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.
Tag: writing
a eulogy for a dreamy sunday afternoon
i. sunlight seeping in borrows a rosy hue from tinted window glass, dancing off your tousled hair.
ii. the stereo murmurs a dull synth-pop tune to colour the silence, inside the lines.
iii. buildings we pass melt into a nondescript blur, like abstractions of ink on a drenched book.
iv. the weight of my baggage surrenders to the one tugging at my chest. i know i am not half-dreaming.
v. there’s only so much i can read from the back of your neck, like newspapers shrouded by the dark of morning.
iv. you mean so many things to me, things no tongue could explain. not even to myself.
iii. this silence amidst noise is killing me. i would rather burst into a rhapsodic wail, out of tune.
ii. this moment will not yield to captivity. like a firefly in a jar, the only glow i see is put out by the last breath of a dying dream.
i. heart and soul, mind and soul, maybe it’s time to let this firefly go?
the wise
days stretch into months and months stretch into years like
dough: beaten, flattened, pulled apart to mock the crumbling fool I am.
nothing has changed.
radio silence brims like sea foam in the concave of our ears
and we aren’t speaking
but in this moment, my love, everything is perfect.
I know to savour it—slowly, blissfully, precariously
—like justifying an expensive dessert by letting it melt ever so slowly on your tongue
before swallowing it whole in all its saccharine futility.
I look to the ground where our shadows merge. this is as real as it can ever get.
all you’ll ever be is another inane fantasy, my love,
a thirteenth fraction of a clock.
diabolical as honesty. forbidden as eden.
still, I marvel at the revolutionary alignment of our stars
because I know that in this moment, my love, everything is perfect.
we still aren’t speaking,
but being so close to you that the world around peels itself away
is already more than I have begged for.
somewhere in the defunct cogs of time, an inexplicable force
churns me on.
as perfect as this moment is, my love, I already know what is about to come next.
the ground I stand on will tremble like the surface of a lake before a storm.
the words I’m about to speak will topple in slow motion like porcelain off a shelf.
the way you look at me will tense up like the hind limbs of a starved predator
and I will be left a reeled fish thrown off the boat, bloodied,
wondering
if I’ll ever get back in a moment like this, my love, in which
everything is perfect.
hell over heaven
in another universe, a cat lands on its back.
in this one, it wishes it did,
of life just… growing too weary.
what it once thought was paradise is
now an amalgamated blur of spilled ink
and pens clicking; unearned bows and
goldfish feeding.
to drown itself in the mundane:
pedestrian whines about priced water.
baying baby digs its legs into nylon.
expired bread clips… still clipped.
it sheds off its layers like an
apple being skinned for someone else
to sink their teeth in with ease and say:
ah, there you are.
there I am.
there I do not want to be.
hope is a fall into the moonlit pond,
still as Atlantis, loud as summer,
coming home to rusty coins
lying idle below.
precious 