I only noticed it today.
It snuck up on me,
Ice breath on my nape
Made me shudder in my fleece.
My ears were deaf
To the crunching neath my feet.
The scene outside my fish bowl
Now a Battenberg of brown and green:
Bricks and trees against emerald grass,
With a smattering of fallen leaves.

I’d been so engrossed:
An intentional whirlwind
Pushing past all in my path.
The chill is appropriate.
The air lacks all its summer warmth.
And it’s hard. It bites at my fingertips
Like you do. Did.
No tense fits.

I feel the resin
Coat the inside
Of my lungs
As I say,
"Do not mistake
Me being
Polite
As me being
A pushover."

behind
my
words
and
smiles,
lies
buried
the
treasure
of
dreams
that
you
seek

- Vijayalakshmi Harish
24.12.2012
Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish

An arm hung across the rubble,
draped like a broken swan neck,
decorated by intricate patterns of blood and dust.

I couldn't have known who the arm belonged to, but in that moment
I was sick
to my stomach
with devastating surety.

Those were the fingers that had twined through mine in gestures of
love and
desperation,
painted my arms
in strokes of comfort, and of loneliness.

The palm that had confidently gripped a weapon,
and had carried groceries
into the house.
Palms that had pressed hopelessly against rain-washed glass and
gently
against tearstained cheeks.
Those palms that willingly cradled my uneasy heart.

And the arm.
The arms that stretched into
the sparkling star-strewn sky,
the grey and
pouring rain,
the sun-baked air rippling in waves across that embrace.  
Arms that had wrapped around a struggling body
with grim purpose and
aching heart,
softly beneath a wiggling puppy and its
pink kisses,
easily against the warmth of my breakable ribs.

I saw the broken swan and I felt something heavy,
maybe my heart,
slip from limp fingers and
break
into glittering shards
decorated by intricate patterns of blood and dust.

She was small.
The top of her head only just
came to my chin -
the bow in her back had robbed her of inches.
Her eyes were deep,
entrenched in the spiderweb patterns
of soft, folded wrinkles that covered her cheeks, eyelids, forehead, lips.
But in her eyes was something that danced.
She reached out
And with gentle fingers took hold of my hand.
And I felt the silky velvet that the footsteps of her years had walked into her palms.
And she smiled like someone who has earned the right to do so, and she wished me a
Merry Christmas.
And then I woke.
Blinked at the tears running into my hair.
Closed my eyes and held onto the feeling
of her missing velvet in my hands.

I'm on my back
The darkness so heavy before my face I could be looking into the depths of a well
The eternity of a starless universe
The pupil in the eye of a monstrous monster
And never even know.

Never know,
Never care (what's the difference, really?),
because I'm thinking of you.
Of your breath on my neck
Your arms on my ribs
Your name on my lips.

Staring into the deepest part of the deepest ocean
The black abyss of a cave unexplored
The yawning jaws of a mile-wide rift in the earth
And I couldn't give less of a ****

Because I'm busy thinking
About you.

You’re a puzzle
Thousands of missing pieces
When I reach to hold you
I touch the missing spaces

You’re going nowhere
Awfully fast
Pedal to the metal
Hope this high will last

“Do you see me?”
Your mother snaps.
Can’t hear.  Ears
overflowing with schnapps

Addiction coded in genes.
Father to son it passes
The pattern continues
Passed along in ***** glasses

My lungs feel young
As I breathe in this
Lovely air
Even though I
Wish that it was
Candy coated with
Your cologne