Sleeplessness is a lonely kingdom.

I could promise myself discipline with the daylight,
but what if I told you that I lied under the moonlight?
Sinners never sleep,
sinners never sleep.

They lie awake and talk
with the wings of Gabriel.
They don't shut their eyes;
there are stories in the picture houses of their own.
Of lie and deciet.
And guilt and anguish.

They'll never sleep.

They'll howl with the night
and forget why they were meant
to darken their hearts to match the sky.

They'll never glow. They'll never beat.
I'll never sleep. I'll never sleep again.

Kissing you was like swallowing
the salty, salty sea:

I have corals for ribs,
and seaweed limbs;
my bones are ship-wreck saves
and wishful pennies.

My heart is a sea-shell:
if you put your ear to it,
you’ll hear me screaming, shouting,
pining
for you.

We will forget the times I breathed your name into the sky
and made it rain.

The thought of you will become a ***** verse in the anthology of
apologies I figured in my sleep.

I will forget the touch of your skin
in the way you forgot how to love.

I could tell you of romance,
I could tell you of Sicily
and sanctity,
and what cold-blooded loving is like.

You can touch me like an iron blade,
rusted, perused;
and carve into me stolen serenades.
Jigsaw my dreams into sense,
I’m a little too tired of waking up alone.

We can do a give-and-take of hands
and we can go look for things we lost.
I could tell you how to love,
if you can show me how to stop.

Love someone who you cannot even
look in the eye:
it's not the demons in their self
but the way they make your heart
skip two beats instead of one
and maybe the realization that
they need not more than one look to know
you have already decorated a heart shaped room
in your ribs for them to find their home.

That's all they'll need to know
how once they let you in
you'll overstay
and lose your mind every time
their footsteps echo in the silent soundbox
of your conscious.

We don't talk of storms when they aren't already there;
if they can't fix you up,
they'll teach you how to ache instead,
and perhaps I'll learn to forget how to
give myself away in my smiles
and scribbles.

and scribbles.

I am leaving scratches on the ground; dragging
my feet: they no longer take me home
if there is one.

The tree in the backyard fell during the storm
and with it went the young years of my life
torn in half by the lightning

and took from me the shade I sought
in your hair and the thoughts they often led me in
and some belief in fantasies.

Even my dreams won't cross the threshold of the room
I confine you in; you haunt me
like homesickness and runaways.

You gave your life to the birdhouse
and waited for the wings to reveal themselves; flutter
and fly away.

The spaces between my fingers wanted
to fill with the bones of yours with such urgency
that I forgot how cold it always felt

and I could never guess if
it was your skin
or your heart.

There are fireflies in the garden during the dawn
and the moon, till the day, stays
hung over shuttered windows like some
homeless
hopeless looking for love.

You turned my world onto its head
and brought me down in chains; now
bubbling the last of me in some
Chinese torture chamber of love
in a dark room of your mother's house
full of the horrors of your childhood
and your children.

You scar this skin like I can go out
wearing every verse that escaped your tongue
like a trophy fallen to dust:
gone sheen, glory and all.

Rivers are finally flowing backward
and I swear I saw pigs fly
in a sky as pink as the lips of you on your glass of venom.

Galleries of art are slipping into the street
because masterpieces were absolutely
nothing when it came to the abstracts
of brilliance and dark you could create
by the harrows of your mind.

I was no story teller and
I could never put you to sleep.
So you slip away from my bed, mind, heart and hand.

And it tastes like a broken marriage
too hot on the tongue
and too far gone to believe
it could become unmended.

Rain sometimes falls in numbers
one here, twice there.
On me
**all at once, all the time.

Stupidity tastes surprisingly like guilt.

Don’t listen to a word that escaped my lips
when I stood with a foot out the door
and myself out of my mind;
I’ve no other way
to keep still
the fires that rage in my belly
sometimes spew out of me in a definite set of words:
leave if you must.

I have shaky hands and I spill a little heartbreak wherever I go.

