of them,

dead and alive like truths. There is no difference.

I have told the cat purring inside my head that

my brain ran out of cat food. Such disobedience,

             these thoughts. These images

that are supposed to be mine, and yet my father

isn’t here to tell me                             to man up,

and talk to real people. My imaginary dad meant

men, who may have real cats. May be as real

as claw. As glint.

Youth is weird and doesn’t have the ocean,

nor butterflies. What youth has is a man who

turns yellow when I touch him, which makes him

outrageous, but oddly mine

             and forever evidence. I met a girl at a party

who looked like a kiss and I pitied her. Some people

look like a blowjob and I pity them even more.

If I look closely, the truth is yellow and will

flutter towards the nearest open window overlooking

billboards and other liars. I try to follow it to know

the hardening theory in my body, saying,

             you look like a kiss, too,

             the kind people throw at birds.

And I am afraid of absence, and I am surrounded

by its lush perimeter. There is a lullaby that only appears

in yellow. I hum it in the dark of a stranger’s neck.

The morning is precise and full of fruit. There is no

ocean here. There has been no ocean for years. The cat

says she saw a yellow butterfly inside an apartment

I have loved so much I have forgotten it.

She says

             she sees it everywhere: inside sleeves, inside palms

             pretending to be something else, in the middle

of Sta. Mesa, where I met so many people and remembered

no one who wanted to forgive my hands. I love absence

not for what it is, but for what it used to be. How once

it whorled inside my lungs; an engine that thought

no matter what I was going to be loved.