Happy makes its tracks
searing, one hundred and twelve degrees
shower streams to skin
and from the corners of
my eyes to my jaw.
It gathers in droplets atop the
jaded pink tiles
that droop along my bathroom walls.
It condenses in distance
between us and words,
and splashes from my cheeks
to kiss the floor.
It bounces off my bedroom wall,
echoing,
slurred like dying art -
it hits me, head on,
brings me to my knees and
burns the carpet below.
You make me so happy, darling:
I'd never lie about that.

I don’t yet know Love
but I know you
and that’s good enough.

Year eleven
English class, you’d sit in front of
me, unaware I could hear
your pencil, scribbling
throughts you scrapped
when we all wrote poems.
The back of your neck would
flush angry red
as you tried to cram rhymes
against their will, into
stunted couplets.
You hated free verse (well,
most poetry, at that).
“It should have rules,”
you’d argue with
the teacher, trying to
derive the lexical formula
through some slip of her tongue,
convinced she was
safeguarding the key
to composition, or at least to
the coveted A.
I sat behind you,
sadly, seeing unborn poems
slip between your fingers,
trickle down the legs of your desk
and settle with resignation in the wastebasket.
I said nothing;
I sighed, and penned
a poem you’d hate
about all the ones you threw away.

The elixir of life
is the stuff of self:
we are spit and ocean
minuscule, innumerable, pellucid
drops dangling dangerously
from windowpane and eyelash
anticipating the inevitable;
the fall
dying to dry
when the sun shines scarlet.
We are nothing more than products of the sky
earthbound, plummeting, wishing
we were suspended in the clouds
gathered just beneath heaven,
hoping to float higher than destiny
someday.

I prayed wordlessly
with glue on my lips,
a prayer that cracked the roof of my
mouth:
not that I would find love, just
that I could have you.

A couple falling in love, first date,
another falling out, last fight.
Two boys playing chess,
a girl hungry, won't eat,
a reader, a writer,
an ocean full of thoughts,
and the rare listener.