Oh god
when it’s all over
we still have to clean up.

I was the one who swallowed the sun
and yet it is your touch that burns
on to my skin like an insignia of shame;
halos of quiet desperation,
a footprint on the welcome mat to our own
little hell.

So the next time you cry for your skin,
remember
I scar for you.

She says she can
make the sky change into
the colours of shame:

but how could she have known
that I already walk
with a cloud over my head?

I learnt this year
that twelve months is not a long time.

And suddenly I was up staring at the dates
burning past; I
was still sunken in the last wintersleep
when spring danced its dance
and left me watching
from the dark corner
of the bar that my life had become:
the dim lights, and broken hearts,
and the drunken thought of you
rushing in and waltzing out.

I learnt that
you are only as tired
as your last mistake.

And that people only remembered
what they wanted to forget.

I began to measure time
in the ways your laughter changed
from a river-burst resonance of joy,
to a difficult trickle of a mighty
stream
drying up.

Can't you see how
it's a long way
down
from the haunt of the
stars stop shining
when you shut your eyes.

I sometimes
break my lines
blur between happiness
and being awake I
can barely feel anything
when you speak.

It's not quietude, nor
speechlessness it's
the way my mind grows
into a cancer of memories-
how one potentially harmful
dies everyday like clock-
work can't make time
stop the way you
do.

I break between
my lines some-
time pours into your eyes.

We can speak in fine tongues
and drink wine older than our hours
but when it comes to you I
let my tongue tie
itself in a knot.

I tend to
break into my lines
which is why you could never
know that after I said I love
you never came.

When I look at you and realize
somewhere in the clockwork of my heart
I still lose a second for you.

(of broken hearts)

I keep saying that I was alright.
But then everytime I met someone who liked me I
would feel ruined.

Like the tunnels of my throat
has your signal lost
and the anatomy of my heart a hot ****** mess.
Its mixing up the hush from my lungs into my veins
reminding
me of how I couldn't talk you down.

It's like sitting in a boat
and trying to set myself on fire: half-
hearted apologies made me a full
ocean to drown in.
A foot out the door only
lets the light in; some-
how I let you creep
in and now I don't know how
to let myself out
of a maze I didn't mean to design around me
more like a drawer full of clothes
that could maybe hide the shame I
tend to carry;
I am used to the guilt
of having had someone
fall in love with you like
it was an act of charity.
I was within you,
without you
ever knowing the way a heart works.
It is not muscle that'll atrophy of disuse,
it could only maybe
break like Schrodinger's vial
and **** you.
I sit here listening to the clocks of our house
out of sync:
sometimes I was always
a second too late.
I feel lost in these ticks
and these tocks
of all the time we lost; I
was within you,
without
you.

With time
they dissipate

no harm
but some broken thought

ash-tray philosophies; you
have a lungful

of sorrows.

Take a long look at the road
you walked past and wonder of
how many stops you made
and how many you had to take.

(Was the meter still running
when you had me waiting outside
your house waiting
for it to become a home you
would have never built with me?
But become a visitor in a gallery
of art I could never understand.)

Live each day like a sombre white
and watch over your thoughts
as if you had a limit to how much
you could hurt yourself
because there is only so long
the Father could hear and only so many hail Marys that can keep you

sinless as the day you were born.

Plant a tree for every heart you broke
and watch someone else carve their stories
in you.

I love the oceans and seas
but I never learnt how to swim;
I'm standing ankle-deep
in the flood of your eyes.

I've learnt to breathe water
for when you cry,
and your waves
pull me under.

I walk these roads as
if I had known that
letter boxes are more like
an ice-box for transplant hearts-
you must move quickly or else
time tames the rest.

Words were like the map of veins drawn
on the back of my hands; I
thought that maybe if I
keep on walking
my heartbeat like a siren beating very fast
could guide me home.

And I am home.

There are stories in your eyes.

I never told you how
sometimes I fell asleep
with the thought that you
were perhaps the moon-

always disappearing
with the dawn.

