I commit myself to the homicide
of my thought-flowers.
I indulge in the **** -
Killing my darlings
for the sake of art and sanity.
What a paradox.
I have bloodied my hands
with it even so.

No more love-lite poetry!
No more adolescent chinks of the
pseudo-heart!
No more infantile fork-stabs
at the plate of kid-intellectualism!
No more Wikipedia pages
on thoughts
that can swallow computers
whole!

I'm killing my darlings
for the sake of art,
for the sake of sanity -
what a paradox.
Blood is flowing.

I'm a murderer of ideas tonight -
today I will write
about many of life's very few truths.
Like trees.
Like soil.
These are the only constants in mathematics.
These are the identities.

In my garden, I reach out
to crush an
almost-crimson hibiscus.
Petals squelching with skin and nectar -
no perfume.
The hibiscus roils, unliving.

Red pulpy mess;
heart out of chest.

“And then, you’d break his heart.’
‘I can’t ever think I could do that. I couldn’t break anyone’s heart.’

You look at me. The tempting colour of your eyes dilates into grey. A blank moment; a break in the cinematography.

At night, I can’t sleep because your smell lingers on me like cheap perfume.
What do I do, what do I do?

That night, I heard
the violin.
Between staves of
leaves,
string-encrusted frills,
I heard a violin,

not cry, not sing, but
dream.
I heard a violin dream.

Before long, after
soon,
I heard the violin.
Between shifting, fleeting,
mindful things,
I heard a violin,

fitted unmathematically
within a memory.

'Tu me manques'.
I miss you.

Or literally
'You are missing to me'.
I like that.
I like that it seems
as if
this person is so necessary,
so important,
so absolutely integral to my life that
they are 'missing' from me.
Missing.
Like a limb or my skin or my thoughts,
things I can't live without.

'Tu me manques'.

They didn't know that
her heart was perpetually on vacation,
stuffed
between the pages of Austen and
Murakami.

Yes, they loved her
autumn smiles, her conversations, even
the jazz ensembles of her
clothes. But her heart
was locked in the New York Public Library.

The distance was far
too great, the risk far
too much.
After all, this was the place where Paul
Varjak told Holly
he loved her
and all she did was look at him.

you filter every pixel pore
you angle yourself thin

my darling, which
do you love more?

the ******* the screen
or the girl in your skin?

Dear Vamika,
of a long and a
short
time away. Of the
future, when
your ******* are fuller
and you can finally speak
French fluently.

I hope you are a woman.

I know you
have not changed the world.
I didn’t write you that way.
I’m still
not writing you that way.
For my cheap gel pen
has none of that spark
of Fitzgerald’s and Nabokov’s,
who could bewitch the imagination with
such timeless giants
as ****** and Daisy.

So remember:
you’ll be brilliant
but absent
from any history books.
But still.
You are enough, exquisitely enough,
for the literature
I inhabit.

Hence, I fill pages with your inky
outlines, shade in the spaces
slowly
with hopes and wishes and poetry and dreams.
For you, of you.
I note
all that you are
composed of, so that
even the marginalia
laughs out your lipstick,
your clothes drawers,
your reading habits.

I am writing you as a woman.

I am writing you
as Music. Here is your laughter,
a little smokier now,
unspooling like a work of
Debussy’s. Here are your
fingers, lighter now, like meringues
or dandelions, as they dance
on your silver flute,
better, better, better than ever,
in shiny theatres far
grander than you imagined.
And here are your tiny
scrawled music notes, that with a few touched
keys, echo as tumbling stars
in the ears of thousands
and then plenty.

I hope you are a woman.
So play, compose, laugh and sing; be
Music ‘til your dying day.

I am writing you
as Ambition. It is calmer
than the fire that currently
singes my hands. Yet it’s still as
constant
as the flame you
light, every night before bed,
in front of the Goddess Durga
you pray to.
Your heart still
salivates for hard-boiled
surprises, for lucky pennies
found on pavements, for the
metallic sweetness of, yes,
success.

I hope you are a woman.
So strive, and strive again,
‘til you’re nothing but ash.

I am writing you, too,
as Success.
Surprise!
Those words unhooked
from the crevices of your mind,
are now bound in
paperbacks.
You are a poet, sleeker than
the 17-year-old fledgling
in her dim bedroom.
You are a journalist,
pouring morning stories
like hot tea, and sighing
with honey glee at
your name in
print.
You are a writer;
you fill even more pages, and
you now have a
gleaming, expensive
pen.

