let me tell you
the sky was a piece of cardboard.
i was 16, painting
it black.
something precocious.
a beginner at beautiful.

i sat under this night i created,
waiting for someone like you
to nod and hold my my head and
tell me, tell me, tell me
you're it, you're all the ocean rushed into one
you're it.

oh i never believed in you.
nor the black night which was just black
cardboard but you
came along anyway -
ambling in and i didn't understand
if you were carrying light bulbs or not
whether they were burnt out or not,
whether this was still darkness.

but we talked.
and spoke and thought and
talked. we talked.
our words became
pinholes
pricked into the cardboard.

and i saw it then
for what it was
but i tried to hold the darkness, tried
to pull the blindfold tighter.
i saw it

a blackboard
dotted with white chalk.
the sequins on my birthday frock.
handfuls of glitter
spilling through a net.
i saw.

how we filled the night with stars.
how we didn't know what it was.

yet we wrote
we would remember.
how strange, how rare, how true.
our hands enfolded
we punched the roof.

look,
a hole.
some light.

a moon.

let me tell you
the sky in fact is
blue.

science tells you
growing into a woman
means a fuller chest and
hips just beginning to smile.
it's the new smell of blood.
it's thoughts fermenting
from grapes to wine.

art shows you
becoming a woman
is a series of quiet
revolutions.
a blessing to bear.
taking a little girl's hand.
leading her into
a great Somewhere.
wiping her tears
because she is afraid.

but logic and art are two
halves of one fruit.
we as humans are living proof.
with rational minds.
with paint on our hands.

so listen to yourself.

you will realize
becoming a woman
is a miracle.
a gift. a grace.
a poem dedicated to all
the little girls
and the women that screamed
for them.

Dazzling displays of downpouring snow
From an ashy and charcoal sky above
Peacefully drifts toward the ground below,
Creating serene scenery I love!

The atmosphere on these quieted streets
Seems rather calm in the still of the night.
During the daylight, even your heartbeat
Could be heard if you might listen just right!

Blanketed are these snowy linen lands
With a sheet colored as white as the moon.
This wint'ry blessing is utterly grand,
It's enough to make me slightly swoon.

I've always found the snowfall enthralling,
I choose to embrace its tempting calling!

The sky, a plate
in kindly blue,
smooth
as the ceramic face
of this, my swimming pool;

the bobbing palm
glazing the back
of my starfish shape
like white liquid icing;

sweet, the water's after-taste;
gently
pungent smell lodged
in the nape of my neck

I will wash the blue
off my skin, in a tiled doll-box
cubicle
I will smell the smell fade
out of my fizzled wet-strung hair
just as sugar dissipates
into the hot
nothingness of drinks.

I will pretend to forget,
then forget
I was offered a plate
in a summery shade, bordered by
tree branches
I was in that half
amniotic vessel -
weightless

as a seed pearl in
an ocean or a lover
exhaling in the depths
of a kiss;

a posy of
air on liquid.

I am the poem
I refuse to write.

My skin has formed itself
as sedimented book pages,
quietly injecting
our unspoken metaphors
into my bloodstream
of Murakami, of Plath,
of everything that hurt too much
to even whisper to my typewriter.

I am a poet,
and I will type you
into the night sky.

And the wind whips the unsteady fingers
of rain
like the swirls and whirls
of ice-cream in cones -

melting on my unsteady fingers,
on a sun-stricken holiday
belonging to a place
in which I don't belong -

until the rain and I meet
in recognition
and open fingers

The poet looks
and delves.

She wonders if he ever stops,
him, this rushing-forward-breathlessly train,
if he did park himself in fantastical paragraphs;
the poet is dumbfounded at him
ceasing.

In construction sites of grammar,
where free ideas float in ruins,
poet wonders how,
how, how
he came to plan to live
up
to an exclamation mark.
And condensed so many dribbles and strikes
of strange and fruitful, even withered
paragraphs into one line and pointer -
a smile and a lope-stagger dance of a walk -
an exclamation mark.

The poet stares, once again
astounded by the little streaks of the universe
and longs to hold on to something.
Disarmed,
she can't quite put a finger on it,
his gaping honesty and his quiet one,
that contradiction
shouting in her face
while whispering in her eyes.

The poet laughs -
laughs of, in, out
of sleep.
Summer is here.
And she chooses to notice.
He laughs too,
but he's always been noticing
and the poet writes down how
she learnt to bite and chew into the fruit of the world
and taste

it sour runny sweet cold explosive lingering
just as him.
The poet saw all
colours rolling in one
strange song of limbs.
She did not like the music
but she made herself a blank white canvas

and listened
and laughed

clean, silly laughs
fluting out of the incongruity
of simple,
simple
moments.

Fun life, easy stretch of the mouth -
it is possible to smile down at
what a clown pain is.
He declares this boldly
without saying a word
or two.
The poet is dumbfounded at him
being.

She did not see and had not seen and now only began to picture
but she was blind.
He said he was blinder and that
was true. The poet
did not smirk but giggle at the irony -
he lived in pop-bold spectacles,
she slept in black and white films.
But both were blind.

We cannot see and
we
are blurs.

The poet likes that life scrapes away at her
because she can see chinks of white sunshine
through all the sheared-off layers.
Clean, clean,

bright, bright -
he teaches her in a beam
without a hello.

The poet writes poetry
on breathing action prose.
And she laughs -

You are everything I don't want
but I'm curious.