You shake and tremble inside,
As howling pierces through the stain glass.
For you have ran from the devil’s ride,
His born demon growling after your ***…

As you have made it through the chapel door,
You pray the lock keeps you safe and warm.
Your soul shakes and rattles to the core,
Around you your love is torn.

What is left of candlelight,
Forces you to fret among the pews.
For no one can save your soul tonight,
Bleeding outside your lover’s heart he chews…

Thunder strikes the cross to fall and crack down,
You choke and pray your dear rosary.
Your screams beg to awaken the town,
Asleep they are, Wolfberry.

So sweet the taste a wolf wants,
And sweet the taste the wolf will get too.
Scratching and clawing the wood it haunts,
Just a couple more seconds to get through.

Tackled down the door revealing the moon,
The death of darkness has fixed red eyes.
Your blood to the beast is not immune,
He latches on your demise…

1)

don't forget to keep breathing
cradle-rock your heart
soothe your ribs
don't forget to breathe

2)

the cold is natural
bundle up now
you can always shed
your skin
when the sky turns

3)

don't linger
in the places you once Were
keep moving else
your blood settle

4)

late night parking decks
hotel rooftops
yourSelf a whisper
honeysuckle blooms through
concrete wounds

5)

don't think about waking
ripping out of your body
clawing through the coffin and up
and up

your gravesite is spotless still

6)

dream
cool rich earth
lilies and lavender
whisper rustle of leaves
dream

7)

dream
heavy water
lake mud and rock ****
desperate silence
dream

8)

dream
hunger
Hunger
H u n g e r
dream

9)

dream
slow opening
granite doors and damp moss
spaces between absent heartbeats
wake

10)

the hollow is natural
the brain craves familiarity
the phantom mirrors the physical
the hunger will fade
for a time

11)

when eating cherries
don't forget to imagine a tongue

12)

remorse with me
may the living one day
bestow our graves with offerings
we starve in silence

13)

hollowing may beget holiness
but it doesn't denote such
divinity must be earned
few buildings have managed

14)

you can almost smell his skin
stomach rising and falling
best not to dwell
his life is no longer yours

15)

phantom petal flesh
teeth and thrush
rosethorn oleander s e e p ing black
curses and
sinking
  forest rot
    deep
       soil


16)

do not follow
when the wind asks your counsel
when the moon thorn buds
when the night screams bruiseblueblack
do not seek the woods alone

17)

don't dwell
it's natural to feel exposed
keeping space beside you
will only make missing them worse

18)

let the ceiling fall
it is beyond your power
stars make fairy lights
through the frame of branches
as it should be

19)

Death is a story keeper
an archivist
a library of everything
from the first atoms
to the last sparks

20)

don't worry
the house hasn't moved
since you last saw it
though the tree seems closer

21)

press yourself into
the size of a fist
wrap clockwise around
his heart
cherish the fleeting creature

22)

there is always
my s p a c e
left in the bed
when I come home to
haunt

23)

there is
My space
left in the house
when I come Home to
Haunt!!!a

Zombie

24)

missed exit
streetlights smeared by rain
vacant hotels
liminality made nostalgia

25)

tracing paper kisses
early spring thaw
did I melt away too

26)

isn't is strange
your shadow doubles
film printed over film
light runs through you
heat waves off pavement

27)

time will slip off you
don't cling to it
you'd have better luck
holding the sun
time is beyond you now

28)

the hunger doesn’t fade
it twists itself into sickness
an unfillable void

29)

let your heart fill
with paint and
dust
like the nail holes in plaster
last remains smoothed over

30)

there is no place
for you here
why do you insist on
lingering

31)

this house is a heart
you
are a phantom gunshot

32)

do you remember
a sharp pain where your lungs should be
the pressure of blood stagnant

33)

molars, incisors, canines
rigid and Real against
the memory of your tongue
a sharpness drawing blood
staining the sidewalk beneath your false feet

