Underneath these artless skies
I marry the ghost within you
because the stories are now
screaming mad, and dark,
and every time your name
rolls unto my tongue, it thunders,
and I tremble, and tremble,
and like a thousand ships set against
the tide, I will my eyes to sleep;
cold as ice, mother, pray tell
how does one go to sleep when
Thanatos is the one weaving the
blanket; rather awake than dead;
half a heart than half a soul;
tell me if I open you up I'll find anything
other than flesh, other than nothingness;
you're so vacant and uninhabited, I forget
you're not an abandoned building;
tell me how I can go to sleep
without being woken up by the ghost
of you in my head, dancing to music
we once made when we touched; I'll
revisit those little joys, and maybe I'll
understand why empty vessels make
the loudest noise.

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 cannot find
my peace of mind,
the weight of which crushes me
and I know not where I am again.

Like being so far away from home,
the smell of clothes
takes me back to the
last time I was in them.

I trace these thoughts
as I trace the curve of your spine-
immaculate ridges like the ride of
the cobblestones on your porch.

I find my solace
in the perfect arches of your shoulders
like the hold of the hearth
that keeps me warm.

I stow my secrets
into the unbreakable weave of your ribs,
safe and sound into the vault
of your tireless heart.

And dreams I dream
to the lullaby
of your ebb and flow
heartbeat.

You take me to places only nightmares
are allowed entry to; the juggler in our midst
has now taken your hand and my head
and we are lost somewhere between wonderland
and purgatory. Bound to you with strings,
I am no longer an instrument of love,
I do not make music, nor do I burn
with impassioned colours. I only hum
the songs you've forgotten, and I refuse to.
We were born in a wrong time and we've got
to get out of this place, before the maze
in your thoughts swallows me
whole.

Go on, dance with me now.
Your hands ticking away time       like a drumbeat,
               your radius hitting the table
with a knock
              on every door that has my heart     hidden
somewhere between dreams.              This orange
              October     sky, your laugh like       an earth
losing its spin,           axis alias         to your tongue.
               Forget me now then, we were never a race-
               track
burnt asphalt                   into your name, I was only
               a ship with a suicidal anchor,
crashing turntables         like the surface of the sea,
              our song stuck now in the echoes
                                                          ­     of the Atlantic.

A tight hug, tearful farewell.
I hope fate conspires for us to meet again.

Six years isn't a short time
six hours a day was never long enough.

I will miss you
like the cold skin misses your touch.

I will smoke rings of memories around you
till Saturn pines for you.

A tight hug.
I will never let you go.

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.

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.

I want to write you something,
but the words don't spill
out of my mouth
the way they used to.

I.
You walk through these streets
like you think you know what you want.
But tell me honestly,
inside the pockets of your coat
your fingers never uncross,
do they?

II.
I drown you in photographic film
and sometimes I wonder how time
stands still in a painting.
In the middle of the bazaar, you stood
like a painting
while people moved around you
like an overexposed reel of film
and time still stands still to this day

III.
You're coughing it all out; winter
on your lips and spring in your lungs.
Drink me.
I am a tincture of a daydream.
The sun is always brighter, my dear.

IV.
Our hands interlace in the darkness
and melt away with the consequences of time.
You are a bottle of something precious.
Put me to sleep, sing
me to sleep.

V.
Undo the buttons of your dress
and wear away with the night.
Shed this old layer of skin
and something about rebirth
we can tell beautiful lies
but how long before the bread soaks up the milk
and the blood on the carpet
seeps into
the wood.

VI.
The ice on the lake
can't hold up this dream anymore.
You're a hallucination
and all I needed.

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.

If the skies would break out tonight,
you will see the fury--
silver white streaks across the prussian blue,
that every once in a while,
the night too,
shall give in.

The rain rips through my turpentine roof,
splitting the cold raindrops on my forehead,
while somewhere across the city,
two lovers meet under the canopy
of a shared umbrella.

They will eventually get out of the rain
that brought them together
and reach across the surfaces
for hands in the darkness.

And get into a car,
drive away,
forgetting everything else.

Lightning strikes,
thunder roars.

They get scared,
the driver flinches
the car screeches
and I lose the only one I have.

The car swivels,
hits the one on the road before,
a flash of light
and into the one forever.

Headlight.
Heaven.

They will drive away
from the rain that brought them together,
while I will still stand there
in the rain that took away
the love of a forgotten man.

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.

We have lived our lives on clotheslines
and antiquities; I carry my home
in the soles of your shoes:

home is where you are,
and happiness is where my arms
always find yours in the dark.

I took a paper and a pen and sat down to write
a plan on how I was going to make a time machine--
because I had to, I had to go back in time and change your mind--
but I flew past papers and entire diaries and I know there is
no more ink
left in this world to continue writing.
Yet, I still have no more than a mite of sense
in a huge mathematical mess
of fractions, functions and graphs, and sad handwriting.

