v-unit

ink spills and paint drops, cardboard shards and headless oxen, this is a wreck we choreograph with backbones and nerves, it’s the way we live, foolish and desperate, holding off sunrises to tell stories with our guts. or to print out v-unit buttons.

and vinh rattles a scrawl with a spray can, playing catch with the tongue-tied curls of his cigarette smoke, it’s south Berkeley, and we’re pulling an all-nighter, smoking cloves to make up for sunlight, fleshing Vietnam out of grass and asphalt, with our lungs crawling lose in our chests, painting in excess, heartbroken and young, excess is what we got.

and there’s tan, and we’re each other’s shadow, and we’re both as clumsy as this city, this place of scattered lights and constant blurs, we move like misplaced things, finding ourselves in other people’s living rooms or on rooftops where the stars squint back at you.

and lili, like an incision, syllables that demand to be pronounced. she’s sharpness made flesh, and her and denise, with a thread, patch a fabric that comes together, a soft skin that stretches and tears like the bodies we’re born with.

and frank, and mike, and jason, and tan, the storytellers who weave us into sentences we lost and forgot under messy desks and stacks of papers, the reminders of what we’re looking for.

frank, camera mike, lisa, dancer mike, jason, huan, jennifer, tu-yuen, anthony, andrew, francis, helene, betty, kathy, vinh, son, andinh, lili, we were a riot, and our faces took the shape of broken glass, in other words, we bled and drank for each other, melting and burning into mirrors. we just smile at each other and say, this is as much you as me.

and this is how we celebrate – with cigars and steak, half-salty and half-drunk, always a half, never a whole, we move like we’re missing something, like lightning and dust, like lego blocks, always coming, going, coming, going.