34)

your body is
wet rot and beetles
a collection of rooms
teeth and stomach and hollowing all disarticulated
a knife in a box

35)


sunlight breaking dust layers
the curtains wave lazily
someone has tracked mud through the halls
a splintered attic door hangs off
its hinges
the air tastes green

36)

when you finally become hollowed
the space between houses
the space between ribs
the space between teeth
the light that pours out
you will be made holy
in your Own image

37)

thick ozone at the back of your throat
rainless thunder rolls
the old piano shuffles untouched
a discordant funeral keen
the air ignites

38)

elevator doors close
open
close
stale cigarettes and cleaning chemicals
fluorescent buzzing
vacant sobs in an airy tomb
of concrete

39)

parking decks remain
a kind of home base
for those of us lacking liminality
every one is the same
and as such becomes intimately familiar
no matter how far it means you are
from home

40)

how many eyes are you supposed to have
what about teeth
count them in the mirror
again
again
Again

41)

beauty is in the eye
gnashing teeth
silent weeping
love lies not in the heart
nor head
but in the stomach

42)

skin peels back
muscles made of embroidery thread
birch bones bleeding
indigo
flesh transmuted

43)

you move through the world
as it moves through you
silently creeping
swirls of smoke and fog
filling up to your sternum

44)

wander
for a time
everything will be unfamiliar
on your journey and
return
to a stranger’s home

45)

dust to dust
and ashes to ashes
your headstone crumbles
your bones are meal
the world in which you haunt
will one day be far removed from
your own

46)

study the web
the winding and stretching of gossamer
collapsed in on itself
clustered with dew

47)

study the shell
the crests and smooths hard as bone
fragile against your fingers
an inner matrix of holes

48)

study the nest
the braiding weaves of branch and thread
fractured to one side
feathers slip asunder

49)

study the desk
the crags and slopes of precarious inkstaining
spilling frozen towards the floor
fine filtering of dust

50)

remember
what Precisely is a
Haunted
house

51)

Congratulations on Completing Part I of Your Introduction Handbook
Please Continue onto Part II

52)

fallow hearts sewn full of seed
bones with the crack and bend of trees
pressed petal flesh bruiseblack at the knees
when building a new body don't forget what it needs

53)

liminality is a current
riptide in some places
burble in others
watch for waterfalls
death doesn’t mean you're a strong swimmer

54)

builders write messages
on the innermost workings
of their buildings
behind the plaster disintegrating and
the wallpaper peeling
a belly button
a birthmark

55)

when the moon calls your name
listen
when the raven screeches warning
heed
when the voices of a house offer deals
Run

56)

kitten-footed fog
follow it through
the tall thin trees
until you see lights
then follow it
home

57)

tell me about humanity
does it hurt you
is it heavy to bear
or is it just breathing
one foot in front of the other
a faded photograph

58)

rivers slip blue
through the land like veins
cornflower and cobalt
cold tissue paper flesh

59)

missed connection
you left flowers
three graves down
I was in white
under the maple tree

60)

missed connection
you look so lovely
in blue
I'm right here
just turn around

61)

missed connection
every sunday
you walk
bakery library home florist cemetery
you talk to yourself
I always answer

62)

missed connection
you talk in your sleep
do you sense I'm there
deep in your bones
do you know you'll never
be alone again

63)

missed connection
I smashed a plate
and spent all night playing
in your wires
can you feel me now
in the light bulbs humming

64)

missed connection
you haven't spoken since
it's so silent I could be heard
I'm sleeping in the walls
singing for you

65)

missed connection
you were up all night
researching the supernatural
I'm right here
just see me

66)

missed connection
sunday you started talking
to me
we took a new walk
library shopping district cemetery home
notes and candles and blacksalt
a rubbing of my gravestone

67)

missed connection
nothing we tried worked
you still can't see me
you can just hear
my humming in the power sockets
my singing in the walls

