These days, you are far away
I look to you and I am sure
There isn’t a reason left to stay,
Be it hope or fear, you do not stir.
I reach out into the open air
Only to feel it sizzle and tear
Filled with electric connections
My heart can no longer bear.
May 4, 2014
May 4, 2014 at 12:11 PM UTC
Distance has a particular way of hurting:
It begins slowly, and is self-contained.
Because our mothers would often speak about Love,
and how everything falls helpless in Love,
Distance becomes a housebroken dog.
It is powerless, and whilst I love, I am powerful.
On Sunday, our fathers would teach us to put our faith in things unseen,
and so we grow confident and complacent.
Just when you think you’ve understood it,
It sinks its teeth in hard and deep.
An idealist tries to make it out light and easy
They will often write poems about finding
ideal love in the real world.
But I will write about knowing
real love misplaced in an ideal world.
It’s a world where comfort could come in binary files
filled with digital empathy and memories.
Where typed words and numbers that form
black and white promises could replace
the real and organic voice of reassurance.
Where wires between my webcams and your headsets
could entangle themselves in ways our fingers
used to be intertwined.
Where waiting for an email meant as much as
waiting for you to return home to me.
Where the strategic positioning of your punctuation marks
could transform these passive symbols
into active symbols of love and concern:
A comma, like a shared pause for when our eyes meet
Exclamation marks for when we wave to each other from across the street,
or as a passionate gesture from underneath these sheets.
A question mark for when you’re sick and I am by your bed
Worried, because you wouldn’t eat.
A semicolon for when we argue,
and a full stop for when we finally give in.
A parenthesis for containing moments of vulnerability
that only seem to leak out late at night.
You won’t know it but,
I dream mostly of an online conversation,
filled with time stamps that affirm your presence.
If I’m lucky, I will find an ellipsis
Small creatures of continuity with
heads heavy with hesitation.
…
And - if I’m really lucky,
I’d undo those black buttons of suspense
and see you once more.
May 4, 2014
May 4, 2014 at 10:20 AM UTC
Perhaps we were both waiting
for words to come from the speechless;
with our hands outstretched, feeling
for some infinite nebula we called love.
I liked the way you saw form in the formless,
a dreamer from the sleeping,
and the ghost from the living
(But the real ghosts and dreamers were us)
Sea-sorrow would sink our ships of wander-lust
And we'd rebuild with planks of heartache;
new sails of empathy and a hull big enough
for everything else in between
Some moments were better than others,
Some forgettable, others memorable
your lips, my eyes, your skin, my skies;
the cavities of silence in our conversations.
I remember, when you tried to blink away the sea-change
Rubbing waves of apathy, so endless
and unrelenting, from your face
Watching you fight the tempest moved me
and my lungs took in so much sin
It made my bones ache with guilt;
the fire of my desires, the prison of my soul.
Perhaps we were both waiting
for the proverbial hand, that infinite warmth,
to reach down from the heavens.
The hand that moulded us;
the hand we slighted for love.
Apr 27, 2014
Apr 27, 2014 at 3:07 PM UTC