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Rohan P May 2018
your glow: so dull,
like keystrokes pounding
to sweep autumn away,
to proliferate
and stain the harvest.
quaking.
       buzzing.
how were you so graceful? i wanted
to touch you, but
you twirled into
sleep.

the laces
undone, trailing.

the nightmares
unfurled, lulling.
Rohan P Feb 2018
coalescing into the night time,
prancing about the dream time,
smiling through another time,
you love for a fleeting time.
Rohan P May 2018
i think sounds echo
off your lips in the dark;
they drop like needles off
my back.
Inspired by the Sandy River, Clackamas—
Rohan P Nov 2018
light-rings:
they're double-rings,
they're doubled in light.

shadow-rings:

i'm thinking of Saturn,
i'm thinking it must be nice, to have colour.

i'm trying to breathe it in,
trying to let it settle in the
back of my mind, but i can't find a place

any place
no place

that's empty of me.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/notself2.html
Rohan P Aug 2018
i can't recreate the
memories of
you, crumbling

into dust, falling
into open spaces: we stumbled
from

oblivion to
your heart.
Rohan P Mar 2019
I abscond from
the phone calls where her
voice reminds me of her.
She's mumbling of the brittleness
of the east Cascades;
memory can't but etch, line to line,
some sore straightliner, wheeled.

I'll still playback what you leave me,
and harbor beneath the arches of ourselves.
Penny for the poor: I never promised to pay
this sum.
Rohan P Jan 2019
Evokes tension. Before
the full-stop. Before the cadence.
You and blood: red, oppressive blood.
Chiasmus cannot contain this
flood:

this drowning.
a poem about characterisation and artistic immersion.
Rohan P Jan 2019
Colonize the atoms
along your collar:

"it took me a long time to meet your eyes"

sprawled,
faded hallways,
caravans of heather.
a tamed world is a heather world.
Rohan P Feb 2019
late to the dusk of her
hands: dazzle me,
love,
a loneliness
best left unsaid.

tipping towards new dawn

her heavy eyes
   collecting ashes.
it's nice to think of loving you again
Rohan P Jan 2019
maybe to hold
      darkly

that which loves you warm;
that which loves you warm and
     sundry.

Flesh to blade, as skin to lips.

love is a pressed handle—
love's pressed handle
        as reddish

florals.

As flush: what you
mean to hold me.
For Nori, a dog, a sister.

(I don't like to say "my dog" because that connotes a power hierarchy with necessary roles of ownership and possession. I'd rather conceive of her in egalitarian terms).

Anyway, she always finds me when I'm down; she knows when I'm not feeling right, and she's always there for me. She's the only love I ever need.
Rohan P Oct 2018
there is no reconciliation.
we're bleeding like paint
in the rain—
wilting flowers
colourless in
our greys.

sometimes your eyes
double, your words
curl my cheek, still lingering
to brush stray strands.

i'm open inside out;
when you turn away
i know the hinges are closing.
i remember your words:

"someday, with someone".
Rohan P Apr 2019
She'd murmur "oh" to know
I'm dialing in the rain.

Muffled receiver to project an
Opus wholly mine. Picture
the murmur, shouldered.
Picture this chord, roaring in yellow tungsten,
Littered to the formless.
off to nowhere.
Rohan P Mar 2019
Orchard hedge, overrun and hazy.

Murmur—
as flowers in your arms decay.

Long to sleep softer.
Long to sleep softer, thereafter.

Shattered by foggy peaks.
written to: "apple orchard" by beach house
Rohan P Jun 2018
foggy inclines, green saplings
and pines: you always loved
the water.

you long for
elsewhere, but
the currents stirred and

you swept into the fir.
for acacia (dewdrop).
Rohan P May 2018
i sat in a corner,
eyes darting to the
cracks on the ceiling—

then to her: huddled
in solitude, snow falling
around her neck

snow falling inside my mind.
Rohan P Jun 2018
unspeakable you:
outlined in charcoal,
shaded in graphite,

the world shifts when
you siphon your
pain.

the world whirs when
you call my name.
Rohan P Jun 2018
scriptures tear
along her hairline: forehead
creased and painted. i can't
help but think of her
as a deer—as the opening
of the breeze, as the advent
of night, where letters
fold into triangles.
Rohan P Apr 2018
the metal is poised:
upright, red, defiant.

the glow is muted,
inhuman    /.
       the garden
is tired; it asks for
forgiveness.

