Poor little fly
Fighting just to survive
No one saw it's demise but me
As he struggled not to freeze
First he flew in little hops
But to soon that stops
Then he walked in endless circles in the Sun's rays
But soon that too gave way
Now he lays frozen stiff
I wonder if me seeing made a diff
That this little flys last moments on earth
Didn't go unnoticed, and to a little poem had given birth

This poor little flys fight
Is a lot like my own sad sight
Wonder if anyone sees my slow decent
How this life is leaving me bent
Wonder if when I finally freeze and die
Will anyone notice and wonder why
Or see how I fought to survive
Just like that little fly

Girl No. 1 wears her jeans cuffed and hates everyone but the Jets. Her voice is honey-thick around biting words. Smiling does not come easy to her. She wears her face like a mask—big glasses, big eyes, big quiet. When I see her, she lifts her hand in a grim wave, delta creases in her brown palm. Her excuse for her silence is that she’s boring, but she’s not. She dots her eyes with tiny stars and listens to German orchestra whenever she can. She thinks she has buried herself well, but bits of her still protrude from the topsoil, aching to be known.

Girl No. 2 is grey flannel and deliberate sentences. Her hair covers her face, yet when she speaks about trees and animals and the hole torn in our atmosphere by ultraviolet, ultraviolent rays, she is thunder. I gave her lotion for her cracked hands one time. When we smiled at each other after, we knew at once we were part of the same club. Girl No. 2 never corrects people when they forget her name. They say Kaitlyn, Kaleigh, Katie…let the word drop as if it were no more important than a used napkin. I hate it. I pick her used napkin name from the floor and smooth it over my lap. I say it right and she replies, with perfect seriousness, thank you: Thank you for the correct pronunciation of my identity.

Girl No. 3 is a hard one. Look at her once and you’ll see Maybelline lashes and a glass-cutting face. Look twice and you’ll see more. The sag of her shoulders, the stinging weariness of posturing for people far beneath her. I startle her. I’m too inquisitive for her taste. She does not want the world knowing her mother drank three liters of ***** before driving off a bridge, that her favorite color is celery green, or that anorexia and anxiety stalked her through the halls of high school like a pair of vultures. She wants to stay in her castle of ice, but it has imprisoned her. You poet, she teases me. You right-brained heap of color and sensitivity. You’re too much. I don’t know what to do with you. I ask her who she is and she recites her answer. 130, 125, 2315. But this girl is more than her IQ, her weight, or her SAT score, and when I tell her so, her Maybelline lashes are ruined.

a woman once drowned from lonesome fear:
the kind of sickness
you cannot hear.

she toiled with the time she'd lost
willing to take the brunt
of their cost.

the last word that parted from her lips
was "the fire burned my heart alive,
a pain that I cannot survive."

and the tiller came to take her away.

when the tiller comes to grasp your hand
what will he take from you?
what will he demand?

there is no value to devotion
if you're the only one
swimming in the ocean

so whatever sets your chest aflame
there is no fire
you cannot tame

In this world I'm an unknown,
Though my presence isn't fully ignored.
I'm present in this ebb and flow of life,
Interesting that it only took one step.
Simple yes,
But it's difficulty lies in the fear of it.
It's all one big step,
Scary, frightening and a little bit exciting.
It all begins with that step,
You just choose whether or not to go through with it.

I first cried
where freshness itself struggled
to breathe. Outside
the Ganges,
asthmatic,
began to cower
back in fear, in
disgust, in
disease, browning
like the discarded banana peels
on the roadside below.

I first cried
in a dirt town
where kings and queens
drank to grass avenues
and swaying music in the realms
of history books.

I first cried
where those books
aged quietly
in forgotten rooms.

I first cried
where the streets bled
out crumpling homes and
cardboard stores with misspelt names,
spilling children in dust dresses
and hair matted
into rust pieces.

I first cried
where those children hung
babies on their arms
like my mother swung
her handbag, a flag
of Valentino, while stumbling on
crushed cans and dog ****
and foetid mud-water
on the way to the dentist.
And the children cried
out snot, their arms
perpetually reaching
for a rupee
from the traffic.

I first cried
where white-lit department stores
sprouted in defiant sanitation
between eczema-covered apartment blocks
in which washing lines drooped
and parking was always a problem.

I first cried
where many gods and goddesses
resided on the footpaths
decked in glitter
and cloths of rouge
as old men with
skin weathered into mottled
leather shook
beneath sheets of jute
on the roadside below
and offered tiny flames
to their gods
as morning bellowed and their coughs
grew worse.

I first cried
where stareless men burnt
their fingers
on the Chinese noodles with too much
chilli powder
they cooked and fried and cooked
for those who never saw them
but to haggle over a ten
rupee note,
on the roadside,
on every corner.

I first cried
as thread-blanketed teenage girls
with wrinkled faces
squatted amongst cows
in the middles of roads,
chanting prices, in voices
full of tar,
of the mound of peas
they were selling for that week.

I come every year.

And I'm ashamed to say
I'll never live here
but in my verses
because I can't stand the smell
of the place where I was born.

I first cried

here.
I first cried here.

What a thing it is to claim a smile.
To grant command
to ranks of muscles ever-ready,
but rarely used,
to produce such radiance
that means I must turn away lest I be blinded.
Regardless of all other commitments
I lay claim to that smile of yours
if only unofficially
if only just for now.

Something I've observed
and maybe you've noticed it too
that your dance is always the same
with steps well-tread, familiar;
a frown,
a concerted effort to hold that cigarette in place
before the resolution;
you sit back,
always one ankle resisting on the opposite knee,
contented.

I must ask,
did the breaker of your nose
ever imagine
that it could form so permanent a fixture in my mind?

Did they ever think
that this feature,
so proudly crooked
would come to define a man?

The same man who bites his nails
who commands rooms with voice alone
whose shirt lays against his chest
just so.