Her prized pink nose is fatty as an almond,
Yet it hardly hides the bone,
Allowing it to snap as giddily as a wafer.
As she races traffic, the waving flags turn the
Blinding white of a hot gun barrel.

What audacity's in that self-expression
But begging to be recalled beyond a crumpled chassis;
What power’s in the craft of self-destruction
Debased by something as soft as sympathy?
Her redemption and own enlightenment only
Lives through mockery. A natural disaster is her name

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

“Don’t make fun of my night out.”

Be good for the all-knowing overhead light, the nascent
Hole in the sky – the aperture of a camera with a stuttering flash
For any cheek turned the wrong way. Must

Be good to be impervious to the shake of our big hands,
Like snakes caught in their own tail; to be
Impersonal as a hairpiece on the skull, flapping against the amygdala
With unimaginable force, like a door-knocker.

Answer in a ridiculous costume to insult the salesmen of sobriety,
Scuttling like roaches, whispering jokes to break one’s heart.
They sting like thumbtacks from below the knee.

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.

Pin ***** beneath your valley of ribs.
Your mousy heart beats
Endlessly and 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,
A paperweight for that
Headless neck. You used to be pedantic.
Now ease is the strangest feeling;  born of the dailiness of splitting hairs
Between us, over and
Over.

Numb under mine, your crossed arms
Frame my grave in a way that seems sacramental,
To be left barren too of hope for you. Not fair to
Create it out of nothing, like some ****** pregnancy.
If God won’t come to hold me down, I’ll go to him and start
Over

While you stay curled up by the window like a vegetable.
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. I 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 headboard, 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 the 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 that abandons
My parasite of a resolve. My mind’s affection
Warped 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.