When I left my father's house,
he looked at me with sad eyes.
I wondered why. Here I was off
to marry the marquis of my dreams
and there he was in the shadows
of a crumbling house
turning into a dream instead.
I wanted to tell him
that I was his daughter
through and true
and he would be proud yet.
But we didn't have time
not for silence nor for words.
So I left my father dusty and alone
and silent and never looked back.

When I returned to my father's house,
he looked at me with love in his eyes.
I wondered why. Here I was because
the marquis of my dreams had become
blood, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones,
living in an empty house of gold.
The reality of it hurt like a raw wound.
I had to leave.
I wanted to tell my father
that I was his daughter still
but maybe not so true nor so brave
and not so much a cause for pride.
So I told him so in silences and in
still, small words.
My father listened, dusty and alone,
and all he said was
"I'm glad you're back."

She tells me she's been starving
herself and she used to burst
into tears at the sight of food
but they sat around the table
and forced her to eat.

It scares me, this pain of hers.
So I joke and tell her that
this is what happens when you're
good at maths -- counting calories
that is, because the

Numbers always slipped away
from me, but the food remained.
So you know, I never could.
join the club, and it made me
Feel inadequate.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like
food. Couldn't live without it.
But how strange it is that eating
is my anchor to this tossing,
spinning life but the

Act of eating sets her adrift.

I am beginning to realise that love,
love isn't necessarily like that carnival
you find yourself tumbling into
where the bright colours and fumbling
anticipation make you feel like
the lone tightrope walker dancing
on a high-wire.

No.

I am beginning to realise that love,
love is like the surprise of the old, bare magnolia
tree you've never quite noticed un
-til one day rounding a corner
you look up to see that it has (pinkly) burst into
song. And you soon find yourself
like a chorus of birds, thrilling
to the melody
of its blooming.

Dearest, you who have moved with me
as the waves to the pull of the moon,
You are leaving me now.
I know I am not the only moon to your sea.
There is another who sways you to her tune.
Her name is scrawled in the furrows of your brow.

But the tears in your eyes and your heartache
Should they not be mine?
I who live on this island, immortal and alone?
You are leaving me a prisoner in your wake,
You with your talk of crooked highlands and fragrant pine
And rugged crags. Dangerous talk, I should have known.

Now I close my eyes and dream
Not of the sweetness of the cypress
Nor of familiar violet-eyed meadows,
But of birds that spin and gleam
high above the land's caress.
You have turned me into another Echo

Stupidly repeating the names of places and people I will never know.

A cat curled in the rug of my soul
snug and purring,
licking sweet cream off its paws.

i.

the bones of your face
are long and defined.
i parse you
into geometry:
the firm lean lines of your
nose, your jaw
as a child's drawing,
as a cubist's dream.

ii.

you linger in my mind.
the way your hands
peel apart a question
as an artichoke falls open
barbed layer by layer until
you bare its redolent heart
which is also the answer.
Yes.

iii.

lulling, your words are calm
drops falling into the ocean
of our mutual silence. i feel
only contentment, only
contentment.

There you watch the movies
and you see them, the leads,
holding hands and walking off
into the sunset.
I wonder what it is like
to walk off into the sunset,
to feel like all your worries are going to be
dissipated by the sun's golden heat
and you're gilded and beautiful, heart soft,
and you think: this is as good as it gets
but then all of a sudden someone shouts "Sike!
it's just a movie set"
and then you realise that tan was fake
and the actors never liked each other anyway.
I tell you it makes my heart ache,
those deceiving sunsets by the bay.

"I'm in love with you," her aristocrat says,
And the girl tries to hide her dismay.
"Why do you say that?" asks the girl
"because you're new and old" says the Earl.
"You love me because I'm a novelty?
Just because I'm pretty and not like other royalty?"
And she feels her heart begin to ache
And she curses herself for being a flake.

