Her kisses were moonshine
and bullets, three shots
to the heart, like a rose
on the canvas of morning,
like art, an eyelash on a poem
that always makes me pause,
three xs at the bottom of a page.

i'm drinking
out of
the bottle
on a tuesday
and i have
to ****
but i'm
glued to
this chair
and the keys
are glued
to my fingertips.
the room smells
like cheep wine
and fresh
duvets
i can't seem
to leave
but i always
find a way to

her innocence is soluble
when dipped in
expectations,
her mirror;
like the bottom
of dinner plates,
her wrists are
tire marks on
gravel roads,
she sees not
what we see
but in what he
sees is what
she cares
but who is he
now?
a riptide splitting
face paint
saturday nights,
veins of toxins,
staring at roadkill
and streetlights
and garbage
hugging curb-sides
mixed with dust
days followed
with headaches
and remorse
dying not
I can see it in her
eyes
she’s only 16
                           MJB

she is an asylum,
her walls drip blackness
writing every word
that neglected
to slip past her
teeth,
she sleeps on
****-stained spring
mattresses as the
clod tiles bite
at her heels,
hair and skin hide
beneath her fingernails
as palms are twinged,
the padded walls
whisper screams
of coercion; wrists
bound by silence and
tightened by insanity.
to bedposts
rusted,
her hands retired on
ridged thighs
hugging her
goosebumps with
convulsions of agitation.
her mind
scratches melodies of an
insomniac,
the flickering lights choke
her vision and blind her speech.
a room of contradictions
irregulating regularities
intoxicating sobriety
hallucinating reality,
the muffled screams
that weave through
the fibres of the
pillow clinched tightly
in her lap harmonize
algorithms that pull
each padded wall
towards her howling
being — centrefold the room,
as the walls hug her body
she awakes and paints
antonyms to
perpetual despondency

he had low-grade
tattoos on his neck
and his clothes
wore transparency.
beneath his eyes
held a dying sun.
he spoke in thanks
and respect, the cuts
upon his wrists called
reached a finger out
and called my eyes
to say hello,
he spoke in gratitude
for the smoke i gave him.
he smelled like cigarette
stained couch cushions
he spoke a respectable
ebonic intellect.
his fingernails
were unswept
floor trim
and his teeth
were smashed
dinner plates
at his mother house.
departing he said
thank you
and i offered him
a cigarette for the road
and he refused and said
“for talking to me”

/
One day I went along this way
to the river
She called me
I had heard, loved
got lost in her

Then,
at that river,
I was swimming,
had a bath
went to the other side,
plucked the red lotus
Tirelessly had seen her maze form,
told her my unspoken words

That time is over
The river is buried,
doesn't call no more
Away,
never hear the songs of downstream
do not write a love poem for her
In fact,
not going the way anymore

Now the way turned the Highway
Cried out to the big Lorries
when I open the old window,
See the rain forms but never reply

Why I still see the dream
In Rain,
A small boat on the river
has lost in the fog-
/
@Musfiq us shaleheen