She confessed that she wished
Only to bide some time,
So I threw my watch away and
Gifted her all of mine.

He used a nice word for it-
Emulate
"Oh! Look how her imagination glides
From glorious skies to
Eerie depths, no hesitation
Dropping from resounding thunder
To dead silence that shatters asunder
All that is sensate
And that, my friend,
Is what I'm trying to emulate!"

With such shameless eagerness
He shifted styles,
A form-changing, chameleon of a poet
Ever so often devouring a new set of words
Like rich, delicious wine
And fashioning his words into
The poetess' writing style,
And crooning with her tunes
For as long or short a while
As his lecherous dog of a heart pleased,
Then letting himself be afflicted
With yet another poetic disease.

I rolled my eyes, yet silently asked
Him- the Casanova of verse-
*When will you stop falling in love?
When will you stop drowning into
Another woman's words?
Think about me,
Struggling to keep up,
Changing tracks with you,
Climbing up and down
Ballads-Sonnets-Haikus-Epics-and free verse
With you,
Watching you enamoured by her,
Still trying to emulate you
For the most vain of reasons there is-
Hope.

Sometimes there's such pain
As can't be healed by
The carefree jest of a dear friend
Or the earnest caress of mother,
Sometimes, when the pain
Is caused by those closest,
And there's no one left to turn to,
I realise,
It's only Allah,
And my Poetry...
Only Poetry,
And my Allah,
Ever-steady, ever-soothing,
Unfailingly right,
Always on the healing side.
Always there.

College is a cancer clinic.
At this university, you either live long enough to die,
or die until you want to live.
Kids drag backpacks like bags of morphine,
and are attached to their planners like they are their heart monitors.
You do your own chemotherapy,
as you poison yourself with debt,
and Friday night nickel shots.