perhaps this is how a heart unravels;
          like a pearl embedded within a ball of string
while you slowly unravel each layer
          until the inside of your heart is undone
only to be remade again—
          ***** laundry, they used to call it;
when something you once loved became shameful,
          like the very first time the colour red became a crime
no longer a colour of love and passion
          but a reminder of the way roses can bite
and how from then on every memory and moment was
          clouded by that anger, that desire
to remake something completely-
          yet it’s all reminiscent of the time
I faced everything, peeled pushed dug everything up
          all the ugly roots the capillaries
until my heart was revealed, like a scarred jewel
          waiting to be understood;
an old woman once told me that when
          bad things occur it means that something
brilliant will soon accompany it;
          that just like that, the moon can unwind itself
until it shows both the dark and
          the light at once—
for just like the heart
           it’s remade itself time
after time
           after time.

I’ve lived in a thousand lives,
seen a thousand faces;
I’ve walked the shoes of fairies,
carried adrift by silk strewn laces.

I’ve kissed a thousand suns,
beguiled a thousand moons;
I’ve danced on the arms of Queens,
crown jewels shimmering in the afternoon.

I’ve seen a thousand worlds,
yet yearn for a thousand more;
for it is these stories that bind my soul
to the living world beneath my door.

You who stirred the words into my soul,
Brought them to life, animated them
With allegory and wit.
As if the Nine Muses had sung to my ear,
And Calliope herself had donned me
With the poems she'd once writ.

Or Sappho of ******, among secretive violets,
Absorbed by the lyre, she pens to revive it;
Not the song, or the tune,
But the calm way the song moved
The violets across the field-
This inspiration, she could wield.

Don't you see now, how it's not poetry the poet will choose?
For every poem the poet pens one shall require an equal Muse.

Spell your name,

I want to see each letter,

as they brush against the paper

a spell cast in ink,

you’ve enchanted me so

that I savour even that magic.

Stung by the bee, wild in what I thought was love
my heart saturated in venom, oozing out fruitless hopes
of keeping you close—despite the burning poison—
I tried to fight for your love
like love was meant to be a conquest,
a battle for your cold affection
and not a sanctuary.

Once again
I am captured
Struck by the rose,
enraptured by the thorn.

I see your reflection in
ivory paper,
and the crown of your sweet head
like a blanket of fallen snow.

Does it matter, I wonder,
if you were truly alive or truly living?
For in these pages I can see your image
as truly as if it were a branding in my head.

The gentle ***** of your shoulders,
the dark and twisted curls-
Now see, you begin to see her too-
the small & delicate hands,
with crooked ring fingers,
the intuitive eyes.

And perhaps if I call Aphrodite,
down from the sea foam
and have her fair lips kiss these words,
I can have you materialize in my breath
and echo into my arms,
a statue no more.

Or perhaps I will lie a fool
my thumbs and forefingers obscured by ink
and your skin that of clay
detached and resolute.

I hold you ever so close, to hear your heartbeat
against the hollow that is my own.

With the shutters closed and your eyes bright
in the darkness that encloses us securely,
I tell you in a whisper about my first heartbreak.

How did it go? you ask and stroke my hip;
I was a flower, I tell her, and my lover left me unwatered
to the extent that my once-pink blossoms became gray,
and the head drooped as if pinned down—

Her hand stops on my knee.
So,
why did you keep loving her?

—Because, even as I withered, I kept staring at the sky,
memorizing every drop of rain that fell, hoping it would shower.

You don’t fear love now?

I pull her in, warm against my chest, my aphrodite.
No, my love, for when I found you, it was like an April storm.

Oh, Ophelia,
sweet cherub
face, bathed
in moonlight,
doe eyes filled
                with woe:

You are a figure
of my affliction,
falling softly at
midnight, a
delicate dis-
position, fragile
                as soft snow,

a garden you
invite me to,
opulent trees of
treason, you
are the siren’s
call at dusk,
pulling me away
from the

                garden
                of
                eden.

What I feel for you

rewrites the meaning of desire;

I long for your touch like I'm the leaf

awaiting the soft morning dew or the sand

for the ocean waves.

