There’s a stage in a relationship when you know that it’s dying and it’s when you breathe out when they leave the room. You know you’ve stopped being the ideal they kissed on a mountaintop when they forget to ask how your day was or would you like a tea. When they no longer touch you with curiosity you will know for sure that the relationship is dying and that is when you start to die too. It happens slowly, like most irreparable erosion. First you don’t get out of bed for 3 days because you can’t imagine what it’s like to not live inside each other, then you travel the world arranging big dreams of a future together by whispering incantations into the wind about your magnificent love. You get back home with exotic adventures trailing behind you and set up a house in a favourite city. You buy a dog together and you can’t stop singing from roof tops. You go out to movies on Tuesdays and have Sunday breakfast in cramped trendy cafes together and become a regular couple at the local Thai hot spot at Saturday dinner time. Just when you think that your joy has reached it’s zenith, you create a whole lot of trophies from that love bond and give them a life-force and names. The thing is, those mini humans can’t imagine living without you either. It gets crowded in your heart chambers. Suddenly you start to compartmentalise your feelings for all these people that are suddenly tied to you because of that double-edged sword called love.

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

i will wade out
                        till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
                                       Alive
                                                 with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
                                       in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
                                            Will i complete the mystery
                                            of my flesh
I will rise
               After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
             And set my teeth in the silver of the moon