I hope you are a woman.
So write, ‘til you have lost
all breath.

I am writing you
as Compassion. How could I not
let you share words (your  personal magic) with
countless sparking children?
And not fill your hands with
gifts of maths, English,
science and art that you can
give and give and
give to them?
An education is as precious and
priceless as Picasso, you say.
A human right, all the same.
A human right.

I hope you are a woman.
So be kind. That’s it.
Always.
I have not forgotten  
to write you as
Justice.
Go out and support,
wave flags and placards,
sign petitions, join many
campaigns, scream out ‘til
your throat can’t bear such
honesty, such
indignation.
Keep fighting.
Never stop. The world is unfixable,
imperfect and
unhappy.
Help it.

I hope you fight for other women.
I hope you fight for other humans.

I am also writing you
as Resilience. So you’re able
to face yourself in that
mirror, even though
your stomach has a stubborn bulge, still,
and you haven’t yet learned
to smile at your nose.
Still.
And I’m reminding you that you do,
yes, you do,
have the strength to cry alone, then
get over it,
to have panic attacks, then
get over it,
to pick yourself up from
life’s many disintegrations and
start again.
You can. You’ve already done it.
I hope you always will.

I know that you are a woman.
So never give up, as
cliché as it sounds. Go ahead and
die trying.

Now, as the cadenza
of this rather sentimental piece,
which I’ve spun as
sweet
as stolen sugar
and the romantic comedies at which
you secretly weep,
I am writing you as
Tenderness.
See, I decided that Love and
Romance are but
bombs. And you and I both
believe in non-violence.
Therefore, you are
a hugger now, with lips
which kiss your husband,
scold your children
and sing
lullabies to the whole silly lot of them.
Your heart is always
swimming
with a good bit of warm wine,  so don’t
question its fullness.
Take care of yourself.

This.
This, above, is all I hope for you
to stay and have and be
until the symphony’s final note, your
final breath.

You are a woman.
Flawed, intelligent, beautiful, cracked, strong, kind, stubborn, soft, honest.
Real.

You are a woman.
So stay like this,
but be just a little more wiser, a little more grown
each passing year.

A woman.
Vamika, that’s all I ever want you to be.

the words
are beads and gems
and hooks and strings

scattered in a box
somewhere in
the softness behind my breastbone

my palms are up to catch the key
whenever it chooses to land

a pandora poised
to make ornaments
from all she uncovers,
all she unleashes

Sun slits in through slats
of kitchen window blinds
and she is alone.

The art major is cooking
spaghetti,
pretending her thrifted T-shirt
bearing a cotton copy
of Campbell's Soup Cans
is not stained with tears and blood.
Oh, but that's hysterics and
hyperbole;
art has a tendency of making its worshippers
melodramatic...no?
The blood is only tomato sauce
and the tears...
well, what are tears but
water and salt?
After all, dramatizing the
mundane is just one awkward shade
of artistic temperament.
Visualizing life through
a heavy silk screen.

The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is redder and
redder as she cooks.
Just as
her paintings bleed more blood
as she dangles a brush over them -
the teary-eyed watercolours.

The art major has decided
that drawing out extremities
of colour
might transform
her own life into
a pop of a Warhol painting.

The art major sighs and
stirs.

She thinks, tries to
think
in technicolour.
Today's thought-pencilled thesis
concludes (like a brush stroke of uncertain finality) that
love is the red of tomato soup cans.
Anger is the boil, passion is
the gulp,
danger, caution, warning,
the hot breaths, fleeting warmths,
the burn and sweet and tang.
She looks down at the
scarlet of
Warhol's soup cans,
blooming in worn out cotton
on her chest.

It might as well be blood, she
thinks.
It is,
it is,
it is.
Blood red love -
tomato soup cans.

Sun sets in slits
through kitchen window blinds
and she is still alone.

The art major sighs and
stirs.
The spaghetti is ready.

the smell of a hospital
disinfecting hands and
identities
placed on the counter.
a passport-size ambition
a fingerprint of luck.
you have arrived.
you are here.

you came in
a bus full of languages
funnelled into the room
'welcome to - '
lost and found
in translation.
you cannot understand
you will try
to understand.

your newness.
new you.
you are new.
you do not understand
you are here.