Why can't we have meaningless talk
the way people have meaningless ***-
you would crash over me into a
river of un-scathing emptiness
and leave marks on my skin-
stories that this was where
you started to tear at
the seams
effortlessly
like the silkness
of your sorrows on my floor.

You would become a sultry verse
in this anthology of every day
lodged between the rush and
vacancy of broken hearts
and anguished limbs.

You would radiate the heat
of your angry, angry heart onto
the cold deadness of mine,
and we could burn and melt
all at the same time.

Meaninglessly you would leave
me out of breath,
gather your clothes
and go home.

Live like an unappreciated stranger
in your own house.

Become the careless talk at family dinners
about the disappointing child
and pretend like it was all a joke
and slowly lose yourself with every
echo of drunken laughter.

Look into the eyes of someone you love
and realize how you can't feel anything
other than dread.

Become the lustful thoughts of someone
you can't love
and watch them cut themselves
into pieces for you, when
in the end
all you can say is a pitiful "thank you,
but I'd rather be a lonely wreck
drifting across the sea."

Ask yourself to be found
in a map with no direction
and with nothing but your
faulty heart to guide you away
from home.

Pretend like the music
disappears into the background
of the screenplay your life has become
and the screen slowly turning black.

Find the dread
in your own heartbeat.

Take off your clothes
and see how you sewed every misgiving
into your skin like a story you
never want forgotten
and marvel at how bad your stitching is-
can't even hold yourself together.

Hear the sound of the rain
and wonder why
the grey clouds of your heart
never go away with the same.

It was not in the road
that took me there
but the way my heart
always remained the same
rushing through college corridors,
open dissection tables,
woodwork poetry breathren.

Indestructible construction
of these cerebral plates
left me the mind of a surgeon
and the heart of a poet.

In the cold operating room
they cut open his chest-
blood gushing out and I could
see why sometimes a little hurt
could cause a lot of noise.
Ventricle, atrium.
A nick that ricocheted,
a word that spelled
goodbye.

There was a rhythm in his heart
and for once I could feel
synchronicity was never so beautiful;
almost teary-eyed
I could find those verses
lost between the veins,
quietude pumping out slowly.

Lost in the mistranslation
of his chest
till the nurse said

"Doctor, your patient's dying"

I heard we
ran out of papers
so you ran up
around the walls
of this house-
thoughts scribbling
on them like the paint
we could not decide upon;
like a troubled mentalist
looking for solace
the sound of your pen
against the walls-
how they went from
flowing to screeching-
hands now bleeding
blue
heart; you reached the
porch where you underlined
your first steps and her last;
the bedroom a serenade
between the sheets some-
times a lie tucked away
underneath;
there are fractured stories
in the woodwork finally
seeping out.
You are making the
ceiling cry in the eulogic living room; the kitchen
is a mess of lonely dinners.
You left the library for the last.
This was where you began a
passion never ending
fantasy; open up
the curtains.
The world will one day
listen to the way
a little scribble went
to a house
and came back
a masterpiece.

They said be careful
what you wish for
but all I asked was
the stars and then
the sky
you once said that
it was all mine to take
you said love is like
a day you wanted to break
for me
talk was never your forte
yet you were always
like the sound of thunder
on a stormy sea
and I was a tugboat
wandering
too shallow in the sea
but too far from home
sometimes I could almost
feel your mouth
shape the words
I love you
even though all I hear
is you saying
goodbye
like you found the good in it
like how it was always
the subsitute for
our brass silence
I feel like I could almost
catch the falling rain
and then I realized
that at some point
dusk looks exactly
the same as dawn.

In the silence of my study room,
I swear,
I could hear my future dying.

I can picture
the colour of my mother's amber eyes
lighting up in a fire
bright enough to burn alight the dark room of my mind.

The resounding echo of
my father's pride shattering
becomes the soundtrack of my
days; I swear I could not have known
that silence could be so devastating.

