You fall out of love like a habit.
Nobody told you that even when they say
'there are no wrong answers',
there's always one that rings all the wrong bells.
You say, 'Maybe strawberry ice cream is my favourite',
and suddenly alarms go off in his head
'How? What? Nobody likes strawberry icecream!
This one is defective! Return to Sender!'

This one is defective.
You were mass produced
on a supply line for antsy, lonely nineteen-year olds.
This was their best year yet; the whole world is aching
but we're sorry to inform you but
Models made after 1995 are no longer supported.

To the scrapyard, then.
You fall and tumble and crawl out of love
like it's out to get you.
Like it's got its teeth in you,
nails tearing into flesh,
holding your ankles and begging you
to stay.

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.

I have stopped counting,
the days, for they are now
just seconds and hours that pour away
into the blankness of life.

It doesn't pain me because it is an
understanding that for you
love could never mean anything
more than a prolonged feeling of monochromia.  

You have fallen,
and fallen again.
Love is nothing more than
a chasing game for you.

But if I had never
come into your life,
what could, in your ways of life,
it have proved?

Nothing.

It was the mischief of the cosmos
that wanted us to be.
Else the weaves of the universe
would come undone.

We have our stories
already written
by a known
hand.

All we are,
are characters
waiting.
Till our curtain falls.

(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.

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.

The car will edge past the truck maybe
and maybe we'll survive this message
playing on repeat, apologies like daft lilies
and then you go ahead and tell me that you've never
learnt from your mistakes, or my mistakes.
That mistakes are only bad unless you change the order
of analogy. This experiment has been contaminated.
Now a fresh batch. Trust me, there's a point to this.
I'm counting back from a hundred and two
and you've got me standing in the middle of the highway,
blindfolded; this is what loving you felt like,
you said. But I think it was more dramatic in my head.
Nuclear fission and the seige of Dresden dressed
up playing Adagio in D minor; I'm dust. I'm dust.
I've become ash and misery and I'm trying to stay inside you
but you've been coughing a lot, and who's to say
you were holding your breath for something exciting,
I just know for a fact that at the end of this beep,
you'll know what to do and yet
you're not going to leave another message.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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 am caught up
amidst a drama.

Your father is arguing with your mother,
the noise is penetrating from beyond
the locked doors,
while I am standing outside your door
witnessing your surprised reaction.

A glass shatters and you shut your door
and ask me to come with you.
We ride on my bicycle to the lonely field
behind the school.

My heart beats louder than ever before,
so loud you can probably hear it.
You are trying to explain the situation at home,
the noise and the apologies,
while I am biting my lips,
trying to tell you why
I drove you out your home
at ten in the night.

You stop and laugh,
and tell me that your best friend
broke away from you
and you tag him--
that *******--
and I swallow nervously.

You suddenly rant of how
he always says the wrong things,
was always a bad friend,
and did the worst.

You tell me of how your parents
are so sickening
you are thinking of running away.

You
look
at me
and tell me that you are
sick
and
tired.

Between the lines of fear and blame,
on a very cold winter night
in the deserted field
you and I are caught amidst a drama.

A drama yet to unfold.

A sweat beads on my forehead--
I have something to say.

Your father is no longer mine's business partner,
my mother hates the dressing style of yours
and
I am in love with your best friend.

I cannot tell you that,
because this is not the time for a drama
to set ablaze the floors of our minds--
we will need it tomorrow.

We've got our math test.

With time
they dissipate

no harm
but some broken thought

ash-tray philosophies; you
have a lungful

of sorrows.

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?

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.

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.

December falls upon my eyes;
I am scared as hell.

The numbness of limbs,
the sorrowful gray
that casts over me and you
and what we once used to be.

December will be the death of me,
I know for sure
because this time
I sit alone with my sword unready
and the candle flickering.

The winds will whisper
in my ear, things I already know
and unto you,
the realization that will never come.

December,
I am afraid.
I am not strong enough
to face you.

You say doctors will
make the best poets.
They will search your emotions
by the skin; cutting open to reveal
and revel
with surgical precison.
They will play with
heavy drugs and blades--
nothing shall hide beneath
the armors of bone and muscle.
They know the anatomy
of the heart too well.
They will find the things
you have hidden in your chest.

I say
doctors will never be poets.
They are too mechanical,
too fast with their edges
and ridges.
They cannot see the pain
as pain but merely as an anomaly.
That sadness is black bile
not melancholia.
They cannot sing to you
but only clammer in medical jargon.

Poets will use their imperfect words,
and perfect rhymes
to find the secrets of your rib cage
with ease.
They will find every flaw
of your broken body
and make it the best story
you've never heard.