Little girl in a blue
snow globe.
Pressed white shirt and tartan skirt.
Hair slipping
out of a ponytail or braid or something
like that.
Laughter like a current
to be lost in by a boatman.
Her first time at the beach.
Writing
childish saltwater sonnets
in the sand with her toes.

Paper-plane sky
kisses
sea brimming
out of its seams.
Singing, on-off key,
school choir tone,
'Never Let Me Go'.
Who needs, she needs
nothing
but
the horizon
cupped
in outstretched palms.
Innocence stored
in jagged-shiny shells
waiting to be
buried
in hot, bare sand.

Time comes to shore, oceans
grow warmer,
shallow.
No more of kid braids
but a woman in
azure.
Her whole life having been
a half-moon run
out of deep, dry wells
in search of,
in search of...
in search of
what, but
hope.
Cracking oyster shells
looking for
pearls.

Time again comes to shore.
Cigarette pants for tartan skirt,
in a blue-almost-black.
Staring out
at water lapping before her,
before her, after the sky.
Before,
after.
The horizon is a pretty picture
she wants to hang
on the wall of her heart.
But she, schoolgirl trapped in snow globe,
remembers
textbook phrases like
'Humans are made up of 75%
water.'
So we are drowning every moment,
she thinks dryly.

Water within,
inevitable.
Maybe her skin or nerves or vocal cords
sensed it all those years ago
in the schoolgirl's snow globe.
Like crying, like love,
like fearing, like dying.
Shifting, receding, flowing in
and out.

Could emotions be tides she dares,
dares not
row, row,
row through?

Where did it all leak away?
Was it in the salt
running down her face?
If she is 75% water,
where has it drained
to leave the heart parched,
and her tartan days a distant drought
of memory?

Snow globe melts away.
Wade in, wade in,
have your fill,
until skin is slick
with better pain.
You told the ocean years ago,
you sang in schoolgirl choir tones,
never,
never,
never let me go.

Now it never will.

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

It was orange -
spherical symphony of segments
I liked to
             cut
up,
      peel off the skin,
lick the surface
while you
       stared
and
       shouted
and
       clapped your hands

and called it Art.

We both devoured it
anyhow.

I spat the seeds into the air,
you waited for  
                         gravity
to catch them in
your wastebasket.

I noticed the sour
before-taste
    dripped into
sweet
    -bitter
so our fiction of
pulp
melted on the
tongue
into facts of juice
running down our chins
until we were
           hollow-hungry
no more.

Facts like
frightening
words -
you may decide which.

It was orange
      like
the globe
     of irrational truths
some people pray to.

Dropped out of a tree
       into our mouths
but we bit into
everything
       but
nothing.

It was orange.

one glance

and a story starts
spinning
on the turntable

your heart -
the needle dropped

I like to do those quizzes
in glossy bubbles that you
find
in Cosmopolitan and
Elle and
Seventeen.

Which girl should I be?

Should I
dump paper flowers
on my milkmaid braid?
Long skirts, long chains, and
Beatles on my radio
during their ‘Indian’ phase?

Should I
paint it all
black, strip life down to
a *******,
blare punk at full
scream,
and cram my toes in ratty Docs,
smash all emotion
into smithereens?

Should I
sugar-coat my mouth with
Maybelline, button up
collars, laughs, opinions,
read books on behaving
just like a
daydream,
sip teas, bake cookies, aim for
Ivy Leagues?

Which gilded box do I crawl
into?
Which skin to don
this week?
Which fashion editor-friendly
stereotype to fulfil?

Which girl should I be?

Insipid darkness
is no better womb for
thoughts.
Decent thoughts, maybe good
GREAT thoughts.
Thoughts that will flow
like the lava of imported electricity
not-but-should-be circulating in Gaborone's veiny grid.

But who cares?
Well, okay, your mother, now swearing
at the singed-black TV screen
(she's missed her daily soap).

Mother Darkness breeds thinkers.
Tell me, in the scramble for your cellphone flashlight,
did you find your inner Plato?
Ah, no, you surely became
a lightbulb,
humming with the shocks of unwritten words.

It is these minutes of lightless inertia when
it's best to tap your swollen top instead
of lighting a candle.
See, sun rays and tube lights dull the finish of ideas;
corporation-induced darkness provides more suitable conditions.
So you must tap the glass globe on your shoulders
and feel, yes,
feel the grey filament
within, buzzzzzzzz

Electricity.

Edison's 'Eureka!' finally
happening, as all 'Eurekas!' do, in
(literally) colourless mundane.