But then he merely laughs and draws
her hand into his and with a little pause,
says: "The taste of you, the smell of you, all these things are new,
and this is why, my Sweetest one, I cannot stop kissing or touching you.
But deep down Dearest, you should know
that as sure as the Kilimanjaro snows-
That even despite my young ******* son
Or the fact that my leg's shot through
and the ghost of an ex-wife hovers over me
and the skeletons won't stop tumbling out-
Still and always you are known to me.
It is as if we had never been strangers, see.
By the crook of your smile and the laugh in your eyes,
You couldn't hide from me, not in a disguise.
And this is how I'm in love with you, Sweet,
Newest yet oldest lover-friend, with you, I've found my own two feet."

I am trying to write poetry about flowers,
The messy, spillingover kind, rioting, too
Bright, so alive something in me cracks like  sidewalks
When tree roots push up the concrete like When molars
Erupt from sore gums that time she said when I grew
Too big for carrying, I had to learn how to talk
like an adult. Whatever. Money. Car. ***. Pill.
Capitalism. Work. Responsibility.

But something about tangly sunbright flowers still
makes my heart say whee.

Unfurl your hands to me, Grandmama.
Your hands are browned and gnarled,
yet textured by age
as pressed flower petals.

O tell me the story of a soul:
As mysterious and delicate
as the heart of a rose,
And yet as always,
as strong as oak.

I get drunk on your hot summer sky eyes.
I get drunk on their sultry, reckless, bright
reminder of a fresher world when
we hollered off wind-swept cliffs and panting
ran heart-bursting through wild open spaces
when the world was new and strange but entire
-ly ours to command.
I got drunk on you.

You know what the stories say
About me. They call me silly,
Foolish, disobedient. They say
I should have listened to my
Father. Now he was a guy
Worth listening to: the one
Who built the labyrinth -- the one
That caged the bull-headed beast
And sent virgins, hopelessly
Lost, to their deaths.

He made me a pair of wings
And when he was finished
told me to contemplate my
mortality. And not to fly too close
To the sun. For the feathers
Were joined only by wax and days
But the sun was made of
molten fire and eternity.

How could I listen though?
When after so long
Penned in the cool, dim labyrinthine
Depths of his workshop, I was finally
Free. A soft warm shaft of sunlight
pierced me through and I was lost.
On my ****** flight, I was ecstatically
lost, rising madly to the shivering
brink of infinity.

Imagine me with my great white
waxen feathered wings circling
(Circling) (Circling) spiraling
Higher and higher to a crisis.

Oh I melted.
Then I fell.

I do wish they'd asked me how I'd have
Liked to be remembered though: Not
the merely foolish bull-headed kid
who refused to obey,
But the dreamer with wild eyes,
The one who once flew
too close to the Sun
And briefly,
(All too briefly)
Blazed.

It wasn't just the shoe.

I like to think that she wanted to go to the ball because she was tired of being defined by her job scope. I mean what she did was even in her name -- Cinderella from the cinders that smudged her face from cooking all day. Cinderella the maid. Cinderella the cook. So she went to the ball to regain that sense of identity and she was ever grateful to her fairy godma for the dress and glass slippers because the fairy saw that Cinderella was just a girl and girls no matter how tired, like pretty things. And this is also true of boys, but I'm not going there.

And I like to think that when she went to the ball she didn't know it was the Prince but he was hot and the strange blushy reaction she got when she saw him didn't really confuse her because it just reaffirmed that she was human and it was right and natural to feel all these things. And she didn't know what to say when she danced with him, so she offered him a recipe for stew and told him a secret (barley grain made stew taste even better) and the Prince was amused, and they weren't in love with each other. Yet. And when the clock struck midnight and he offered to kiss her, she politely declined because she didn't know him all that well, except that he had been very kind and listened to her. Then she ran off.

And when she went back to her old tired life, she was sad but glad because she knew that she was alive and human after all. Except sometimes she worried about him because he didn't have barley grain in his stew. And the Prince went back to his clean well-ordered life but he thought often of the girl who had been so obviously not been of the nobility. And he might have smiled at the memory of her from time to time when he was alone. Until one day he realised that he was in love with the memory of her and he needed to rectify that. So he brought out the shoe and went searching. And I like to think that the glass slipper was just a metaphor for how fragile appearances can be, that we shouldn't take things at their face value, because when he finally found her, she was covered in muck and grime but he recognised her anyway. And she wasn't proud of her appearance but she wasn't ashamed either because it was only a necessary result of all the work she'd been doing.

