I never wanted to write bitterly about you.

I promised this to myself long ago but in light of life and in dark of hopelessness,

what ground does my promise hold?

and yet I keep it, like I kept all the other vows I made to you.

we start learning the alphabet around the age of 2

but it’s been over two decades since and somehow ‘I’ still comes after you.

over two decades and somehow the same alphabet still fails me;

did I learn differently than everyone I knew?

how am I grasping at straws,

at words,

and coming up with nothing?

he sings ‘I’m losing my baby on promises kept’

and I’m thinking of how I missed out on the day they taught that

‘I’ always comes before you.

when you agonized over bed sheets and bedpans,

the drip of the IV and the trip of your heartbeat,

the messages (or lack thereof) that you received and the faces you had to greet,

the sweet, un-soothing words of sorrow spoken over your head,

what did you believe heaven would be?

did the crusted blood on your stitches burst forward like coral?

and your bruises, did they blossom into crocuses -

the violent violet of careless injections and the yellow-green of chemotherapy nausea?

what about your articulate thoughts, the ones under your sunken skull?

surely they went out the window only to perform sun dance amidst

the snowdrops at the end of your winter.

when you agonized over your will and your will to fight,

the house-turned-mausoleum and the North-less children,

what did you believe heaven would be?

I always walk into social settings not knowing the right way to smile.

the last time I was out, it was a funeral

where uncles and fathers waited for the body quietly,

where mothers and aunts divided their time

sizing up every girl who walked in fresh,

evaluating the contents of moroseness on her face.

did her nail paint make her look well-maintained

and yet purposefully unaware of her manicure?

her clothes, were they the right balance of panache and mourning?

and what about her mannerisms? is she polite and demure,

is she the girl next door? is she an acquaintance? is she family?

well, if she is, why isn’t she in the right colours?

how bold of her to wear eyeliner!

her mother ought to have taught her these things.

cue scrutinizing the parent, the birth giver:

at least she’s wearing white clothes. her fingernails are light pink?

eyebrows rise up in the odd combination of judgement, approval , and the tiniest hint of contempt.

the grandmothers come out from the woodwork

because their experience and expertise in death is unparalleled by the young:

they seize responsibility of the rituals,

tutting at the slightest deviations of the routine they’re well-versed in.

what a business they make of death.

the loss isn’t theirs to feel, the life isn’t theirs to grieve.

‘the head faces the north, the toes to the south! don’t spill the grains unevenly! come, let me tilt open the mouth so you can quench the thirst of the dead with holy water.’

they know it all, those devious grown-up so-and-so’s. we’re still too alive for their acquiescence. they’re so assured in their rites, they’d take over from you at their own deathbed.

they’re watching you very closely, don’t you forget.

they’re not here for the deceased, they’re here to inspect.

I stay under the radar with my tight-lipped smile,

they may not live for too long, but I’ll be here for a while.

you drink from your tall glasses, a toast to lives you barely touched.

we do not care for the river of words that rush from your mouth.

we have no use for eulogies underground.

only what you sow you can reap, your nothingness begets nothingness.

we who lay among the roots

do not see the cyanotype sky behind your rouged liquors.

we look below for asphodels to sate a hunger that has no pulse or palate.

Lethe consumes our memories from seeping water.

we talk to shadows without light. we do not bear the stains of summer.

there is no loss when there's nothing to keep.

we who lay among roots

know who we are when separated from you.

your draughts of grenadine are no more than a euphemism

for how we breathe the crimson seeds that keep us under.

"If you'll make me up, I'll make you." - Virginia Woolf


How much of who we are are just stories? How much of you is made up in my head and how much of my flesh is your fabric? It reverberates between the cells of our bodies (our prisons): an entity that eludes definition and strings a cosmos betwixt our ends. In your silvery light, you are the moon and in my eyes, you are transcendental.

I know that only light makes you real. My mind brims with sunshine and it makes you sing, it makes you shimmer. Such ephemeral glory we held in our hands, beheld in our sights.

We shift in space; faraway glints of reflections. You flicker on your lonesome, your ashes I cannot douse with my sadness. Feverish at fingertips, I draw sigils to trap you in my mind. Phosphorescent and bleeding, as if anything could ever escape the damage from our names.

Winter's early dusk sinks around us. It's so cold and you're so warm, I know I'd go anywhere with you.

But we ruin too easy. I see you in the reflections of my mind, separating your image from who you really are. Everything I touch becomes surreal but here you are, still the same. A prosaic body that learned to glimmer in my light, still lunar in your way. There's nowhere to dive when you're only a surface, I can't peel at layers that don't exist.

In this gloaming, you can now see the light. In this gloaming, I now see your void.

the earth around my skin is more

home than home could have ever been.

my sinking fingertips cut and

bleed into the soil, bleed into

prayers that flash red

on your face and in

my sight. no sea monster could rise

in these black bottomless eyes; the

songs choke themselves to the blue of

our forgotten ghosts - the ghosts of

loss who have forgotten to haunt,

to be real outside of our

abandoned relics, outside our

destitute, neglected bodies.

blinded and uncomfortable,

once by lies and fear, now decrepit

the stem running up my back and

its wretched and cursed flower

wilt sixfold ever since the thunder,

the lightning that you unleashed on me,

stolen rouge, broken plumbing -

trying to be more than the damage you left behind.

no butterflies for this mess

conquered and destroyed by downpour, sunburst;

only a mouth full of ocean -

shuddering waves towards the blood moon -

and the remnants of your solipsism

more real to me than my own beating heart.

now, blinded by formal realism and your belligerence,

crimson clouds against inevitable death,

i know you can now see the light

no blades you need to hurt me

no delicately decaying words of devotion

for i always begin with you

and then diverge, disintegrate;

a mockery, mayhem, a survivor of bedlam

could i ever be more than the damage you left behind?