(Note to self: Write a thank-you email to that pathetic power corporation for your rebirth as a glow)

Thoughts.
Thoughts and thoughts, thoughts,
thoughts.
                 thoughts,
   thoughts,
thoughts and  
                            thoughts,
coming in viscous gallops,
extra voltage baby, thoughts!
Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts,

IDEA.

You are no longer living!
You exist as shards of yes, one GREAT whole,
one...brace-taste the word now...
idea.

You are glimmers of something greater.
You are hot charges of energy your country failed to harness.

Sparked at the flick
of a lazy corporation's switch:
they

cut the power which
cut the flow in the varicose veins of Gaborone which
cut your bedroom's plastic brightness which
cut the bored-contented moment you were wallowing in which
cut your breath (still-half-scared of the dark, you) which
cut the blood flow to your grey matter which
cut the oxygen supply, replaced the fuel with electricity

and then you could think.

Thoughts
and  
thoughts
and

what will you do with them? If
you dare the sun's brilliance,
you might land up as some poor Icarus;
if you wait a half-volt longer,
I'm afraid the fuse will blow, madam and
your mother cannot comprehend these blue-light shocks,
please find a paper and a pen
immediately.

Ah.
So the electricity must, after all,
power something.
And in the crackling dash
to eke out your blow-blaze-brim-burn words
onto something that will last longer
than today's ration of blackness,

the power comes back.

Mind chars into itself.
Snuffed too soon, you pathetic power corporation,
why did you put me out like that?

Your mother turns to you and mutters
'Thank God.'

Wanderer.
From window to window.
Seeking
             something
in different glass scenes
from offices and trains and restaurants.
Like she'll see something or someone
or somebody.
And the world will no longer be
a tilted painting.

Clear spring cold
papers over
the scene of the city of her world.
She's freezing.

There is a cafe at the end of the
road
where sidewalk snow has mingled
with trod-on mud
from commuter's shoes.
It's called
'Les yeux qui voient tout'

She can smell coffee and cigarettes and paper and words
and smiles and wine all the way from Bordeaux.
She sits by the window.

Tendrils of hair cut
across her cheek
as she lowers.
The seat is cold.
Legs crossed,
                       arms clasped,
high-heeled shoes with straps
that cross,
head bent
over a crossword.

'Un cafe au lait, s'il vous plait.'

Last four-letter word pencilled in so
she crumples up the paper.
The eyes don't notice
origami birds dangling above her.
Somehow
they're all angled
towards the glass window
like sunflowers reaching for the sun.
Perhaps the casual
shuttered-open winds
are the birds' oxygen;
reminders that
                          something
like
sky,
air,
wind,
exist, beyond
coffee-smoked counters.
Reminders that
they could breathe, live, fly
in some other city of some other world.

Cup and saucer on a silver platter
hover over.
Idle fingers
and then a clatter.
She stares down into
the white porcelain pit,
teeming with hot brown
                                           alarms.
It isn't a portal
into
       something.
Just a cup of coffee.
Now that is an alarm.

Slow and
                shaking,
drip,
         drip,
                  drip.
The milk is poured.
Curling, italic, Persian carpet spread
from the cup's centre into warm-cream brown.
She imagines it is
blood in her heart.

She raises the little silver teaspoon
napping on the saucer and
stirs.

'Le sucre?'
Does she want it all
to be
sweeter?

Two packets, long like
Marlboros,
hastily, desperately dumped
into the mix.
Quick and
                  shaking,
she raises the little silver teaspoon and
stirs.
Little sugar grains ******
into a vortex,
dissolved and melted into
the city of the world of the cup.

With her little finger, she
dabs
stray sugar grains
on the table
and tries to bring sweetness
to her sleep-thick tongue.

Slow and
                shaking,
sip,
      sip,
            sip.

She's­ tricked herself
into feeling warmth.
Ticker-tape banner
pops up in her head:
'All of this will not
fix you.'

Porcelain clatter
as cup meets saucer.
Again.
She arms herself with
a cigarette case and a book.
Maybe now she will belong
amongst these people
with sad eyes and burning lips,
clinging on to cups and drinks.
So desperately-lit smoke
trails out of
her warm mouth,
steaming up her face
like a window on a cold winter day.
And meanwhile Camus perches
in her hand.