When you touch my body

my heart is rewritten;

encoded with your name, again and again,

until your name is the only one it knows.


What I feel for you

rewrites the meaning of desire.

Her figure in my bed
relaxes, half obscured by silk sheets;
there’s a sweetness to her uncovered form,
not in a way that is ****** or arousing,
but for how it speaks of comfort in my presence
like we are so adapted to each other
that nothing is strange or foreign to us—
even the vulnerability of nakedness.

And like a goddess, she pulls me in to her chest,
a whisper of soft and beautiful flesh;
there, I imagine us as once born from the ocean,
with pearl strewn hearts and wanton eyes,
as goddess meets goddess among seafoam and silk.

A new page turns:
it’s midnight
and all I see are dreams and glimpses of her,
the ink from her snake tattoo
dark on her wrist like a passing shadow,
lean fingers layered with gemstone rings,
jade feline eyes swallow me and spit me out.

I want to pull you in,
and trace the ink written on your skin.
It feels like stories to me,
pages and pages of words
transcribed along the flesh of Aphrodite.
And, oh, to touch with is untouchable—
the more I long for you, the more the venom
of longing seeps into my untouched heart.

Gently, I wake from your side.

I love your serene face on the pillow,

The soft, fluttering eyelashes on cheeks,

The strong, resting hands tucked underneath.

But I won’t kiss you, or touch you for

I don’t wish to disturb your dreaming,

So, I watch, and I smile up at the light.

It happens every morning, this feeling,

and I think just isn’t she the sweetest human?

I taste wine on your lips as we kiss
and make love—my heart is heady
—drunk on you and the sweet drink
that incinerates our maddened lips
and pulls me closer to your trembling.
Hours pass in a dusk darkened chamber,
my mind coated in the two syllables of your name:
Are you still drunk, my love?
Only on you.
Afterwards, when we lay intertwined,
I forget the separation of our two bodies
and imagine our souls interlocked
like the wing of a moth against a flame.

1
I’ve seen many goddesses born
but none as finespun as you, my Venus:
for if
existing were an art form, you would be the moon
enlightening me in all her silver beadwork and mystique.

2
At night, I see my beloved again
and find her body captured by the seafoam:
it’s only a reflection,
a silver phantasm dancing on the ghastly waves,
but I adore the sheen of her face in the sea.

3
I’ve seen many goddesses consumed
by the very passion that I feel for your soul:
for the moon
is only the shadow of her full being,
and yet I still drown myself in her light.

It’s a January night:
we are walking down windswept streets
with windswept hair adorned with white jewels,
carried into the night as if spellbound;
so, what do I do when you tuck my hand in
the crook of your arm? I walk with you that way,
in the dark of the forest at midnight, a coffee in
my right hand and my left tangled with you.

We throw our coffees into the night, and laugh;
what a terrible thing to do! — the poor forest! —
but there’s a brief high when we realize no one else
is awake but us in this lonely forest, no one to yell,
no one to criticize how I press my lips in the crook of
your neck and whisper sweet promises in your reddened ear
in the deep shadow of an oak tree crystalized by snow.

For a small infinity, we carry on walking, saying nothing,
the deep silence of the midnight forest swallowing us whole.
Windswept, two small universes exist in our minds;
yet, in these two universes the same song is imagined
again and again, without the other knowing—if only we knew
then that our love was reflective—if only we knew then:

How beautiful you were that January night,
windswept like the snow.

I: WITCHLIGHT


That vividness—
     witch light in pearl eyes;
     I long to raise my ear to you
     for you gleam like a shell,
     your hollowness holding
     a delicate song, billowing
     out like a spell of sand.

I loved her so,
she who fell for me
with the wild grace of a falling leaf
captured by autumn winds.
I loved her wildness
and felt that,
as long as I chased her,
I would remain exhilarated.
Chase I did, until my legs grew heavy
and it was she who fell
to the ground,
her brittle stem exhausted,
crumbling in my hand.
Who knew that I was the wind—
all along?