Hello, Cupid,
what are your plans for me this year?
I've been lucky for a while now,
but today might not be the same
This guy that I've been seeing,
well, we're not quite really dating?
And he told me last night
that he's not very lovey right now?
Sooooo
I guess today is a single girl's day...
But, hey!
There's still plenty of time
for a V-Day surprise:
roses at the door and Mylar balloons galore
A box of chocolate hearts and
A kiss for the Miss?
There's still an entire day,
so, Cupid, don't waste it away,
I really do love Valentine's Day.

My days are numbered...
the body casts a shadow
penumbra
across the lustrous face
of Time

Soon I will fall,
silent pendulum
prostrate
into Your celestial arms
Swamiji
a Lotus petal
drifting down from heaven

Swollen tears crash against
riverbanks
golden fish swim in limpid, rippling
black iris pools of my eyes

And the wild throbbing of
my soul
cannot contain
this love that
soars unfettered, undying
perpetually
towards...
You

Don’t confuse the hypnotic
hum of highway traffic
with the anesthetic lull
of your dreams deflating.

Don’t confuse the murmuration
of small black flies above the bowl
of rotting fruit with the devastation
you feel in the hard pit of your soul.

Don’t confuse the blinding eyes
of white vapor streetlights
with the coruscating promise
of an unmolested path home.

Don’t confuse the empty auto lot
at the edge of town with an orchard:

tonight the gravel of crushed bones
blossoms in a shower of moonlight,
the interminable hush of a hard rain.

somewhere in my mind
a sky is full of kites
sunflowers blossoming on a hillside
fields of grapes, of my salt mixed with your perfume
my eyes drift across a canvas of waves
on which your warm feet have flattened grapes
into a sea diluted of sadness
stretching far from left to right
and wisping clouds above.
the heart follows timidly behind
approaching cautiously the soft strokes and waves
seeing each kite as an arrow
shot into the air by Cupid's jealous lover
as heaven's golden eye creeps past the mountain,
dips into the ocean
leaves this sky
a sweet, light wine; leaves me tipsy-turvy
while one can't help but believe:
loveliness is a vine mapped out within each
arms can hold, arms can drown
...I await yours.

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The words don't flow the same
The colours seem too tame
Lashing out like a whip,
Tongue doesn't know when to stop..
Last piece didn't fall into place..
Now I think I've been building
A castle in abstract air..
This cartoon ground crumbles
beneath my leather shorn feet
I fall upon this weathered earth
Disillusioned yet unblinded
Stuffing my ears with things
I've ripped apart
To keep from hearing the tick tock
Of this broken clock
Cranking the volume of this poem up
To Drown out the phrase "I'm lost"
But the words don't flow the same
This tongue hasn't learned
This new rhythm
And I sit in the dark sometimes
Counting the seconds
Until my heart learns it too..

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.