the metal is poised:
the leaves disperse—
frightened./
       the valleys crawl into the sky.

the metal is poised:
you’re/     like a dusty,
aeroplane
window: i see home falling
away
       away
              away)
I'm experimenting with a new style of poetry, inspired by the works of Chelsea Dingman, among others.
Rohan P Jan 2018
while the holocene climaxes
through empty, breezing streets (seeing
your leaves and flowers wither and curl on the two-edged
backlane, loose gravel and overhanging apartments looming
like sharp needlepoints of darker grey)
drops, just streams, coalesce on dark green leaves,
dirt scatters on the phosphorescent, forgotten film—imperceptibly,
rain blurs your lonely photographs (i hold

them in boxes and under books, and
gaze at scrawls where your hand once touched, and
ponder at surfaces where your mind once wandered, and
shadow them on my heart, and
shatter them on my memories).
Rohan P Jul 2018
bluejays scream: "the

world rounds about
your faces"

your lips—a flightless
moon.
facing morning (and birdsong)
Rohan P Jan 2019
Poetry is not often a
Circle. More a snare.
Noose in my hands.
Chiasmus is thorough:
I am locked in.
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in".

'Circle' as a symbol for balanced aesthetic reflection, dispassionate observation—in Woolf's jargon, the state of the "incandescent" mind.

'Circle' as a symbol for everything that poetry can never be. Everything that I can never embody.

I'm sorry, Virginia. You're not as embittered as I am.

This is a feeble attempt at reconciliation.
Rohan P Aug 2018
silence
flows differently
than quiet —

she trickles
like a spring creek;
he tumbles
like warm sand.
Rohan P May 2018
she was named after the mountains—
her irises flashed white and howled;
her sleep rumbled with the earthiness
of winter; her mind wandered through
fields of

snow.

i wanted to wander
with her. i wanted to bury my head in the drifts
and sink into her core. i wanted
to stroke her gently:

kiss the
        falling

snow.
Rohan P Feb 2018
her palette unfolded like a
sea of roses and you
remembered “trees

and couplets
of tomorrows”:

just enough to feel the
breeze and hear her
gently recede.
pulling away?
red
Rohan P May 2018
red
burning, fiery red
stones add to the coal

imperfections crouch
in the flames: flickering,
lifeless

consuming, dispassionate red
from dirt to dusk and dawn
Rohan P Jun 2018
spring pressed
flowers against your body: bluebells
and lilies, yellows and greens.

you remembered the place
where the reeds thickened and
the tall grass swayed with your
heartbeat. you remembered
unravelling the sky, that
withering blue nebula,
sinking into shades of
night

        (your
petals fell into
               the dying        breeze
"I live among men and not among angels", claimed Thaddeus Stevens, that lion of a man, in justification of what he saw as an imperfect 14th Amendment.

Imperfection is what defines humanity, drives us to change. That we can feel—and that we can lose—reaffirms the beauty and subtlety of this dance we call existence.

This is for Benjamin.
Rohan P Dec 2018
Electric lights don't waver
Across your strings.
As if I played only to savour
your darker glances—my wings.
Rohan P Jan 2019
pulses
on the stained desk
wall

jilted in absence
blurred by a haziness of your time
"Jynweythek"
Rohan P Sep 2018
you circled the wrong
answer again
and again, the
led darkening into the paper
until there were no answers
left at all.
that's what i love about you.
Rohan P Sep 2019
Thoughtlessness—
         suspends space—
too much space—between fringe and
fringe; moonlight
pools through windowsill—
         a mirror of its shadowed self.
Rohan P Aug 2018
you always worked
blue

into your patterns—
always molded the

colour and feeling
with darker shades, like

paint splattered
in a room with no
windows.
"sunlight through the leaves" ♥
Rohan P Jul 2018
and seeing your
eyes, slowly
hold onto your nights—
the wind's rustling.
my 100th poem on hepo
Rohan P Jul 2018
sail the fields

like her silhouette would
whisper: “someday

the bluebells will
crush beneath your
fingers”

like her sunlight would
wander: someday

the soil
will cover her

footsteps.
Rohan P Aug 2018
your reply opens,
pale,

mine to darken.

but screenlight's not quite like starlight;

it's not enough to hold onto.
not enough to never let go.
wpc wasn't who /i came to see

you/
Rohan P Dec 2017
seldom do i recall the vastness of the open—
your cold invitingly holds me to the unspoken;
beckons at me through that sylvan oaken
world beyond worlds, rising within me, bespoken
of that grandeur through the sky—floating
just beyond the edges of our emotion.
Rohan P Sep 2018
she writes me a requiem
for our encounters, waving
like a flag outside in the yard.

