it is baffling that after
a series of unfortunate/emotional/fulfilling events that
someone would ask to use
one word to describe how
                                              you feel
                                              the day was.


my teacher once told me to
cut down on my sentences because
apparently ‘shut up!’ was more
effective than ‘shut up you are
very noisy and disturbing me.’


"but," i protested, "i am a long-distance runner.
my periods end far past the 400m mark.
besides my ‘and’s are your punctuation equivalent and
my full stop your ‘the end’ because i
can’t stop won’t stop not when my chest
is so full of air and lead and
pounds like a mad man locked up
not when there are tyre marks and red lights be ******
not when dots and curves and dashes feel like moving day
as though you can pack feelings into neat spaces.”


how i feel
         my day is
is not an entity to fulfill your collection of
singular adjectives because no
one word explains the comfort of a
dear friend in a day with
too many questions and far too few answers
because the dictionary cannot match being sad and angry
for being sad and annoyed for being angry for being sad.
so know that when i say ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘reflective’
they are poor substitutes for all the
nouns and prepositions i force back down.

i.
in an attempt to encourage selflessness, they say:
"actions speak louder than words."
actions save others but words save ourselves.
we all have an irrational desire to rescue people
but sometimes it’s ourselves that need salvation.

ii.
there are so many ways to be brave
and even more to break a heart.
i don’t know how but you managed
to accomplish them all.

iii.
it takes only a height of 3cm of water to drown
so when our children play in the shallow pool,
we never let them out of sight
but we forget that we are 60 percent water
and more people have drowned in this body
without anyone ever knowing.

iv.
if Man is measured in degrees of light
some would be the greyest of grey
because no one can tell where their
light begins and where their shadow ends.

v.
someone once asked me when did i first realise
that life was short. 10 minutes past midnight
on a March morning, when i found out that
no one could ever possibly love you enough
for you to stay
(yourself included).

thank you for thinking so
highly of me but i think
you are mistaken.

that girl you see, she is
intelligent, capable, ambitious,
pretty **** impressive all round.

nope,
not me.

so please dim that
expectation in your eyes -
it hurts mine.

i am not a cube, nor
any shape you can name; i
would not fit in your fancy box
with your fancy label
to be shipped off
to your fancy institution.

history would tell you that
i am quite the rebel but
i have paved my own way.

do not yank me down
the road as another
of your success stories.

i will not budge.

not an inch.