Her eyes swim
in the choppy seas
of French.
The cigarette dangles,
painting the air grey, grey,
tilting, tilting, tilting.
Slow and
                shaking,
she weeps.

Half-aglow in the white sunshine filter
from the glass window,
a woman is wondering.
She drinks her coffee,
wipes her smudged mouth
and leaves.

Nobody notices the wobble
in her high-heeled gait.
She's just a part of
another tilting painting,
another glass scene.

These simple acts,
           simple things,
define
the speaking soul.
In a scene of the city of the world.

Time: 1
Us: 0

Will it always be like this?

Swinging our racquets at Einstein's illusion.
Singing, singing, singing 'Stop
the World I Wanna Get Off
With You'
when nobody hears
over the relentless tick-tocks.
As
     as
the clock's hands
push
         push
pull us together,
apart.

Hey, you.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
Let's look at the scoreboard.

Time: 1
Us: 0

In school, they taught us perseverance.
So we keep
dancing, dancing, dancing
                                              around
the hands of the clock.
I'm on number 3 and
you face me.
What's it like on number 9?
What's it like to be on the edge of
the next hour,
the next day,
the next big thing?
You're on number 9, I'm on number 3.
I face you, you face me.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
I face you,
                   you face me.

So easy for us to...
So easy for us to love, but
so easy for us to leave.
So easy to fight, to
wrap our hands
                            around
each other's throats
simultaneously.
So easy to embrace, so
easy to walk away
when you are the west and I am the east.

I'll ask you again:
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
Eyes flit up to the scoreboard,
even though
                      we don't want to look
away from each other.

Time: 1
Us: 0

The ball is in no one's court anymore.
No more back and forth,
stichomythia, repartee.
Nor round and
                           round
when it's all an illusion,
isn't it?

Don't look.
Don't bring it up.

Time: 1        
Us: 0

The figures are getting bolder, louder
than the ticking.
Tell me, tell me, before
you move to 10
and our angles get skew,
tripping over the clock's hands,
because we forgot the steps of
our dance.
Tell me, tell me, what it's like
when you see me
all the way from number 9
while I'm on number 3.

The scoreboard's screeching
like a train ready to leave.

Time: 1
Us: 0

The audience is already beginning to clap.
They have loved us
and so have we.
We put on quite the show,
enough to rival Djokovic or Murray.
But neither of us will walk out with gold.
Not when we've lost to an abstraction
that can swallow us into
memories.
We get silver medals.
Around our necks, choking
but we clasp them tightly
so they can sparkle on our chests.
My silver beams to you,
                                           your silver beams to me.
On and off,
a Morse code speech.
When we can't speak,
                                       can't breathe,
that seems to suffice.

Here is a case of beautiful irony:
How did we meet?
Your eyes
                 saw in
my eyes
               that silver gleam.
My eyes
               saw in
your eyes
                 the very same thing.
Remember:
I face you, you face me.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?

The scoreboard screams:

Time: 1
Us: 0

I bought a watch today, why
did I do that?
I'm so smart but
I'm so stupid.
I face you, you face me.
It's not an illusion, is it?
Look at me.
Is it?

Time: 1
Us: 0

We're finished.
But then how could we have ever won
when neither of us knew how to play tennis?

We look at each other
so the scoreboard can dissolve
instead of us.
Like your eyes
                          in my eyes
a tethering glance,
could hold us in an eternal position.
Like a single look
could sustain us
stationary.
I face you, you
                          start to leave.

It doesn't matter now.
Everything's spilling out
on the loudspeaker.
(And for once, you don't wish to seek this one truth.)

Time: 1
Us: 0

It will always be like this.

Time: one.
Us: love.

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.

The rain runs,
spreading the stone polished
and clean.
Like this, you must
let the water slip
on the back of your unkissed neck,
the curved dips between
your fingertips,
nestle
in the soft folds around your waist
that you hate,
and stumble on your collarbones,
your genetic mistakes.

Let it slide on the stretch marks
skimming your thighs
like fog diffusing across the hills,
and inside the grooves of your too-large ears,
form little streams.
Let it wash away
and unearth these parts of you
where you don't want to look,
where your lotion never reaches.

These are the little patches of soil
you must water with care.
Flowers, flaws -
how much is the difference?
One day a lover will give them a kiss
and you will understand
why we are so tender
with broken things.

Let them bloom, and see yourself
wilder, as you grow,
for gardens are most beautiful
with some ferociousness.

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.

