Tag: writer

+8

kellyLeave a comment

if i walk down london’s streets to 
the ticking of the kitchen clocks—
rows of billowing steam from
stews and curries that do not remind me
of home—
i could almost traverse these eight hours, a 
second and a step at a time, 
outpacing the sun that stretches my shadow, 
undulating against the cobbled mews. 

i adore the way you speak my name—the hook 
of your tongue reels me back from everything ugly, 
crushing my mental map of loss. 
i am named for the millionth time, 
but beckoned for the first.
so i keep walking, addicted, faster than the 
ancient tempo of seconds, 

fast enough to escape the trawler of reason,

begging time to let me catch you at the end of my 
afternoon shadow. 

yet the line in greenwich is stubbornly still, 
itself a blade welded by visits of the sun, 
carving up the temporalities that 
melt away within these same four walls.
a playground of conversation—childlike fun until 
you yawn and say good night and 
blow me a kiss i wish the wifi would let lag. 

i don’t lose, my dear, i can’t, not to time nor space, 

so that’s why i rush home, wrestling the hands of the clock,
where i eat warm rice and xo sauce until 
i’m no longer starved of the illumination of my screen. 
until i forget that i am just like that paper-thin iris 
i plucked and hairsprayed from your bouquet,

in a dark room, 
leaning into that fluttering glow,
praying it’s not bloomberg news 
and that the connection is just bad today.

The Intersection of a Flare

kelly2 Comments

Today, I finally spat out your name,
single syllables starting pointed and steely, harsh
at their tips but meander gently into curves—the
seed of a fruit, one ripened last season.

But last season was just yesterday, and I am

a miser in love. The melody of her name plays 
as a maddening strum of your tongue—
the way you stretch it across a lovesick sigh,
have you noticed? Cocooning it with such tenderness, 
awaiting her metamorphosis about which you 
narrate predictions to me—the fool
who wishes those 
elegant, confident, poised 
wings of your dreams will 

Guillotine my gaze, like the way they cleave the air.
I wish them to sweep into a distant world 
your reflection,
the one that is dancing and falling off the
rim of a martini glass, a treacherous caldera…
the one I can’t save from being
entranced by the spotlights, from being
kissed and devoured by the intersection of a flare.

The jazz in the lounge is swollen with my passion and
I’m still the fool, and still the miser, 
suspending a pointless hypothetical in the air, 
its pendulous swing lunging my words out, 
then in, then out again.
Perhaps it’s the alcohol and the scent of the stars—
they press me dangerously close to honesty,
brandishing a candour so bold it would 
cement every plot hole I skirt around, 
undo every reef knot you said, more than a sextant,
would save a seaman’s life. 

Deeper into the night, the wine softens my edges and 
your faults trickle away, with wine legs that
seem to mock my tear-streaked face. 

You ask me of the plague in my mind,
the pensive swarm that shrouds my routine smile,

and I want to tell you that her beautiful wings did nothing for me, 
but also
that love makes me a miser, a fool, a girl who
hopes that for you, one day those wings open wide.

Million Medusas

kellyLeave a comment

The sunshine lets a spillage of secrets
Fool me into thinking that this is
yet another beginning of my life. The Sixth.

Having loved one too many
You still stun me stiff
like a million Medusas.
I am both paralysed by love and its negation
一necessitation? Nevertheless,

You’ve got me, again, like a pest
Dancing in the very fumes
sent to kill it

Always mid-movement, limbs
bent all the wrong ways,
reeling my words back again
To mix them like paint on my palate
一palette? Perhaps,

What tones could I
Possibly contrive to cover everything
ugly and grim about myself?
Sinking my loved ones in shipwrecks,
A gut that has never known nourishment,

To make you want to frame me up
And kiss my rough edges and paste me on the
roof of your bunk bed? I continue
Mixing the acrylics as I wonder
一wander? Whatever.

Another Orphean temptation
of departure splinters my will,
and a ghastly silence trickles down
the walls of the room we used to inhabit.
Sabotage is a tradition.

Dying, am I, just dying
To erase this fiction一friction一
Prediction,
Of so many untold secrets
I dread no one will want to keep for me.

Unless you, you
You could cope一nope?
Fat hope.

Virus Villanelle

kellyLeave a comment

so i wonder, where in the minute are we?
through a fortress of masked faces, minds,
never thought the world would leave me

here, i stand far yet stand not free
washing my memories, bordered by lines
wondering, where in the minute are we?

digits skyrocket, into a soundless reverie
under the stars, a joss stick bleeds and blinds,
I never thought the world would leave me

they hope a strange fate shows mercy,
for tangled queues and questions to unwind.
tell me, where in the minute are we?

cradled like a baby in the arms of the big city,
secretly waiting and dreaming feel like crimes.
never thought the world would leave me

maybe one day we will believe, not only see
to have died once is to have lived two times
still, answer us, where in the minute are we?
never thought the world would leave me

White Whale

kellyLeave a comment 
I am wandering, haphazardly at best,
head full of helium and heartbeats running wild
to a hallucinatory rhythm.

History stares sternly at me,
its piercing gaze raising the hairs on
the back of my neck. I’ve
been here. The soles of my shoes
fit perfectly into the craters of footprints
left behind in the dirt. 
Perhaps I’ve just walked 
the entire planet to escape you,
only to return to where I had begun
at the end of my cyclical sojourn.

I wish I could tuck you away
into a password, 
or a receipt crushed at the bottom of my purse.

But you are my white whale,
an oasis in a desert. Like a drowning fish,
you make me pull my own puppet strings,
even when I’d sworn to cut them short.

I’m drawn to you, hideously and fatuously,
like a wasp is to a beacon.

And on some days, some better ones, the clouds seem to
morph into the contours of your face,
and I laugh from the earth below
at how even the skies

have a little sense of humour.