Sunday would knock on our window pane - repeatedly.
once
  twice
     thrice

once -
sneaking out of her place
in the weekly schedule,
Sunday tip toes,
t i p p y t o e s,
into the bedroom -
she sees a troll's rule
on the floor,
almost picks up a broom,
but then lets go.

twice -
creeping into the kitchen
now - takeout pizza on the counter,
unimaginable amounts of sugar,
a pile of dishes flowing like
a fountain -
the chaos seems to amaze her.

thrice -
we've woken up, so she
skirts the living room walls.
as I untangle my arms from your hair
she sees your eyes rise to me-
then fall.

*"Five more minutes?"

nothing.

not any thing.

no single thing.

you see? the dictionary can't tell you what nothing means, and I expect me to have the answer. the only travesty is that I indeed know what nothing is.

nothing is the first blade of grass
that withers away come summer.
you thought you could play on lush greens, but dead dry leaves are a ******.

nothing is also the bottom of a
once-full glass - you emptied its
contents thinking "this too, shall pass".

nothing is the first page of a diary
that you intended to keep. it is now
used as a paperweight, a place for
dust to sleep.

nothing is the first lie you ever
learned to tell - to bravely decorate
your face with a smile even if your pockets are filled with hell.

my personal favourite definition -
nothing is the space I occupy
on your overworked mind - I try
hard to look for traces of me but
they seem impossible to find.

Missing Someone*
is the name
given to the space beside you
that you assign to
someone else.

do I remind you of a summer's day?
does the memory of my eyes
slip between your skin
and your clothes,
teasing your spine
gently,
working its way
to the small of your back?

(small, like me - haha)

do my bad jokes
make you see my curly hair,
my crumpled figure,
all scrunched up
in the middle of numbers
that you can read
but don't register?

do my words flood your brain
and corrupt
whatever you're listening to,
adding my accents here,
and contorting languages there?
do your sentences lose count
of the number
of tongues they're made of?

Missing Someone
is the name
given to the space beside you
that you assign to
someone else.

does my taste of my laughter
linger in the air
beside you?

oh but my love is not
a red, red rose.
i chose to replace
every tear on my face
with dying embers
of every memory
you said you would remember.

i trust
that you must know
that i am not a summer's day,
i will never play
at being warm
or temperate.

you can berate
me for not knowing
whether i am to be
or not to be,
but forgive me
if i don't play by the rules
and exit
the right stage
in a wrong scene.

it just means
that your music
is not the food of my love.
i will continue to shove
your thoughts
under a carpet of denial.

do not throw away
any vial you might find
in my room,
you sealed my doom
when you stomped down
that staircase,
tripping on the last time
we went for a walk.

my face doesn't run
smooth like the course of love,
you should have known
this truth.

my eyes are not rose petals,
my heart not a white dove,
my love
when they say hell is empty,
they haven't been inside
my mind -
here
you'll find horrors
of a sweet kind.

Sleep caresses the
corners of my covers
stumbling over the pile
of clothes that I left
from yesterday's encounters
with the city.

Sleep tumbles over
the corners of my bed
stubbing her pinky toe
in this hurried process.
she has to reach me
before my brain takes over.

Sleep rushes in
before i have the chance
to say
.

it feels so easy to
hurriedly pen down a bunch
of you-centric words
huddled together like
cold syllables around the
last embers of an idea
that i had a minute ago.

it sure doesn't take effort
to weave you in and out
of clever metaphors
concealing you from the world
but letting you shine
for those who know you -
a blanket of fractured sentences.

it comes all too naturally to me -
making your every movement
into a monument constructed
from love and letters -
letter by broken letter,
love by broken love.

it is so easy
to cheat on poetry.
all i have to do is trap
your last word to me
between ink and paper
and watch you struggle
to ever leave these
paper confines.

it is so easy to cheat on poetry.