Category: poetry & prose

I think I’ve never wanted anyone more—but you’re already halfway across the ocean that you’ve so laboriously tried to beat down into submission. What’s left for me to do is to wait at the pier for the mast of my own Time to be erected. I enter a laughable attempt at embedding the contours of your vessel in the harbours of my mind, bitterly pining to sail past an exact replica after I’ve mastered the turbulence of my own voyage. Chronology has not been the kindest to me, yet it is the only thing that has curbed the erasure of possibility—allusions to my coveted Future—a dancing wisp of air giving the quivering needle in my compass a little meaning. Half a reason more to watch the bleeding horizon swallow you up with nothing but a smile and a parting wave, grander than the ones that crash at my feet.

All clocks will always point to you, the time of my life—my nascent abstraction of love.

working with nothing is what i do best:
it is lapping up the gold coins
of wishes unheard spraying in
all directions from a bird fountain—
there’s something beautiful about
trying to separate gold from bronze
in the darkness that prods at what is
amiss.

working with nothing is what i do best:
it is getting down on all fours to prey
on something unrecognisable and strange.
through the glass of the urn these ashes
are tamed and unmoving, deprived of the
winds that give them song and dance,
yet i’ve held nothing more alive in my eyes.

working with nothing is what i do best:
it is holding on to a drink for longer than you know you should,
being convinced that melted ice
shouldn’t be discounted as a beverage.
the bank notes exchanged for this thinly
stretched delight were grown from the soil,
just like coffee beans, you forget.

working with nothing is what i do best:
it is unveiling the lace that shields your face
and finding nothing but stolen glimpses of
the back of your neck,
or the introspection you press between your lips—
but still loving you the same,
undocumented and subdued, anyway,

always.

in seconds we mutter a thousand verses

and jog our fingers down plastic beads,

though we know that none of the psalms or hymns

can save us from the way we claw onto each other so

we don’t feel the winds of the fall.

like crescendos, i grow, only to scrape my knees

on the harrowing accents you release from the bow of a

…pause

—

because when all the world’s a bathtub

and my ears are steeped in foam,

all i can hear is the lingering doom that screeches

before the plug escapes the geyser

through the hourglass i peer to see this golden dust drizzle inward,

swallowed by a starved vortex

like those halcyon days when

sugar didn’t feel like mites on my tongue.

with weathered fingers i

overturn this simplistic contraption

and like a metafictional novelist

through the hourglass i peer again

—timeless covet

rest your bones from time to time because there is an unavowed need to have those moments in which we sit down in repose: the only way to catch a glimpse of delicate seedlings swaying in the cracks of the asphalt pavement, how they stretch their necks to satiate their thirst for cups of sunlight. petals a tad bit more saturated than their mother’s, she’s an ocean away. tip-toeing to reaching a little higher than the sporadic weeds to see every setting of the sun. slapped so hard by the wind that its head descends to the earth. then recovers and dreams grandly again, skyward.

so everything is motionless and we see motion.

then we understand and carry on.

(sit down again if you must)

 

in bitter retrospect, i lay my head down and my vision becomes one with the multitudinous stars. the placid rhythm of their pulsation, like the heartbeat of history, keeps … slowing … down … and in my great sorrow for all the thing i’ve done, i seep away into soothing repose, like rainwater into a shore, letting the waves take me with them to a better tomorrow, where i am forgiven