somewhere
between 4 and 15,
your innocence was lost
in the angles of your cheeks

and the hardness
of your dreaming
wore itself down
like bark on a tree

now you're standing on an edge
looking over at the sea,
with softer hips and aeroplane feelings;
you know
that you are leaving

somewhere
after 4 and 15,
you learned to be gentle,
to hold yourself
more carefully

you were
a flightless bird.
you are
a girl, becoming
woman, turning
over her dreams
like tea leaves.

you know
that you are leaving
somewhere
behind.

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'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.

The air burns where I sleep;
you trudge in almost-snow.

The resetting of alarm clocks
let the wind slip
through your dreamcatcher.

And my sunset is all
the colours of your fall.

I write a poem;
you will awaken six hours
and countless miles later

in the cold
while I burn.

The ink lies between
the segments of the universe;
unreachable,
incomprehensible

in the fire
while you shiver.

What is it to miss
someone?
I do not know.

the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.
is stumbling
in the hollow between
life's collarbones. it feels just like
velvet.

innocent. a moment.
crushed-soft, caught you unaware.
as vulnerable as hot
breath
alighting on your neck. his
fingers lacing round your ribs.
a moment.

innocent.
placing lunch plates in the sink
getting washed by sunlight instead.
a glow on metal
so bright, so clean
you think of a baby's skin.
warm.
like love.
like love exists
in everything.

the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.

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?

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.

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.

She warns herself
to cork the wine tangling
up all her breaths.
She doesn't want to drown,
she doesn't want to guess.

But she does,
she does.

She realizes,
nauseous, breathless,
that she's stopped looking for stars
in the sky,
but has begun to search for them
in wine glasses and
a boy's eyes.
She desperately doesn't want to. Desperately.

But she does,
she does.

Her mouth is smeared with
straw-gold honesty
because in the morning
it'll be crimson again -
a scarlet as sharp as a
poison dart.
So right now, she enjoys the pale golden.
Fizzing from her mouth and
coursing through her shaking hands and
enveloping her and the lost boy beside her
like a red and blue coat that they can't shake off.
She wants to say:
This is the winter of our denial.
Of our everything and anything and whatever it is,
this thing we can't name.

But she doesn't,
she doesn't.

The Chardonnay isn't
golden enough for that.

All it can gurgle out is:
Don't do it, don't do it.
It'll mean something.

And she listens,
she listens.

She walks back out into the cold night
because she must.
And she collapses into herself
like stars and galaxies do, don't they?
In the morning, she'll paint some false sunshine
onto her face again.
And pretend she isn't bruised all over,
all red and blue,
golden and crimson.

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.

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

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.

one glance

and a story starts
spinning
on the turntable

your heart -
the needle dropped

a rainfall of words
skittering delicately
on mind-stained pages

Their poetry imperceptibly
slipped
into the first person.

Neither of them noticed
when
'he and she'
became
'you and me'

Let's analyse that, shall we?

la poésie est une manière de créer la
distance

où l'amour
entre nous
est trop pur

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

five minutes can fit
a magnum opus of sound
between them
so believe me when i say
this
five minutes can make
a shotgun out of our two
glances
like the thickness of honey
squirted into a glass
five minutes are viscous
slowing time into drips that
entrench sweet shrapnel
of this miracle bullet
in our hearts and our
heads.

five minutes
between us

we're in love and we're
dead.

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.

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 thought

i was more his
than my mother's

as he shouted at me
as i shouted
to him

lost
behind angry.

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.

You've been crying into your pillow for weeks now
because he-

Never mind.

Today, you walked into a grocery store
and stared
at all the people
buying broccoli and shampoo and dish-washing liquid.
All those people with their own
chapters and textures,
their own loves and hates and
personal heartbreaks,
all their embarrassing habits.
Mundanely gathered in this over-lit shop...
You realize that for this short while
all your lives were quietly mingling.

And then your heart sighs
with relief because
you've done it, finally.
You've realized something small but so very
important.
It's quite simple, really.

The world is larger than your heartbreak.

(You smile because you know that things just might be okay.
Eventually)

home was grandiose in the poems
so it didn't exist.
it had to be fantasy
where there weren't tears on your tuxedo
but the alcohol stains of acceptance. and love?
love couldn't fly away on an aeroplane;
love stayed.
and clouds didn't swell into
empty promises; they
gathered their things and rained.
yes, you don't believe in home anymore
but god, you miss it.
so you'll drink beer at the ballet and pretend
that home is in the poems you've written today.

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?

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.

i am strong.
i clutch my ribs on certain nights
because i might split open -
i might even spill.
my fingers stay tight
to keep me stitched.

i am weak.
i seal my tears in a jar,
let it sour and congeal.
i take my success
hard.
i love
unruly

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.

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

'What shall we talk about today?'

Spin, spin, spin the conversation
into loops and recapitulations.
Cassettes were my sustenance but
a vinyl record spins on the turntable.
Won't you tell me what song is playing right now?
Rests, then
    block chords, then
          swing-swung rhythm.
Then,
unexpected concords.

Where did those blue notes come from?
And colour our red, some supposed red, into
purple?
But jazz has always been unpredictable.

I grew up on the clarity and
gravity
of soft pink time;
pearl-notes to the steady, steady,
steady
beat of a metronome.
But now,
                now?
Syncopation.
My  
      beat
against your
                beat
and we make a violently violet
bossa nova.

Suddenly the classically trained flautist
has time-travelled to her very first lesson.
Because no sound flutters out of the mouthpiece
and her fingers can't keep up.
Swing-swung
            syncopation
and she doesn't know to breathe anymore.
Where did those blue notes come from?

Silence.
Have we reached the final double bar?
The cadence is imperfect,
                                             unresolved.
Listen, a cold snap of instant jazz
knocked us over.
Arms clasped, teeth chat-chat-
                                              chattering.
1,
     2,
3 -
A not-quite waltz.
But jazz has always been unpredictable.

Won't you tell me what song is playing right now?
I think we know what it is but can't figure it out.
And so Cole Porter and Billie Holiday save us
from
     fading out.

'Let's do it, let's fall in-"

I don't want this song to be over.
I don't even know what it's called
but
don't let it end, don't let it,
don't
        don't
don't.

I can't cook but I think
I can make  
                   instant jazz.
And you,
        and you...
You'll write dizzy like
a Coltrane solo.
As you do.
And I'll lay down my flute,
struggle out of my red minuet and
                                               wonder:
Where did those blue notes come from?

But jazz has always been unpredictable.

'What shall we talk about now?'

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

you do not need to fit in their beautiful
because it lies
that one size fits all.

you were not made
so powerfully, so tenderly,
so naturally
to smooth yourself into
a magazine cutout.

remember
you are not a puzzle piece.
the only place you need to fit
is inside that skin of yours.

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.)

alone and awake
pressing a small silver coin
between sky and glance

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 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?

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?

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.

We never liked the same music.

We never did
like the same music.
In a sea,
a virtual ocean,
of song recommendations, we
would only find one
or two
that we both
intensely
intensely
intensely
loved. And because of that,
those few, rare songs
became magical
in their significance.
Like small pearls in a tsunami
of grit.

What kind of music do you like now?

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.

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.

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 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?

How strange and violet and giddy
that you are a boy
and I am a girl,
and we sit here, there,
you with Plath and I with her lover,
pretending, pretending,
pretending-
they are not the poets.

It is you, the boy,
and me, the girl,
writing to each other.

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.'

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 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

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.