What power’s in the craft of self-destruction
Debased by something soft as sympathy?
What audacity's in that expression
But begging to be recalled beyond a crumpled chassis;
For redemption that lives through mockery –
A natural disaster is my name

For impotence, a gripping horror;
Inexorably image-perverting, like ashes
Of the ******* ancient in Pompeii –
There are no do-overs for *******.

“Don’t make fun of my night out.”

I have witnessed unsolicited exposures
And revisited old faults without closure –
This painted ceiling, slowly stripping off its finishing
To bare its defects, begets nostalgia over

How your name is still a byword for frustration,
Shelved within my innermost synapses;
Like a dog-eared page in an Asian
**** magazine, sound & stiff as an equation.

Pinprick beneath the valley of ribs.
Your mousy heartbeat sounding
Endlessly, namelessly as static.
What used to be swollen with purpose, constipated
With pride, greasy and blistered as a cocktail sausage,
Is now an old wound.

It needs a poultice, a placeholder of semantics
For the palms praying to the peerless sky. You
Used to be pedantic. Now ease is the strangest feeling; 
Born of the dailiness of splitting hairs
Between us, over and
Over.

Your crossed arms, numb under mine,
Frame my grave in a way that's nearly sacramental.
Left barren too of hope for you. It's not fair to
Create it out of nothing, like some ****** pregnancy.
God won’t come to hold you down — Go to him, and start
Over;

Or stay curled up by the window like a vegetable
While time makes cautionary tales
Of lucent billboards that brand the street,
Infected by moths numerous as ****.

Subdued and flickering out,
They don’t concern me anymore. Now I
Contemplate cleft-lipped fractures in the concrete
Cracking seedy smiles at me, and grow
Quietly dim as understanding takes
Over.

You are well-acquainted with the sight of
Columns of apartments like pillboxes,
Naked as ****** once they’ve been
Emptied out with a heavy hand.
Your touch brings with it separation-
A million cells deriding me between our skin.

My resentment is misdirected as the traffic tonight, and
The world made my helpless victim for
Allowing me love, even letting me leave
Too many red-stained kisses on your
Clean dashboard, turned jaundiced by the evening.
Your scent rises like a note in the sanctity
Of my ***** laundry.

Flesh pulls my soul from its core
With every fall of the sun’s breast.
I am a thief of its radiance,
Breathlessly clamoring for an insipid warmth-
I like roses, even though they smell like the bitter dirt.

I partake in shedding of skin, like a diaphanous veil,
For all to witness my soft underbelly.
The first acceptance is sycophantic-
Fathers’ lust and mothers’ panic
Are wed in the same vein. This is my resignation to
A marriage as ancient as

The first rejection –
Desire, a hunger who abandons
My parasite of a resolve. An affection of the mind
That warps my size beyond its threshold, too dormant to digest
Love.

Isn’t feeling chagrin cruel?
I’ve learnt it from a life’s refusal
To crawl out of my glass house.
I like roses, even though they smell like the bitter dirt.

You correspond to the night.
Like an angel with gray wings, effacing the stage
Of my prayers in tongue- a perjury of
Mine lesser than yours;
Which is a forgiveness, swaddled in linen sheets
Offering no warmth.

Mascara delineates 100 filaments
To exalt your image in my eye.
The copy left a shallow impression
And an afterthought of indelible darkness.
These tears that stain are a borrowed black;
100 claws that catch my skin in your shadow.

Faith ends with me
On my knees, conjuring you
Through dreams which evaporate when
Distilled by light. Is it weightless?
The sun injures me with attention.
Day breaks like glass;
Coming over me at great altitude,
You correspond to the morning.