I put together my math with metal and I scoured the earth looking for the exact things to perfect my monster creation
and satisfy the algorithms.
Time was not going anywhere and you are awaiting my perfect words that I actually tell you,
and stop you from taking the step outside the door.
I spent, seven years to just put together the courage
to finally plug the machine
into the socket-- a humble four-point in the wall and all it took was the turn of a switch.

I spent years and all my time and all my youth,
all my mind and all my life creating a time machine,
so that I fly by the light, going back into the time to that very day
when I first saw you and take a the seat in the back of the train
instead of the one next to you.
I would take the one opposite to where you sat and refuse to even look at you.
Because then, we will not begin something we would never be able to end.

I am here now and all it takes is the turn of a switch,
a time machine to end all of the worries.
A turn of a switch and I would be able to fix all my life;
I created this thing with all my life, so that I can forget you.

And glory! I am successful.
I forget you, but not by the power of a time machine
but I forget you nonetheless.

I set my room on fire and jump out of the window.

The clocks tick down from hours to seconds
leaving me at the end of a lonely road
where you and I stand at different ends
of the paths we used to tread on together.

Always out of time, aren't I?

Running.
Breathless.

I don't even have the time to put on my
**** shoes.

I am rushing down the corridors,
I don't have the key to the car,
I'm still trying to put on my shirt
and I am trying to do it all at once.

Rushing.
Out of breath.
Tears now falling.

Too late, always, aren't I?

Like a thunderstrike straight to the chest,
I get news--
far too late for the girl far too late--
you are somewhere on a bridge
waiting to take a leap of faith.

Lost in seconds pouring away
like rain on the sill.

Lungs ablaze.

Six blocks down to the river.
Distances counting themselves
from inches to naught.

A splash in the river.

Always too late.
Always too late.

Lost you.
**Too.

Julie was a winner.

Her eyes were made of stars
that had fallen off the sky
and they twinkled every time
she smiled.

She had dreams, and ambitions,
she did not ride on high horses,
she did not trust the words of great men,
but followed her own sense of direction.

She loved life,
and a boy who never could understand
what love actually meant.

Like flowers in spring,
her madness grew in vivid colors
and she could feel the surge
in her veins.

She was a like a flower.

And like a flower in the fall,
today was the day,
she decided to die.

She took a deep breath,
and drowned herself in cold lavender-scented bathwater,
falling into the forgotten forevers
to lie quietly, finally complete.

Julie wasn't a lie,
she was just me.

Just because it ended
doesn't mean you have to
set fire to what you've built.

You can just
not visit there
anymore.

When his hands dance in the night,
the moon quiets down to sleep.
Maybe he's awake at this hour again,
who knows what the day will bring.
I'm in love with the absence of hurting;
like this; my shins splitting with dancing
so much with my own insecurities.

I saw you today.

As you sat with half
of your face facing
away from me,
I prayed you would look at me.

You didn't then,
but you met me at the staircase,
laughed,
and disappeared from the landing.

I saw you today.

And I don't remember
much of anything else.

One year, seventy six poems
and twenty five thousand glances
later.

You are gone.
I am alive.
Still.

He is here.
I want him to be.
And only for myself.

The wants have disappeared,
the time has finally come.

Give of yourself for yourself.

So I shall
this time
take a step forward
no more two behind.

Feel whatever comes,
take whatever gives.

*Almost dying with a smile on my face.

I can tell you that touching you makes me shiver.
It's like sometimes when I try to speak
I choke on the words as if an ocean I keep
in my throat- an abode for the Poseidon in your midst.

Stay with me like cataclysm with a sinner,
lie to me; I'm made of cardboard and tape,
I can take it.

Your soft tsunamis of tongue,
a voice like thunderclaps,
you could make Zeus blush-
a blinding fire shut behind his eyelids,
and an earthquake in every touch.

They tell stories and call you apocalyptic,
but to me you're just the hiss of the snake keeping
guard to what he thinks
he should be protecting.

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.

You're burning a seething red beneath
your skin; how long before this garden
burns to ash and the ferns grow?

When you no longer know how your
story goes, how many demons can you
create out of those who you've surrounded

yourself with? These tresses will strangle
the last of you in some ceremonial ground
where all you'll ever hear is the sound

of their voices laughing like a pack of
wildebeests, waiting for when your flesh
is no longer owned by your bones.

They'll pick you apart like a child
in a corridor full of strangers much
stronger than you; go to bed

sleep on it, and just let the light of your
ember veins light awake the madness you
cannot cast away. These miseries

will find their way into their beds
and make your dissolutions their nightmares
and then sleep, sleep you will.

