B r o k e n

songs,
muted lips,
words with indefinite
spaces & pauses

dot around these floors in
this
home.

Where once upon a time,
there was
two
heart beats
instead of
one
within
it.

One slow,
lonely
heart-beat.

Why is the ocean blue?
The ocean is blue because water absorbs colors in the red part of the light spectrum. Like a filter, this leaves behind colors in the blue part of the light spectrum for us to see.

Why do people you love get angry, till their fragile veins bleed out?
They care, sometimes, too much.

Why do I feel like this?
Perhaps, your eyes said a shy hello to his.
And both of your lips refuse to say Goodbye.

"Stay a little longer," he said.

The wink of urge, the want she felt in her chest was sharp and careful.

Mirroring the tendency to stir up the settled sugar at the bottom of a stained coffee mugs and tea-cups.

Footsteps chasing after overly-small ones.
Little gaps of space between their lips & hearts;
flitting in between are voices like little notations on crumpled maps.

Carelessly inked shortcuts to a
dainty dabble of
yellow on
ones soul.

You fill my chest

with

little
hiccups
of
happiness.

I hope you know that.

I like how her eyelids slowly close ever so gently, as if those words could be forever inked into the pockets of her mind.

Oh, the way he breathes in at times, it's like he tries to inhale the words through his slightly chapped lips into the airways and then

into the staircases to *nowhere.

A stomach full of disappointment.

Price: Lips stiched by all words I wished to say.
*Discount: If you have the kind of bitterness found in burnt toast.

honey*,
I am no princess,
I am a queen.

It hurts.
When  those two little words say 'meek hello's' to your ears, please don't laugh,
thing is,
it is an infinite number of fragments,
sweet heart.

It hurts.

Time is a very, very scary concept.
We can only live for how long it wishes to breathe in our veins.

Her words were thrown in the air.

I stood there.

I walked home.

I unlocked the door.

I stripped off my damp coat, unstrung my scarf.

I collapse and sit on the cold, cold wood floors.

As I do so, that’s when my metaphorical heart splinters into the tiniest of pieces.

Anatomically real hearts don’t break, they cannot realistically do so.

Which is precisely why this is so god-**** hard for it to heal back.

As you are fighting against a beautifully lucid and meticulously choreographed illusion.

"Stop, you're tickling my heartstrings."

"Don't ******* over there-
You'll feel a half-moon smirk and laughter in your left shoulderblade."

Spilt
little
pecks & kisses
on
bared collarbones whisper
"Good Morning"
on

those sundays.

You absolutely do not get the honor of burning a numerical value on her self-worth.

You certainly do not get to measure that assumption from the hem-line tailored on her thighs. Or the daring dresses she wore because it made her feel a different kind of beautiful.

She is not asking for it. What she will demand for is neither your attention nor stares. She wants respect.
Can you do that?

Oh, and when you are emboldened by your 'witty' validation that she  is a ‘****’ or of promiscuous nature, all down to the clothes she wears on her back.

Don’t.

Cotton stitches against warm skin. (She was enjoying a walk.)

Silk swathes on slightly chilled bones. (She forgot her jacket on a Wednesday night out with friends.)

Thick knits adorn even more layers of cotton. (It was a winter night.)

Their cold lips pursed by the late hour, scream silence.

With that validation, you normalise and excuse the acts of ****, soul-destructing ****** offences.
For you have blamed the victim.

You excuse a depraved psychological state.

The veins that choked from ice and no’s. You have forgotten.

Rapists and ****** offenders do not get the luxury of being excused.

Neither do you, ****.

And he closed his eyes.
Drawers are shut gently, curtains drawn back.
Silence stilled heartbeats & pulses.

She refused to close her eyes nonetheless.

He said he liked her hair long:
messy and unruly against
upturned cheeks and winks.
Braided secrets running
between lilac
blooms and plaits.

He tasted of *** and berries
Short. Sweet. Sin.

He is a wisp of an
inferno eating
all the words playing

tip toe

on her bitten lips.

Winter came as a painter’s
brush dipped in blue and grey.

Secrets that taste of sleep
syrup and honey  f r o z e
Drunk bees dance in
pale and grey roses.

A careless mistake came
in bruises, a stain of
an indigo sunset.

Rusty kitchen scissors snip,
snip, snipped away all
the bad, sugary tartness
eating a toothache.

Spring crept up on a
bare nape and shoulders
Her sun-baked eyes burned,
softened like butter,
maple syrup and something
harder than life.

I drew specimens carrying XY chromosomes as sharp, angular.

But really you're this
gorgeous, warm, breathing breadth of muscle,
tendons & bones.

They wrote

girl

in the centre of the page.

Word connotations tranfusing into veins of ink.

Pretty synonyms { eyelashes, flowers, cherries, collarbones} lilting with virtue.
A marriage between dainty and fragility.
A wink of buttery pastries & flushed cheeks.

Why the hell did it take so long to put
strong
brilliant { sun & stars }

w-o-m-a-n
{equals}
?

Eventually, the letters will just be letters.
{But they will always be mine.}

The syllables of lovely words will wilt a little. After all, blooms & daisies die.

His scent will never linger in your hair or on the edge of collars.
The kind of heart I wore on my sleeve will just be something I used to wear.

And he will wish someone Good night
in the way it is
not
a goodbye.

On the inside,

I'm a wonderland.

Remember, we are the grand-daughters of the witches they couldn't *burn.

The sunshine dabbles on my skin.

Pale with wistfulness. It somehow reminds me of bitten back lips and swallowed words. The sharp edges of each letter paper cut there and here.

I stay a little longer, motionless, in this hazy light.

I'll come back alive.
I will be living once more.
Just give me a pinch of time.
That will do.

