Traffic speeds past
People go slow.
Days are long
Nights are short.
Silence is deep
People are shallow.
Love is a need
Like water and air.
Food interrupts
A nice interruption.
Dolls for girls
Guns for boys.
Boys now men
Girls now mothers.
A Mothers tears flow faster than traffic
For the boy with a plastic gun, now a dead man,
a dead soldier.

I am a lonely narcissist,
In a fit, in a struggle,
And straining to exist.

The almonds are sugared,
The potatoes: starched.
A hipster-dream
Of third-world colours,
Stretched out on my back,
And lamenting the distance of stars.

Bumper caravans of **** and cherry cola vacations;
They fill my mind in the coming of summer.
There’s beer bottled tears
And eyes left bloodshot,
In this fevered remission
To a life we forgot.

But change, is change, is change;
I’m listening to jazz and not heavy guitar,
And my teenage lover is a sacrificed cathedral
In the laying down of all arms.

Still, I’m looking to stay sober
For a week or so, or more.
But another day, year or era to come;
For now I’ll just get up and off the floor.

I’m self-obsessed but devoid of self,
In a rigid flow of car window reflections;
A body check to see if my shadow still exists.

How much does a shadow weigh?
But first: where can you get me some blow?
You see, I need to sharpen up my ambition,
To thaw out in the frozen snow.

It can’t be long, old friend,
Before one of us succumbs to addiction.
A ****** jaw, or a healer’s mouth;
Well, I guess that either can offer
A place for us to mend.

I think I see my life now.
Its purple light is cast off in the distance.
I am coming off chemo
For a couple weeks more,
I am combing the meadows,
And I am asking for more.

The heart, full of hatred
Hardened with tarred emotions
It does not beat with rhythm of Love
Discolored beyond recognition
Pumping thick fluid of crass
Across all veins in the body
Paralyzing the mind and the limbs
Finally, hatred suffocates
Unable to breathe the fresh hope
As the body is full of vicious hatred
Asphyxiating the last breath of hope
To revive the chances of Love again
Hatred wins, and the soul, succumbs**



© Amitav (Radiance)

On the floor of the river styx, frogs burrowing peer over muck duvets to watch me press like a violet between the cookbook pages of the water and the land. I went overboard-

I am addicted to the darkness between worlds.

Somewhere above me, I see the moon. She doesn’t try to warn me, she doesn’t bother reminding me that I can’t breathe. Heavy currents like snakes blur her face into fractured crystal tears that wash me over with sweet exasperation.

Sedated by the salt toward the other side, where the ferryman flips my coin and hums a tune without words about all rivers rushing toward the sea.

He doesn’t ask me why I chose this route, just grins a toothless grin
And winks
And tosses my coin into the water
without

So much

As a wish.

I love to watch you sing in your car.

The way you play invisible pianos and guitars.
The way you scream out all your favorite lines.
The way your face tells the story of the music.

I love to watch our hands.

When they are interlocked and unbreakable.
When they search for one another constantly.
When they run over each others bones.
When they pull our bodies closer together.

I love to watch us.

Becoming one.
Becoming something more.
Becoming better than before.

And when you reach for me in the dark of your car, singing out the words of one of our songs, just to find me missing.

Know that I am saturated in the lyrics you scream, and the fingerprints on your window.

(i.r)