i find her photographs and boots in
odd, less-frequented corners:

we'll never
decipher the scrawled handwriting.
life's hollow without you.
Rohan P Aug 2018
she wanders
the flats, looking
for mirrors and windows

around her face—reflections
of the open sand.
Rohan P Aug 2018
should that i—
fall from being nowhere

and time: so restless
to leave your purple
and blue, spattering,

echoing spring
rain.
i wrote this as a progression: from a jumble of words to a depiction of an image. Rather like the rain itself, I think.

and ellie: I imagine you as a patch of colour in the rain.
Rohan P Dec 2017
—formula for your endings; for these numbers to fade away, bespeaking something of infinity, i hear you laugh; beside you, i am only counting, continuing.
Rohan P Jan 2019
Believe—
how skies are
folding blankets: theirs
to mock the solidity of material form.

Believe—
what skies are
gesturing to bloodless hurricanes.

Believe—
why skies are

Yours.
I structurally designed this poem so the first line of each stanza is the shortest, and each successive line gets longer. The stanza lengths also decrease by one each time.
Rohan P Jan 2018
softness flows over
rocks and rivulets, jettisoning
the clouding embraces of treetops,
holding the modulating fog on brushed canvases:
away, floating away, currents of love.
Rohan P Nov 2018
the way you loop,
the way you close your eyes to
look at me,

i feel you,
voices down the line

(something has to
give.
part i
Rohan P Nov 2018
something's burned
between
you and me. I didn't
smell the smoke,
feel the flames
stir the pensive
air.
she's just an ideal of who i want you to be.

who you are is tearing me apart.
who she is is keeping me holding on.

i know you won't fall in love with me, surely, but you fall in love with *him*, not to mention *him*, and I'm lost among your laughter. You just scroll: new faces, new angles, new everything. Novelty. Is that what's important to you? That's not, I think, what she cares about. She cares about relation; she is my ecology. She exists between things; you exist as things.

i'm being too harsh, i know, and i condemn myself for it. you're living your life, never mind if it's not *her* life. that's not your fault. i'm glad you're happy. i tell myself that every day and maybe one day it'll be true.

i'll never truly have her, no matter what you say. i know this because she's already been found. Found, embodied, then lost.
Rohan P Dec 2017
and sometimes, you
are like starlight, for you fade
with the colours of the dawn,
and only when quiet reigns—when
shadow overtakes shadow, when
adoration slumbers in golden, curled chambers—
do you arise; spinning, and just discernible,
you reflect on charred and distorted surfaces,
sometimes curving, sometimes eclipsed and
forgotten.

to be unmade, to arise from the
planar and float in myriads indescribable:
the object of your temperate love.
SP
Rohan P Aug 2018
SP
grandeur—
starlight trickling
into sea; she nodded
beside me, gracefully.
she fell into never,
beside me.
and you—can make it last forever (you).

♥ SP
#sp
Rohan P May 2018
you carried
space and time
in little dots,
like jackals, you thought,
like autumn starlight,
dotting the sky with their
cold, curdled howls.
Rohan P Nov 2018
tender,
you trail stars,
wake to your
stars

still starry, dearest,
starry-eyed,
you outshine me.
for m.f.
Rohan P Jan 2019
Lamenting lines filling
   stillwater.

Find love in me, tarn.

Disrupt
    this still.

Ripple on the window.
Window as liminal zone;

Suspend imagery.

"Before our love got lost", you said
Rohan P Jun 2018
graves are silent in passing;
stone withers like snow
cracked and weathered: the horizon
pales in shades of blue.
Rohan P Dec 2017
there’s a cold, electronic melancholia in the
crevices of lighted rooms, in the imaginations of
giants, in the suffocating, wondrous monochromes of the night
in whispered, blinding, broken, dull,
in relief maps, in cold hands running alongside climactic surfaces,
in small, imposing shadows—in model ships, dying reeds and houseplants,
pieced-together wolves, as close an imitation as can be dared, in stained glass, dusty
aves and books and windows, closed, and closed and closed and warm;
cables, flooring, displaced, obscured, scratched-out names and labels and figures and
facts: beautiful facts, useless facts, cold and impersonal, lively and running,
i remember the small smile, that slight wave of your hand as you passed by, but never quite
left me.
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