Like soap, your poetry cleanses my soul.
On paper, I'm filthy from your touch,
and your honey is sticky on my fingers.
But, your words and your laugh are a spring
that douses me in bubbles and gold.
I sip from your tears and sweat,
and youth revitalizes my skin and bones.
You are an oil that enriches
and cannot be rinsed away with water.
You are the dirt that gets under by fingernails
and houses the seeds of a hundred flowers.

The shovel is in the same place I always leave it
Numbly I think to myself of the caked grime that’ll require a shower
as I perform a stand up routine for the nth time
Twigs crack under my boots

How often do I come here?

The number is unclear
and dirt pile grows

A burning cold settles over me like fog

I dig a little faster

I always have to end up in these situations, don't I?

It’s shallow, barely enough to work,
but then again they all are
“Lift with your knees, not your back”
I’ll have to thank whoever told me that later
A resounding grunt echoes throughout,
and I finish the job
The surrounding ground is ridden with raised mounds

How many again?

One… two… three… four…
Too many others I don’t have the time to count

I do, I just don't want to
Not after last time

Turning on my heel, I walk away
leaving the bodies I bury to rot at the crevices of my mind

Tight in my grip
I feel your nails slip
Digging deep
Digging hard
She says to me
He left me a card

For you, on whose
Oil painted skin the stars did sleep
For you again,
Who wept, wept in vain

I’d tie a butterfly to the unwavering sky
If only as a frail worm to
lure the fish
But did we not swear to leave the winged
alone?

Yet, there they are
Causing a reckless havoc
Trying to tear open the blue
And I’d shoot them down
But the ground is ours you see

Wounded and bleeding
The dying, as a fish, squirms
A broken spear pinning him in place

And I will keep on burning this dirt
To bricks
One betrothed to other
With cement,
Your own strange creation
The one you pour out your flutes
And pluck out them strings
Like fresh born weeds
dried and crushed

Songs upon songs
We set free up the yonder

But here is a bubble that will not be butchered
Like our sacrificial blooms
Ripened and fat,
This untouched pomegranate
Ravages itself

Long did our labor weave tales out ruin
To build us a shell
Within which we now reside

Unhatched

How do we do? It is pretty
A sight
The sky chokes on dirt and dirt
Drowns in the blue
Time, a trapped moth, flutters about
It collides around in its blind frenzy
And will not settle

I keep on
Painting our dry clouds
Birds still peck at gleaming stars
And you
You live, live in vain

Dirt
         You've turned into dirt.

Twisted away in fragile positions,
You've turned into dirt.
          How does it feel to be this vulnerable?

To be plucked from your home, and bought with dirt to be sold off to the husband who forgot his wife's birthday?

To be called 'beautiful', only to be left rotting away?
To sit beside a bed of 'beautiful' red roses, who think they'll be safe forever. To know they'll turn into you, you who has moulded into dirt.

These eyes fall on you now,
   they feel guilt,
      they feel remorse,
(they feel happy?)
          they feel like a murderer.

They run to drench you with water.

                           The poor white tulips,
                                              and the poor pink roses
                     will you be fixed from this phase of dirt?