Didn't you know I kept a few smiles in my pockets?
Lined against tissues with lipstick prints on them.

A smirk hanged off his lips as if it was a semi-colon.
;
Half-opened lips as if in midsentence, when in fact he has said nothing.

And all this time,
his eyes was on you.

And so, they ran as far as 7 year old muscles would let.

Cutting across the softened hues of green and pinks on the end of a day.

Where skinned knees were kissed with the warm promise that the smarting pain would be gone.

Pinkys said shy hellos under bed-sheet tents,
their hair haloed by the sunshine
Eyes brighter, and cheeks crimson and freckled,

all ready to take on the
great big world.

He had a heartbeat like a hummingbird.

You forgot to pull out the blunt knife you put in her left shoulder-blade.

She's not all sharp edges, rusted metal & stale blood that you hoped for.
She's all more than that.
She is *alive.

You kind of make my cheekbones hurt
from
all that midnight laughter
and
the little rhapsodic notes escaping
from
my
lips.

Such
a
lovely
hurt
has
never
tiptoed, danced
&
flicked
across
my
chest.

Could you fill my sunday mornings
with little kisses on the nose
between yawns
&
let sleep dance across our eyelids
just for a little

while
more
?

These bare walls whose peeling paint once felt the tremors, dips, quivers in your voice.

As my numb eyes and tired eyelids stare at them, they look
awfully lonely.

And this lull of loneliness seeps into these what I thought were  impervious pieces of myself.

Who knew lonely itself
could have such a
presence
in
the
e m p t y spaces of my chest & mind.

I stand here with winter-bitten
fingers & bare ankles..

I never needed much
when you were aways just a quickened heartbeat away from my own.

you tend to realise several things.

1.  Infatuation and love affairs with phones.

2. Everything and everyone is a variable.
The probability of being on this lonely carriage again as that stranger with 5'o clock stubble sitting across you is infinitesimal.

So, when you find a constant, that is when things get interesting.

Uninterrupted eye contact.
The same dated train tickets stuffed deep into pockets.

3. All these people. All these faces.
I think I am getting to know love.

Blame is a highly, highly strange thing.
Latching onto anything, it sews itself into the weak, the strong, the inbetweeners.

{Like fire-flies to light. Vice-versa. }

Simply because the world needs a bad guy.

In the same way, we need good hearts.

Her eyes were like the mirror reflections of all the cities he
wished
to
see.

He want to travel to all of them.
Every single street-light or star light
for that matter,
to
kiss
his skin.

Her lips & little smile creases held
the lines and angles
that
were
co-ordinates to
those
unspoken
wishes.

Those crimson cheeks were colours that reminded him of those days of balmy summer.
Rhapsodic notes of laughter finishing the hum of warmth.

Her words were undoubtedly the ones he traces on his wrists when skies are grey and black.

Her fingertips and hands gently reminded him
of

*g                    
                     r                            
                                             a                                      
                   v
                                     i      
                                      t
                                                  y.

Messy hair,
crinkled sheets,
it was a rough night of sleep.

On some days, I write bolder, thicker & harder, just to prove not everything is empty and blank.

And that my words are just as heavy and all raw edges like *yours.

Chance, a wise man's wizened lips would say it is the one terrible thing,
a slightly wide-eyed, a little dreamer of yet another wise man said

"This lovely celestial thing that lives in the pockets of those shy hopefuls.
Who are all pressed lips, closed hands.
It is all those cold e m p t y spaces
within
your warm soul
no-one has
quite
lived in."

That stranger had cheeks stained by berries & a summer's day.

The rueful ache of time
kissing
goodbye
to
our everywhere
is
rather bittersweet.

The kind of burnt-black and acrid taste of burnt toast.
Strange enough,
it is also
the kind of sweet like
honey and brown sugar
dotting
the centre of it.

We have to wither and die a little.

Prune, snip off all the bad, no-good things.

Even the parts that grew another home in your veins and bloomed roses around your ribcage.

Thing is, it is a place you need not visit anymore.

Burn down all the empty houses
with
light-bulbs still on & unlocked doors.

You need not wait.

From the ashes and bones,

there, you're *blooming.

I miss the cookie crumbs that fell from your lips and then dotting the wooden table.

It drove me
crazy-insane.

Thing is, it was good crazy.
The one where undiluted happiness bubbles into your chest.

Inexplicably lighting up places you thought the light switches
were
terribly
br ok            
                       en.

Now,
I am
slowly and surely
losing it.

Wit by wit, memory by moment(s).

Let gravity do its damage.

I am so in love.

I draw love-hearts within love-hearts.

Now, let me just hide my crimson cheeks and the flickers of shyness behind those
white,
white covers.

My heart has been
d,
since your eyes met mine.
i
The little gaps punctuating the Z's are
filled by the little crease line that gently brackets your mouth right before you smile,
z
the way your eyes flickers in amusement; it's like a dozen of stars winking at me.
The words you speak from those lips flit recklessly in between.
z
It's the tiniest of winks that causes my heart to stutter a little.

Just a little, ok-ay, sweet-heart?
Don't flatter yourself.
y
It's that inexplicable yet silence that does not quite feel like silence.

Should there ever be a backward twirling of the clock gears, a paisley maze of metal and magic to occur,

every tear will trace back to its watery scars.
Even the ropes shackling hearts will fray,
shackles broken.
Bits and crumbs of dim memories become whole again.
Just as sweet.
And perhaps, the bad will seep back in.
The dead will open their eyes again.
Roughly stiched in wounds so long ago, where even the owner has forgotten to hem back up the stiches to the surface.
The white cotton thread would have never met the needle's eye.
A baby's nursery room may gather more dust than expected.