Well I swear I tried to swim
across my own disappointing sea;
Well I swear the tide
swallows me.

I watch the house come down
like a vengeful wave crashing
against my barefoot shore.

I don't know if
I wore my grey shirt
or the blue one with checks.

I can't tell from the dust caking
my chest; beating loudly I
put my hand to it

as if searching for my heart
in the shirt pocket;
I fumble

and feel nothing there.
I'd kept a picture of you there
in the breastpocket of my grey shirt

close to my heart.
And not any more, but a familiar ache;
left are these buttons of your last touch

and your breath in these threads.
You don't know that once you breathed into the sky
it just wasn't yours to take away.

You've got this fire
blazing away in my mind;
burning through my time,
making me breathless,
shreiking anxiety,
a chaotic unrest.
Heat in my veins
and my douse just
no more the same.

Hide me from these false hopes of life cycles
for they are tempting quietude.

I don't care who I was in my previous life,
as long as I can make this one work.

Take away these choirs of chaos,
for they become mad kings.
And I refuse to be their hymn.

You fell in love with me.

I just hope you jumped.
Not slipped.

When I die, dear Mother
don't give my body away
to science.

I'd rather have it given away to poetry.

I want people to cut me open
and observe
how my bones were riddled with
melancholic verses of joyful pasts.

They have to see
the scarlet of my blood was the hue
I stole from the sunsets of
wishful thoughts.

Dear Mother,
give my body away
to the art of writing:
for they have to look past
everything they have ever learned.

They must know
of how much I loved and I lost,
and how that made the twine of my ribs
a story to tell.

I watched as you
cast yourself away
one step at a time;
with my gaze fixed
at your dauntless irises
how could I have known
that with every breath
you were drifting further away.

The clocks ticked away,
and all I have is the last of
second chances.

I watched as you slowly,
very slowly,
with such grace,
effortlessly,
faded into the horizon.

And all I have to thank
is the image of you
my eye lids were able to retain.

Wise men can tell you
of stories in the stars,
how life began on this earth
and that love is an imbalance of the heart.

These wise men drank wisdom
from the pages of age-old books.
They spent their lives learning of
what others know not.

I
see you in stars.
My life began to get me to you
and I don't care what love is
as long as it makes sense to you.

I spent my life knowing that of you
what others will never know.

I read your scars
like a lover's braille.

And I am not wise at all.

From you I learnt
that true love was
and endless cycle
of hello and good night.

Yet you and I
were stuck in a vortex
of stay and goodbye.

Like half written symphonies I wait for you.

I wait for you
like an empty house
so you come and build yourself
in me.

I wait for you
like the flowers wait for spring
to bring them
back to life.

I wait for you
like the rush of blood
my head needs
to feel alive.

I wait for you
like the warm earth
needs the kiss
of soft rain.

I wait for you
like the souls
that walk this earth
waiting for release.

I wait for you
like the heart
that needs a score
to play.

Like purity for
true love,
I wait for you.

I wait for you.

It's hard to explain
how this heart feels.
Like laughter lost in echo
and your warm touch
now long gone cold.

Anxious, breathless;
something lost I need
so desperately found.

Empty perhaps.
Abandoned like houses,
broken like silence.

These hands can't reach as far
as where you lay.
Somehow I feel like I burn at both ends;
the flames now reaching their meeting place.

But it's always better to burn out
than to fade away.

Broken conversations,
empty lungs,
doors half open,
hearts almost out of love.

We used to talk of how
we used to be infinite.
But now every second now feels
like a stroke against an unforgiving current.

Our conversations broke
as the flaws of our souls
fell through the cracks of this glass foundation.

These upset words that escaped you
left the air around me a little sad,
a little awake,
and with a lot of echoes.

My lungs went empty
talking you down.

I left the door open for you.
So you can walk in
and slip in quietly-
I won't say a word.

And this heart could never go empty,
not mine.
Yours,
at this point,
I know not.

Flowers never lost their color
as long as you walked this earth.