And I like to think that the Prince realised how wrong he was to have fallen in love with the memory of her because the real woman was so fully present and alive, incomparable to his flimsy memories.

And she, she was glad because he had recognized her. And that was how they fell in love. Only after all the hard work. Oh there was more hardship later on in their lives, but I like to think that at that re-encounter they fell in love because they knew that neither of them was afraid to work to get what they wanted.

I used to think that your smile held the key
to this wide, bewildering existence.
Because it was both.
But then you see,
I never forgot
The song you sang to me:
The one about the green mirror of the sea
And the lie of the blue sky.
And therefore why
Some vast emotions
are better kept locked away
Lest they be mistaken for truth.

It always starts the same way.
"Hello it's been a-while."
And then half-formed regrets hidden under word layers,
wrapped up to
conceal, deceive.
A smile. Goodbye, farewell.

The ache doesn't come from parting.
Au Contraire dear one.
It comes from what-ifs, might-have-beens, should-haves;
and always the knowledge of walking away,
letting a part of you go,
a whisper on a breeze,
a prayer.

And so we begin.
Head bowed,
Pen poised,
Whetting words against the edge of a dictionary.

A list:

He wears blue.
I love blue.

His clothes fit.
Mine don't.

He isn't ashamed to wear his spectacles.
I am. I am. I see myself too clearly with them.

He only eats vegetables because he has been convinced for four years.
I have never ever been absolutely convinced of anything for longer than a day.

Maybe except gravity.

Me, pulled like a planet into his orbit.
A minor planet,
But no.

I am not a romantic.
My fingers stutter on the keyboard.

He's smart.
I am, but differently-abled.

His quiet is cool.
My quiet is shy and sweet and all the things girls are supposed to be until we find out that we don't have to shave our legs because ***** patriarchy.

He had a vegan mint rolled oat brownie for lunch but they are not cake because they're flourless.
I ordered the 'beef salad' on the menu because I thought it was funny.

And all these reasons that we wouldn't fit, and still a thrill of excitement. And the girls around us that make us laugh and the girls who are not me who make him laugh. And the shame at having tried too hard and acting too cute and being too, just being too...

Bless me, for I have sinned.
I saw the fantasy before the person.

You left me
A story
And a hole
In my soul.

My sister grumbles
when I say less miserables
Diable!
I tremble
when I think of less miserables.
In Les Misérables
everyone needs a bit of a scrub.
Jean Valjean takes a gamble
to steal a loaf or die without preamble,
and when it comes down to it,
he really only took a sample bit.
But he was caught
and sent to the docks
and ****! His life went down in shambles...
So when you think your life's a jumble
and no one cares so much as a rumble,
take a breath and then think back to
the fates of all those more and not less miserable than you.

They say if you meet Death today,
he'll take your breath away.

I have pools of sadness within me,
of unfathomable depths.
I do not know how it is that
my sadness cannot be measured—
only doled out in spoonfuls:
a bitter medicine
taken daily.

Do not abandon me,
No do not leave me,
To the wilderness of my mind:
A veritable tundra, a savannah,
Cold and dry and arid.
My soul pants and thirsts for a cool tall drink of somebody.
Give me a man,
Tall, strong, beautiful,
Let him hold me in his arms and croon to me
and sing of star-song and moon dreams
under the blanket of a velvet night.
Let the warm winds come with the salty whisper of sea,
of jungle-scent and overblown jacaranda flowers,
or snatches of arctic breeze
and the high keening cry of the albatross.
Only,
Do not leave me to myself,
For the scent of jungle then fades to mud,
and the jacarandas wilt,
and the arctic spaces chill me to my bones,
And I drown in the unfathomable darkness of emotion
In the lullaby-rocking motion of the sea.
And I cannot see you,
And I cannot find you,
And the night becomes a terrible blackness
And the stars intimidate
And the moon remains impassive.
No, do not abandon me.

Nunc est bibendum,
nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus*

        Now is the time to
                       drink,
Now the time to
            dance
                     footloose
                            upon
                               the earth.