Who needs a noose
when the wait will **** you anyway.

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.

I'll toll the bells in your return-
you've come back empty handed,
without any stories
to tell me.

I'll lie awake tonight again,
and you'll have nothing to tell me.
No happily-ever-after, no stories of heroes and queens.

I'll wait and want to be tangled in narration,
and dialogue and maybe finally
slumber might find me
and take me in.

And you'll tell me that you're sorry,
that you owe me histories and narratives,
that my eyes won't rest
and it's all you're fault.

But oh my dear,
all I wanted was for you to know
your homecoming
was my most favourite story
yet.

Like some sort of sordid fantasy in the tangles
of my subconscious belief, I
think that maybe some things must be waited upon to make come true.
That I must wait for the dream to unfurl, like the petals holding
tightly onto you and my talks to the mirror.

You have no idea of how terribly, insanely, amazingly
I can put my feelings
to words and not in my voice, that you are awaiting to read my mind and
my hopeless efforts to convey the feelings I hide so poorly
behind incredulous yarns of vocabulary.

I must wait, I tell myself for I, wait so intensely for my illusions
to come to life.
That you put to words the thoughts in my head without me
telling you so--
that you have read it all, the words, the thoughts and all else
and you love it without obligations.

But alas, have you found me, in the depths of oblivion
and I see a smile beginning to mark your face, for yes
you have found me and my words, dancing to the endless sonata
of feeling shy and courageous, all at the same time.

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.

So you left and I got into a car and drove up to the hills.
I drenched my eyes in the green hues of the trees and
drank the misty air.
I filled my lungs with fresh emotion and said,
"Oh boy, where have I been?"

I put my feet in the water, and felt the feelings gush in.
I felt my cheeks turn wet and my eyes raining
and you come flashing into my mind--
yes, I regret it--
I regret you.

You arise from phoenix ashes and hide beneath the bed.
You are a knife stuck in my chest, twisting in with every heart beat.
You are a lost opportunity and a scar on the wrist.
You are my lost love.

So what if you are sorry, you think I care that I have become
a part of the dust neath your carpet, struggling to revive.
Yes, I would like to hurt you, and hurt you so badly
you feel the need to caress me again.

I drove up to the hills, a place where you are not
and I realized, that happiness is really just sitting down and eating
cheap Chinese out of melamine plates and putting your feet in the water
and thinking we'll learn from our mistakes.

The man sings like a plague
crawling on the ground,
its attachments are not the first
thing you’ll notice, but when
his verses and the tone of his voice
slowly takes over the machinery

of your Monday morning misanthropy
you’ll begin to wonder
how you could ever forget
that loving takes more from you
than you could ever give, and how
you do it anyway. The toxin

now in your lungs, and your body’s
immune system is hostage to his
rhythms; chasms of his songwriting
has metastasised into your liver:
I love you’s taste like anxiety induced
speechlessness, and bile, and how

many times will you run this over
in your mind like a hallucination.
His song like a plague,
has wiped out this population
of sorrows, and what now of you
who has only ever claimed

that sadness was your art, your clothes,
your home, your sanity.

*What now?

Your eyes.
Your voice,
and most of all,
you in your green blazer
with your hair swept to a side
and a shy smile.

No,
not your smile.

No, not now.

Your smile not now.
Because you are smiling now
with your peaceful eyes
in your sharp green blazer
to the girl sitting across the hall
while I
am walking out the **** door.

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.

I could take care of you-- I can make up your bed,
make up your mind; I could colour the sky from blue to gray--
not because you are sad but because it is your favourite colour.
I could do the math, hold up the papers, read to you at night.
I would come and comfort you when you cannot sleep.
Draw the curtains to wake you.
Fix you where you are broken; I’ll use the perfect words.
I can make you smile; I could lie on the floor with you
and create dust angels and then hold your hand and watch
the world around us gently fall apart.

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.

You can't lock yourself in
and then complain that nobody visits you.

Somewhere over your rainbows,
lies still
my beating heart,
which you've thrown away.

Somewhere under your shadows,
is a shard
of my life,
still trying to piece with yours.

Somewhere in your mind,
I'm there
wondering if you'd ever,
say yes.

Somewhere in this empty house,
I lay still
waiting for your voice,
to break our silence.

Found myself staring
into the cold ceiling
thinking
if this could be right.

Weary soul and broken body,
you found me
when there were none
to see.

Right before this
we condoned with friendship,
but now
you've got me thinking of ties
more than them.

With my flesh and bone
by the telephone
waiting,
your overdue phone call.

Stealing glances and hushing breaths
you barely look at me now,
only feign an ignorance
and refuse to
pick up where we left off.

Call me a friend
Call me a cheater
Call me a liar
Call me a lost enchanter

But call me.
Just once.
Tonight.