She contemplated death
as coolly as the opening of
a lotus.

Its light spread on
her mad-locked smile
drained
of his mournful red,
like unfinished smears
of butter on toast.

And every night
she unhooks the
stars
to string them
'round her neck.

She can't decide
if she's making a
noose
or she's making
a necklace.

if you took
the edge out of a storm,
you'd be left with a blank film;
no soundtrack of droplets,
no lightning
cracks of conflict,
no romance, from
air steeped in rain.

so if
you wiped away your childhood
scar, laced your
back up straight,
turned the volume **** on your opinions
and cried a little less -
what
would you be then?

if you softened all your angles
would you tell your story well?

their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.
people like them are not meant
to come face to face.
is this the first time the distance between them is silent?
emptied of political din, hoarse
shouts of protest in market squares,
flags unfurled not in love for a country
but in hate for the other.

are enemies still enemies when they are of the same space?

the two girls recognize
that their hair curls in the same way.
they don't reach out to touch
but a curiosity forms a thread between them.
a thread. their fingers tingle, flutter
spooling and unspooling
this new connection, this new thread.
their eyes swing like pendulums.
how new, how strange to breathe
in air that is clean of artificial hate.

they are curious, spooling and unspooling.
what will happen to this thread?
for threads are too easy to break.
and each knows the power of governments,
their ability to dangle them
then break
and break and break.

the two girls wonder. the two girls stare.
they look. they look and look.

but their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.

making coffee, burnt
toast; blind tuesday 4 o' clock
you fear you're in love

tea
for the unfinished assignments
for the time of the month
for the boy who douses you with salt
for trying to feel loved

wine
for your tired eyes
for your loneliness, a butterfly
beating its wings on your ribs,
for trying to grasp
what freedom is.

my darling,
don't you love to heal?
don't you love to escape?

sometimes love is not relentless
but like the soft smiles we keep
safe for goodbyes
it sleeps. a playful
child gathering breath.
don't you see that i love you?
but you will know it
in the ceilings of uncertain places
in the fingerprints on your beer
in that shirt you forgot about
but you'll wear it today. now.
our hearts will look onwards.
we are only at rest.

I used to think
the heart was only a piece of
paper.
What else?
While you go through the motions,
he and him leave pencil marks.
Scrawls and doodles, just
hasty mutterings in the marginalia.
You know,
those little hearts with
those little initials
you find in little girls' maths books?
Your eyes don't stray from these scribbles,
ever, no, never,
but
you vow to yourself that one day there'll be
ink
scrawled across that paper.
Black or blue
heart-stamp.
Vivid.
And nothing else would matter anymore.

What the fairytale should really say is
once upon a day
he'll walk in and grab that sheet of
paper.
It'll disappear into his coat pocket forever.
And you won't even know it
until
that paper will crumple,
black and blue, black and blue,
out, out, out of his coat
that he's left behind in the closet.

A souvenir,
a lost cause.

That is your heart,
that is your heart.

and there's something about
turning 16
and filling your lips with
the deepest red
in the mirror

how it feels
like you've become a rose
freshly unfurled from
some skeleton,
your colours as rich and
viscous as your dripping blood

yet a rose that's closed
in a glass jar, you are
turned and admired, you are
twirled in fingers
like the stem of a wineglass

because at 16,
you feel you are something
refined,
mature and flowing and
beautiful

older

but it's only
your mother's lipstick;
she too is getting old.
at night you take
the crimson off,
and the rest of you
comes into focus.
all your yellows, all your blues;
you will need to love them too

and don't you let the laughter
slide off from
your new scarlet mouth
because you're 16 now.
it will try to
and you will need to pick it up
off the floor

because you're 16 now
but remember one thing for me:
you are far more sturdy
than just a rose

you are a girl
you are every colour
you think you haven't become

Here is the word I
would place alongside myself.
A neon placard, no
hesitation.
An ugly-shiny presence within
the confines of my breath, the
whispers in my hair.

Bittersweet.

I split it open into near-perfection like
two halves of a peach or
two sides of a brain.
Right, left,
right -
I don't even like peaches.
But I offer them to you.

My 'sweet' is a sucker-punch candy on
your tongue, you confess. Like
licked-off icing, 100%
perfect.
You love it. You love her.
But it's only half of -

The 'bitter' I hand over, all
slap-dashed with hurt and
hope that
maybe finally
you'll be that boy who holds the glue to
put me back together.
Pick up
the halves of the half that
stop
your tongue and
put me back together again.
Would you do that?
Of course you
don't.

