We rocked you to sleep under
cushions of burnt frankincense,
your rosemary plum lips glowing
beneath the glass shutter,
as our warm, fluttering fingers
smoothed the polished edges of your velvet mahogany.
Odes of voices,
soft as the powdery scent of dried roses,
were wordlessly strung into
half-convinced rhapsodies of "but it was painless",
and as if from the fragmented lens of an abstract camera,
the pews streamed in, black and white, woven hushes,
broken ***** sighs,
as we poured through glazed photos of your enraptured memory lanes,
how you burst through black winter days like a firecracker,
your young blood
blossoming as a scarlet primrose
upon alabaster.
Our preacher (who once prayed for my cat which
then died and
said it was God's plan)
professes of your rapturous gaiety in the angels' hideaways,
but my aunt stopped preparing family meals without a husband,
and your wet sapphire eyes,
like the violet blankets of daffodil pods,
only glisten at us from shrouded, opalescent moons,
stray and far,
transfiguring into vacant mirrors,
shaded from reach.

You disappear,
one day at a time,
like the fainting trail
of a shooting star,
and you look at me,
like the cold sky after
a firework show.

My dear,
why do you float away
like a drifting balloon
to a faraway land,
so deep,

and glaze at me
with blank eyes
like the empty television screen;

becoming just another soul,
I cannot meet?

Your lips move,
like the fluttering wing
of a butterfly,
but they part to
babble new syllables,
only you understand,

and we teach you
the colours of a rainbow,
the names of fruits,
or fishes,
knowing they don't matter,
for our voices are
simply words,
spoken underwater,
and our faces become
the edges of a cloud,
or the faded ink
of an old newspaper.

You live in a fishbowl,
where you bob along,
like a sail in a
quiet river,
and once in a while,
you wonder how the windows
shut themselves,
or why the kettle whistled
when nothing was boiling in it.
You told me then,
it's strange,
how funny this world is.

I remember,
my mother kissing
your forehead,
your skin like wax,
as white as bone;
and you ask
in a voice
like the shuffle of a blanket,
if grandpa
will be coming home,
for dinner,
tonight.

When I slip into my lingerie
It means I am partially ready
But not to have my womanhood plucked open
For that would involve
The subliminal **** of
The underside of my skin
I do not want to be deflowered
Lest the festering corpses in my closet
Are expulsed to be
Too varnished,
Too synthetic,
But I want
Your head to shyly probe within the
Musky walls of my inner galaxy
While I embrace the
Tendons of my muscles
Yawned open like the convulsing lips
Of an exposed fish
Before it dies

I wanted to show the secretarial assistant
the mashup, parody skit of the grumpy cat snoring under a
lampshade
but resisted for the fear she might think me strange
I am very lonely
Yesterday the girl in my team replied my email
with gnawing, jagged words that tapped on my skull
about how my prep materials belong to the basement
shelves of a blank, barren attic
and how the world would be a useful place
only without me
in barbed, lofty italics
that slickly slices open my skin
Perhaps she is correct
for my social life is the bluntest thumbtack in a drawer
like a black hole ******* me into the hollowness at the pit of
my stomach
I sometimes say
"I want to change the world"
but really, if words could ****,
all I want is to write poems all day
with my face a moving canvas for animated poems
like razors, stabbing into her black-widow lips
or a hero slamming his fist
handsomely into the villain's chest
as she mouths "you're no good",
once again.

How strangely coincidental,
it is, how nothing inspires you
with age,
that a shy, withered leaf parting sedentary waters,
is dewy-eyed dead yet unconsciously graceful;
such profanities of nature,
no longer expands your soul
like a burgeoning bubble which whisks you to write
carelessly-composed poetry over forgotten dinner plates....
it's a tragic symphony of desperate piano keys,
a blurring condition of blacks and whites,
age, and nothing but overused, age, is.
And so on lonely train journeys,
you craft a smattering of shorthand poems,
about how crackled, aged people on trains only have capacities
for whimsical jokes,
and nothing but dear,
dear whimsicality as life's
gilded philosophy,
when their bodies are no longer covered with
magic leaflets of hand-strung poetry,
for they are barren,
and if gods were gods of stanzaic hymns,
they'd open bloodless wombs of literary nymphs,
or so boldly believed,
the aged once-artist say.

Your lips bleed
like the scarlet syrup of a
dark passion fondue;
two curly lines of red
peeking from behind
your hallowed veil,
and you,
you lay them upon
my neck,
my very body you hail
as your own.
This then, is like
a red petal falling on
alabaster
or a rose stained in blood
as I pull you closer to me
and together,
we drown in a pool of
crimson wine
you anoint
my lips with.
The taste of you
is like the tip of a sword
dipped in sparkling liquorice;
and our ******* becomes
the hypnotism
my tongue
slickly wrap around,
or perhaps,
the ****** of this
eyeless world.
We’re just like
diamonds sleeping on their
velvet cushions,
or illuminating puppets
showing the way.
Love, may you claim me,
till death do us part.

My best friend
clutched my fingers like an
oyster on its pink, luscious flesh,
and kissed me
once on each cheek,
in the manner of a ship forcing the sea apart when against the wind,
then shoved me excitedly to her father’s coffin,
and begun crooning to him how I’ve been a good girl,
and how my college grades were very exceptional,
with an air of a flighty tea-party mutual introduction
before giggling with the
lost, hollow smile of a drunkard.
In the kitchen,
her youngest brother
absently-mindedly whipped up a feast of
grainy meatballs,
their father’s favourite dish, he carefully explains,
with murky crow-claws etched beneath his peach-pink eyes
and a tipsy smile that reminded me of barbed wires,
before placing a bowl on the coffin
as if forcing his father to eat,
while the preacher majestically proclaimed outside,
with the red, jagged glare of the funeral lights,
about how it is God’s will to bring him,
to a better place.