When all is gone,
that matters now,
one last poem,
survives somehow.
And so you read,
and so it goes,
explaining this,
in rhyme or prose;
My dear sweet love,
I love you still,
with all my heart,
I always will.

I burnt down the metal cage
that confined me

I have broken up with God
and I am blossoming

without his hand pushing
my head down

I eat blackberries straight from
the bush

tasting the dirt where they grew
the tightest bud bursting

into fruit that nurtures me
that sustains me

I am Godless and cageless
I am a woman of

flames, starting fires
wherever I go

burning, burning, turning
into ash

into the very dirt I courted
with my purple stained

lips

I'm afraid of dying alone.
I'm afraid of how I'm always the one
Who reaches out to loved ones first.
Like they're more comfortable apart from me
Than I am from them.
And it becomes a chore, a conscious decision
To not obsess over how long it's been since we've spoken,
And if it means they don't like me or they're just busy.
I'm terrified of everything shortening my life span
Or the quality of the time I have left.
How severely I'm impacted by my own wilting body
And how many goals it means will be left unticked.
Sometimes when it's night, and the world is covered in silence,
I wish to myself that I'd never existed.
Such a waste to be given life and to spend it all
On illness, misery and loneliness.
I'm scared of dying alone,
But I'm more scared of living alone.
And I am living alone.

I was honing my voice
he was building his muscles
to impress our common interest.

Whenever she was at the roof
he was seen doing squats and push-ups
I was heard singing love songs
taking the notes to that high scale
where my voice invariably cracked
and his bones creaked with exercises.

The three roofs became one battlefield
where two warriors would rather die fighting
than give up the princess to the other.

One day she would smile at me
when I would extend the limit of my voice
the repertory of my vocal talent
but for reasons best known to her
the very next day she would feign
I wasn't existing on the roof
and it was all muscles her eyes got stuck into.

Then she stopped coming to the roof.

The two warriors had only each other as company
the days were never the same
for she was married off to have new interest
and having lost the race for common interest
he started singing mournful songs
and I decided it was time
to give voice to my muscles.

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.