The urge to disappear
when your tears refuse to fall
yet your smile fades slowly.
hopeful eyes, drowning in silence,
held back by unspoken pain.
when your voice stays locked behind the cage-
and you realise...
This hurts more than any sword could ever **** you

Grey clouds crack open, weeping angels,
rain cascades, a liquid broom
washing earth's filth and sin.
The smell? Enigmatic—spring's embodiment,
summer evening's bold scent.
Drops like strings, smacking,
a hundred clapping hands under a faucet.
The wind keeps pace, whooshing,
shaking excess from leaves.
Tires glide on wet slick,
cars pass like crashing waves.

Peaceful, serene, innocent, refreshing.
Cold strings, exploding like macro water grenades,
rejuvenate skin.
A wonder to stare at, always.
Whether three, experiencing first cognizance,
or thirty-one, marveling.
Rain, a majestic measure of universal peace
in a world of chaos and noise.
Chaotic itself, like a jazz band drumming,
wind wailing past windows—
yet so serene.

Still, rain brings annoyance.
Bones ache, joints lock and creak,
and a youthful strut turns rusty tin-man waltz.
But its mysticism deafens pain
and frees the mind to fly.
Clarity, a rare enigma,
tickles skin raises arm hairs,
kisses lips with reality,
appearing ****, flirting with prismatic curves—
often ignored, and unnoticed.
Euphoria is splendidly remiss.

So easy to catalog memories,
reflect in life's mirror,
and determine what needs changing.
Everything changes with time.

Life, a garden.
We inherit seeds of knowledge,
plant interesting parts.
Love and sadness water, shine on plants
bearing flowers we call friends:
tulips, lilacs, dangerous roses.
Unique: blue, orange, red, white, pink.
Some sweet, some foul.
Each one is unique.
Flowers grow wild and wilt on vines.
Some aren't flowers, but weeds,
diseasing what they touch, like death.
Covered in insects, eroding beauty.
As a gardener, you decide:
anarchic disarray?
Or grab shears, and prune ugliness.
Friends who matter won't let your soul wilt.
Yes, rainfall brings such clarity.

But clarity's bubbles are superficial.
Easily burst, window closing, smog reconfiguring.
A bowling ball rolls across the sky and strikes pins—
a lucky strike.
Tree branches of light shoots extend,
lasts a second, and seems slower.
Adrenaline rushes, heart pounds like a drum.
Seconds pass, another strike, another flash.
A storm had come...
and it would pass.

There was once a child
born beneath the sign
of unburial.

She carried too much—
not in arms
but in tethered memory.
Things with no names,
only weights.

A cracked watch
that ticked in reverse.
A button from a coat
that no one had worn
in three generations.

A feather
from a bird
dreamt once
by her grandmother,
never seen again.

She believed—
as those marked by absence do—
that keeping meant remembering,
and remembering meant
nothing would vanish.

Others crossed her path,
offered to help unfasten the straps.
She refused.
They did not know
which talismans bled
and which only looked like wounds.

So she walked.
Through salt seasons,
through bone-rattling frost,
through forests with no floor
and skies that never asked her name.

The bag grew heavier.
She grew cleverer.
Silent.

And then—
on a day that wasn’t special,
under a sun that wasn’t kind—
she set it down.
Not as surrender.
As an experiment.

The earth did not crack.
The ghosts did not scatter.
Her shadow did not abandon her.

She sifted the contents.
Some were dust.
Some were still singing.
Some curled away like dried petals
and begged to be left behind.

She took a key.
She took the bell.
She left the rest
for the moss.

She walked on.

Not lighter, exactly—
but less governed
by the shape
of her grief.

I do not know your name—
only your silhouette
etched in the echo of things I was not given.
Your absence was my alphabet.
I spelled every woman with your ghost.


They loved me.
But I loved you through them.
Your hands behind their voices.
Your eyes haunting their praise.
They were flesh, and I was kneeling.


I made gods of strangers.
I made homes of hunger.


Mother—not mother.
Lover—not lover.
I could not hold the difference.
They all became symbols
and I became a shrinekeeper,
tending lies with tenderness.


Forgive me,
those I touched but never saw.
I was trying to reach through you
and forgot you were not them.
And they were not you.
None of you asked for this altar.


I am dismantling the myth.
I am returning the light.

Bigotedly, I held the same view,
Pacing a tank domestic and half-full
As the airbag now sprung from the hemisphere of my lungs,
Stone-hard and hysteric in the cradle of your palms.

There is romance found in ingratiation – chaste doilies suffering implicitly beneath the burden of unclean bowls. Here’s one, illuminated as a pinball machine when you rattle that dung-brown stain about its shrivelled axis. Above its shaky pupil, a cataract of steam squirms about in unalarming routine.

So many nights I adulterated merely for lack of better days were given credence by the gimpy sun, turned away with its blouse undone, and ****** back to the chalkboard. Somewhere along the past few days I must have become bedridden, indentured to prickly sponge baths by that ****** tongue.

How I’d like to stay sedated now – another day of inoculation becoming an alibi for the adhesion of this numbness inducted to the soft-boiled meat of my temples, combing out my shoulder blades, running down my legs.

Stupidly I almost feel a sense of superiority in not learning any faces among the indiscrete convoys of whitish heads popping in now and then, with the subordinate arousal of stiff knuckles, or other things compressed inward by their own come-hither fervor.

“You talk too much, you worry me to death…”

ribbons of rain
curtain across the pond

in a chorus of stones
touch tapping the surface

unspooling in ribs of circles
within the trees

time collects in rings
roots seek the deepest mysteries

at the water’s edge
a heron

that ever seeing eye
stands searching for the shadows of fish

in a flash
its beak trades life for life


empty yourself         of this world
empty yourself         into this world


you will be                warmed & welcomed
you will be                feathered lightly along

I’ll meet you again
Somewhere between now and then
When the marigolds have long died
Where tears have finally dried
How long, we won’t know
For we must wait to reap what we sow
Cobwebs and dust will cover each shelf
No longer will I be myself
Between life and death
I must find you before my final breath
Through soil and stone
Nothing matches the love you’ve shown
Please don't forget about me
Soon, together we shall be
I’ll meet you again
Someday, somewhere between now and then.

Before her, I was
Tipped over in the doorway,
South-facing as a loose tooth
Plucked from sore gums.

There is a affinity shared with her
In this gloomy dark hair, like graphite
Fingerprints wiped on my featureless cranium; and how

Before me, she was
Broken as the noon's fever. Her boyish
Hips fanning out, abdicating space
For my tiny anemone palms to measure their wingspan.

There is a flood of adrenaline
Simmering the film in paragoric dampness; and
Suspending us in a jellylike expectancy.