68)

missed connection
I wrote you a letter
with leaves under your staircase
you swept them without noticing
singing one of my songs

69)

missed connection
you found a picture of me
framed it
sometimes you leave letters
my name on the front
hidden in the table drawer

70)

missed connection
I tried writing on glass panes
whispering in your ears
you tried spirit boards
seances and divination
I'll never stop
as long as you live

71)

missed connection
you stopped leaving letters
sunday walks abandoned
for living friends
I shorted out the tv
you don't come home much
anymore

72)

missed connection
you started driving
to nowhere
I tucked myself
between
the back seats
you locked eyes with me
through oncoming headlights

73

missed connection
I broke every mirror
ran screaming through the wires
the curtains are catching fire
can you still feel me
do you still know I'm here

74)

missed connection
you look so lovely
in black
just turn around
please turn around
I'm right here
always

A string of unrequited loves
invade my mind amid restless sleep,
four AM dreams under starless skies occupied by
pretty schoolgirls with rosy cheeks.
Seven years flowed under the bridge,
yet one of the many unspoken faces stands out
uncloaked in the mist of corridors and the early stir
of shuffling feet and uniform skirts,
my breath catches in my throat as I think of her.

I think back to our interlacement inside those four solid walls,
how I had met you through gossiping whispers and scribbles on bathroom stalls,
our paths had crossed in late winters and spring,
but those summer conversations changed everything.

By now the details are coated in dust,
but I remember the shifting air around us
wrapping me in enchantment,
and I knew I hadn't known euphoria
until I'd tasted my name on your tongue,
and I've only ever been sober
but the sound of your voice could get me drunk.

You wore a shell unlike whatever held your notoriety
and I never saw it coming, like an English storm brewing,
getting caught in the middle of it all until
it became this game of counting midnights, pacing, waiting
for the day our fingerprints stamped the same staircase railing.

I'll bet my eyes that your deathless beauty is just as haunting
as it was when I looked up at your raven hair against jasmine skin
and eyes rimmed with shadows that got me thinking
how close can our skin skim before it gets too intimate?

Transposed to a time when
what made me float the most
were your glances,
brushing hands and
hugs between classes,
and all your excuses
for patching my bruises,
to wiping blue paint off the curves of your face
and suppressing the urge
to crop the space
between our flustered breaths and parting lips,
I'd still give anything to have that kiss.

These days, I recite your letters to my bedroom ceiling at every turn
and they echo back to me in harmonies, as sacred as scripture.
How do lost words in stale, stained ink still make me yearn, crash and burn
until I'm screaming to the sea before me that you slipped through my fingers?

In retrospect, I think it's fair if I called it love
and that's something I won't apologise for.
Perhaps someday, I could stand up with a hurdling heartbeat and tell you
that I loved you the way Emily loved Sue
in glistening pink, purple and blue.


Copyright © 2021 by S. Y. Kalindara. All rights reserved.

Sometimes you can feel the void. The emptiness. You can feel the wind blow through the chambers of your heart.

And sometimes, there's a haunting silence; the sound of ghosts of all the people I've ever loved.

Invisibility is a cliché wish,
But a night spent staring at the ceiling
Or the wall
With the feeling of existence
Washed to the minimum
By consumption,
Creates a similar feeling
Of invisibility to the senses.

I wish not for invisibility,
I wish to be your ghost
For exclusively your eyes
To witness me
As a shooting star
Scratches the sky
Leaving no trail
For those who missed it.
I hope I don’t miss
The trail of the gentle scratch
You leave in your last touch,
Letting this fleeting moment pass
Without recognition until lost.

If you spend forever in a single moment,
It’s not just a moment anymore,
For if you lose sight of me,
I'll erode away in the river
That you'll toss me in.
Emergence to accept defeat
That I let such a moment
Dissipate to become a lifetime
Of regret is the pressure point
In my mind regarding you.
Losing you now would be unforgivable,
Don’t let me go.