Doctors,
they will put love to define as
a momentary rush of adrenaline,
an arrythmia for another human
caused due to an imbalance of the heart rhythm.

Poets will tell you
that love is the first jolt
of life for them.
They will say love is a state of euphoria
that takes those irregular rhythms to perfect symphonies.

Doctors say that
veins carry blood
devout of oxygen.
I say that they carry your broken emotions
to their feelings factory
to mend it within its beautiful catacombs.

All those doctors
will find and fix you
with perfect solutions.

And these poets
will do their best
to be your perfect solution.

I will be like a tree to you
neath whose shade you lie
as the days pull you down
and my branches long for
the pull of your weight-
the only kind I will allow
to pull me down.

Painless is the way
I shed my leaves for you,
die a slow death
all for your love for a golden autumn,
and again I come back to life for you,
because winter is a lonely business.

Your faith in my hold
is strengthened over these glad years,
unbreakable perhaps,
like how my roots are interwoven
into your ribs.

My poetry is eternal for you,
growing each day
and when you cut me open,
the rings will tell you of the years
I bled for you.

I will be a tree to you,
your very own Eden,
and the day I die,
I hope my roots reach out to you
when the time comes for you to
marry into the earth.

Only a vehement storm
can put me down.

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.

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.

Please don't play
with my heart,

I only have
a few pieces left.

This is not
hiding away,

I just don't want
to take any more of your crap.

Allow me to slip
into the darkness you created.

Let me
chase shadows.

I once used to run
with both my legs tied together.

Now I just lay down
wherever it is that I stop.

Please don't play
with my heart,

this is no longer
yours to keep.

I went looking today.

I put on my red boots
and my blue pants
and I opened up the doors.

I went looking today.

I went through the parks,
the streets, the empty hallways.
I got lost looking for a lost you.

The crowd carried your scent,
carried me,
and I was six and a half miles from home.

I put on my smiles
and my cloak of courage.
My watch ticked away the time my heart drove my feet to you.

I went looking today.

I went looking for you.

I searched the corners of boxes,
under the shade of rose petals,
and in burning letters.

Because I had to.
I had to find you
before I lost my mind.

My bones ached for the home in you,
my heart refused to keep a beat continuous,
my skin began to come undone.

I went looking for you today,
only to stop before your door
and walk all the way back home

still in want.

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

I.

No, don't go now. Please
don't go now; the fog is creating ghosts
out of people and we're breathing clouds out of our mouths.
Tell me about that time when you held your breath
under the lake for six years and still survived;
tell me how if I do that, it'll never work.
I'm not a sea God
any more.

II.

My knees tell better stories than my tongue
ever did, please don't; wretched hive harangues
the mind in a plague, can't you see I'm holding you down
and telling you you're all I ever wanted,
you're all I ever wanted; your head is the stuff of dreams
you're all I ever wanted; you can put your arm
right through me and only feel mist;
I am fog. I'm creating ghosts out of you.

III.

Make it up to me in a rainbow of hues of grey;
at the end of it I'm holding my ribs open. I've never
been more colourful and sad at the same time.
You're the mirrors to my house; stay
has always sounded better than don't go

yet neither seems to work anymore.

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.

My name spells love in every language
you say you’ve learnt; the pulsating
streets of your veins are alight with life tonight.

We walk them with empty-pockets and
hand-in-hand; the only crimes we commit
is that we lead each other to dark places;

a castle of lies; half-said the only loving
we’ve done is in our heads.
We lose time in words and suddenly

it’s four a.m. and the coldest hands
have only ever been yours; all that throbbing
gone to waste. Rest your heart

with me, it’s never lost; four a.m.
is your hour with me
because you’ll sleep and awake

and we’ll become thieves of conversations
stealing emotions we hide in jokes
and the sundry ‘have a nice day’s.

You become a handsome ruin
in the hands of the glass God; an imprint
of your presence on the coffee table
makes more hurt than the sound of you
almost putting your key in the door-
the dangling of keys, the pins shifting
like sands; I'm burning so bright now,
I think I'll turn these sands of time to glass.
You kissed me with such shards of love,
the blood in the mouth is the only memory of you left.

If I could put to words
what this year was,
I would say--
****.

**** this ******* year.

Thirteen years into
the second millenium,
was as unlucky as the number
said it would be.

This year was about
being on my own,
being sad,
being alone.

Yet I found,
poetry, and that death
could never be the answer
to questions I'd rather not ask.

I found friends
in people halfway
across the whole
world.

Love from the people
of my kind--
poets--
who loved and despaired.

This year was not
the one I would remember;
because new beginnings
are often disguised
as painful endings.

So here is to
my new beginning.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.