It's okay.

You cannot, I cannot deny,
the 'bitter' is grinding, grating,
binding
and I don't tell you that
I'm tired.
So tired
of pouring sugar on it,
with my hands all out of breath. Pouring
sugar
that's only stolen.

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.

snow was brittle, i found
fresh white paper
crinkling under

snow was fragile, i learned
like shredded glass
but softer

like all my edges
as they really are
not how
i see them

Art is good
medication so you'll
deal with this creatively.

You've careened into this so
make the wreck,
the chaos
bloom on a page.
It might even help.

You're going to be a comic book artist
because in the face of such things
words fail and lips
falter,  and you
want to knock your head comedically.
You want
to conjure silly star-loops for
smashing into this
feeling.
Knocked-out.
Reeling.
Draw, draw out
and ink in your malady.

Crash!

The worst is when
your heart is the caricature.
A full-page feature,
a splash,
of high-strung colours
begging to be neatened.

Splash!

Your
cartoon heart. An
image of a fat, crimson
apple
like a clip-art pic, got
a little worm poking through
it.

Eating, eating away
to leave a love
or loss-sized hole.
Fat white bubbles announcing
hurt!
so graphically.

Go on and
draw it more lurid. If
the feeling is here, you might as well
feel it.
Let the slops of gaudy red
and green
bleed and
bleed
out of the panel.
Stain it, stain
the gutter
where time happens.

At least it gives the comic
a heartbreaking!
twist.

And then you turn the page.

the magazines tell me
'natural'
is a ***** word

like my bare skin
is some kind of rebellion.

i have laid no foundation.
no mascara on the windows.
so they find my architecture
unacceptable.

yet I think my home
is beautiful.
simply
because it is home.
my skin.
my nature.

still
i hear them whisper
'natural' is a ***** word -
and you don't say those out loud.
do you?

Do not abort words from love's womb;
she will choke herself
because she could not be a mother.
Stitch lips together. Let silence,
nothing,
be purity.

Words end.
They
are hot and furious, oozing
sores relishing in their own
blood.
Organisms,
dull black embryos, eyeless
until
roiled on red tongues;
spluttered, screamed, snaked
out into being.

They heal themselves to death by the hemlock of Time.
Dying is a definite thing - words are not
immortal, not greater than us.
Not love.

Autopsies reveal varied, unwanted truths:
either
heart splintered too swiftly
or
poison turned flesh to gore,
cell by cell.

Do not abort words from love's womb;
you are wrapping the umbilical cord
around your own neck.

the girl with the blue hair
bled outside of the lines
like the overdose of colour in the
comics that she read.
big eyes and
big lips - the girls on the pages
had hearts for eyes and tears
of fat diamonds.
their sadness so precious.
their affection spans shaped
like rainbows in the
big big blue.

she liked all the colours.
the girl with the blue hair
painted her lips
in the new york cold for
life should be livid, life should
be vivid.
and she
wanted the colours
inside of her blue.

like inking a sketch she
filled herself up.
i was silent when this meant
she threw herself at countless walls
to call
the carnage 'art' -
see how

the girl with the blue hair
became an artist.

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.

It's the awkwardness and strangeness and
slugging-in-time-ness
of discovering a new
person.
Too often, movies portray the meeting of the
protagonists as some
heady rush or a
whirlwind of sparks or some
******* like that.
In reality, it's a slow fire
laboriously
begun with two
sticks.

And sometimes that fire never even starts.

this is how i travel,
with a paperback clung to
my chest, fingers wrapped 'round
like birthday gift ribbons

i sail on the syllables,
the music they make.
how many homes i have,
nestled in the spaces
between paragraphs and phrases.
each chapter an
island
where i'm somebody
else

this is how i learn,
how i journey -
between pages
and tales.

do not come to
find me

She drank her coffee too
sweet
and drew herself
to the smell of new
pencil shavings,
like a pupil dilates in light,
telling itself to expand,
to drink up
more
and
more.

She fumbled
on old strands of her
self rising like mug steam
from poetry
she wrote only three months ago.
Wide-eyed,
reading "when
one leaves,
the past is a fetish"
in rounded, running letters
bubbling up over each other -
a gravy she found
herself constantly stirring.