       Tread  lightly
                      upon
              the clay of
      my  heart.

                Do you
           not know
                  the way
                       my pulse
                              drums in
                drunken            syncopation
               ­             as you
                                   waltz your way
                                            towards me?


The courage of your beauty overwhelms.

Lord,
Your eyes hold
The age of the universe.

"You've loved sometimes so beautifully,"
someone wrote to me today.
Me, loving beautifully?
I don't know if I should laugh or cry;
If I should exult because (sometimes)
the flickering flame of my heart
becomes so incandescent with love
that
  I
     blaze (?)
Or if I should cry
because
(so often)
I feel more like shadow than fire.

Trees rearing their boughs in the wind
laughing through rustling leaves,
Water dancing through drain pipes
like gurgling brooks.
The sharp thrill of a far-off bicycle bell,
Whistling blue skies,
Cool stone floors and sun-scented skin:

Soon the world will bring
whispers of spring.

Spring is violently upon us.
The earth sings like a Valkyrie
heralding the dawn.

The anxious wait is over,
The crocuses are alive:
Golden heads thrusting
through dark loamy soil.

Spring is violently upon us
Dearest. We strain and waltz
In the dark, a gathering symphony
Explodes into the tumultuous
beating of drumming hearts.

Punch-drunk, the twits circle
Their nests, the weight of snowy
Linen on our chests, and sunshine.

To the Victorian poets of Decadence:

I love you, you who conquered lands unknown,
spread diseases, plagues full-blown;
you who revelled
in the unbearable lushness of being
sensuous and decadent, kings
of insidious words, slipping sweetly,
sliding slickly
into the narrow channels of the outraged public brain.

Ah how I love you, you who exhilarated
in deep despair; woe to the nightingale immortalised!
Who yet found meaning in dark emptiness,
rallying 'round with the cry of 'Art for art's sake!'
And so you, bridled with emotion, eat your cake,
fuming with bright, bitter melancholy,
never gaining the intimacy
and restfulness you so craved.

I think I love you because I understand you,
you who search relentlessly through
the victorious squalor of life that will not cede
control to your grasping hands
but jostles greedily to conquer virtuous lands.
Run away Prudence, Chastity and Grace!
Fall to your knees, hang your head, hide your face,
let shame overtake you, for Faith is a cuss word, you've decided.

And so, you arrogant men who surrender
to the hedonist's depraved desires, you pleasure seeker,
dearest sybarite, no mere voluptuary,
You whose gilt-edged poetry tongues my heart,
whose heady sensitivity makes me start,
and long for the things of the world I should not cannot want,
I love you unto madness, to distraction, to a slant-
ing of morals, to giving in and giving up.

I fall, a long way down.

I want you in a gasping sort of way.

So i tried to be Snow White
And did the whole pin-up girl look
Red lips, black hair, white skin.
then I joined a website
and learnt how to cook
and how to wield a rolling pin.
Then I sat and waited for a charming prince
who never came.
So I got up and made an apple pie
and lo seven guys turned up in a pinch
but most of them were really lame
and short and they didn't like the pie. I cried.
I threw the pie into the trash
where the rats choked on the apples
and waited for their own true love's kiss.

(But then I needn't have worried about making a hash
of things because later on the steps of an abandoned chapel,
The Anti-Pest Society gave me an award for getting rid of all the rats
and that's how I got work as an exterminator -which I am justifiably proud of and good at-
So hasta la vista baby, I'll be back.)

I think people need to be looked at in the eye and told "you are kind and good. you are kind and good. you are kind and good."

I do not know what it is
That you so earnestly wish to forget.
That makes me tremble.
I find you smothered
In the startling infinity of the universe
Where time neither sets nor rises
And the stars are the stars are the stars.
So I wake you from your sleep
And pronounce your name,
Shaking you into existence.
The weight of memories
A pebble rippling your dream-pool.
There, I have disturbed the still hour,
See how things begin to move:
Swift-footed Time begins its race,
And glaciers start to weep.
Stars unfold their dark mysteries
And secrets are spilled
by quivering plums.

Beginnings and endings,
I would not have you miss them.
This then is why I woke you.
Even the Lethe river must run its course.