And sunsets,
dashed with pink syrup,
are a passion
('passion' being her
'word' - a skin-colored tattoo,
a branded prayer, an incanted torch)
Sunsets.
Sour golden orange laced
with strawberry wine.
Bittersweet.
Passionate.

Her.

I'll pretend that the rain isn't already
falling in my chest
when you ask me to drown with you.
Didn't you know?
Or did you choose to look away?
Because when I read about the way
Virginia Woolf wrote her own
ending,
filled her pockets and waded right in,
I didn't feel pity
like everybody else.
I understood.

I'll pretend it's not really so
knife-edged
when you say that
I'm only a lie on your page.
And that that diffusion
of red and
blue,
dirtying your thoughts
is just a mirage,
the work of some crayons and pen
only you
hold in your hand.

I'll pretend my spine isn't caving in,
trying to prop me up
against the onslaught of
myself.
And you.
And him.
And whoever he is.
And all your eyes, blurring
into one green light that only seems to
fade.

I'll pretend somebody loves me.
And he isn't afraid.

I want
to be written about.
Immortalised
in the scrawling of
a pining boy’s
pen.

Encased, no,
enshrined
in verses of
a stars-for-eyes
poet.

Enwreathed
in flowers of
words that
a hopeless romantic waters
everyday.

Is it
much
too much
to ask?

Come here.
Let’s.
Let’s?
Let’s…
Let’s.

Come here.
Listen to Edith Piaf
(So hipster, n'est-ce pas?)
and the scratch of her
voice on the turntable,
will be ours
to keep in Moleskine
notebooks of memory.
So that we’ll try to believe,
love is actually a thing.
Let’s.

Come here.
This quaint room will be
ours,
our guest, as we breathe life
into the coffee cups, wooden chairs.
We’ll give it a nose, yes.
Lightbulbs will smell red
wine in fingerprinted glasses.
Windows will drink
us,
to us.
And we’ll laugh, our faces
hot and sad, mouths
crammed with French
fries.
A scene blurred with happiness.
Let’s.

Come here.
Trash the hands of every
boy, who’s spread himself
out on marginalia of our days.
Slathered himself on pieces
of time we wish we had hugged to ourselves.
Hate, hate, hate
him, we’ll say.
And his **** hands.
Let’s.

Come here.
Our eyes will be fireflies
behind our glasses,
in this cinema’s night, as we ‘swoon’
at rom-coms as buttery
as the popcorn we bought in the interval.
Life’s too short, we say.
Eat about it, drink about it,
maybe even talk about it.
Forget about it.
Let’s.

Come here.
Talk, about nothing.
We’ll all be dead one day.
Let’s.

Come here.
We can be friends.
Let’s.

Let’s.
Let’s.
Let’s?


(And your giggle will end
all and every verse written.
I’m **** sure of it.)

Heartbeat limps
into my ears as I perfunctorily
greet your memory.
The slate of recollection wiped
clean
by a year-long flood.
Good.
Passersby on the street - your
memory and me.

Heartbeat finally caught
up to steady-drum-wit.

I'm glad, I am glad now -
you exist
only as a breath-steam image
on my glasses.

I got a new pair this year
so I could see more clearly.

No, I don't want to write a sonnet;
to self-lock in an octave
only clasping a rusty key
-volta-
leading to another office cubicle
efficiently labelled sestet
for its six undone quotas
waiting coolly for my
calculating.

I want to untuck my shirt, Whitman;
to unleash words to gather at seams
then tear them open
like bursting blood cells crowding
out of a wound.
I do not want to fit
flesh into a 'perfect' Barbie membrane,
let me stretch the skin taut as sheets
so I can feel the redness
and gouge underneath.

Clarity glazed the Classical sonata
opaque; staves of controlled fantasy
so imaginable, like an illogically
round orange, sliced
in concaves fat
with pulp, each ripeness methodically
connected by thin breath threads.

This is why we have madness, need it;
bless the ****** of brilliance in Beethoven
symphonies, the metallic muscling
of Ginsberg verses, electronic with strange beauty, holy
and unholy, every ****** mess
in between

The heart can't suffice
by merely inhaling
glitter; I can't dare remember the sane
pretty sighing of a Petrarchan
uttering; canned love,
a predictable malaise packaged
neatly in a bland tome, most likely
beige, with the fashionable odor
of bookish age

And so, serif-writing sweetheart
please don't ask
me to write a sonnet.

too comfortable to tuck my shirt in,
I won't touch I won't touch I won't touch