Every weekend at summer camp the
Memories of the midnight walks we made,
The rushing of the silvery creeks
As well as the daily art and games,
Entertainment as well as molding clay,
The mountainside at night gave good
Presence, the moon offering her halo,
With the memory of endless essence so,
During this time of adventurous fun,
A story telling we campers would all go.

Her raspy voice, I can remember well,
Those cute sparkly playful brown eyes,
We walked side by side, she told me that
The truth was being denied, she was a
Girl in disguise, how I dream of her
In Garnet, Alexandrite. That feeling of total trust,
Now I will probably never be close to
Anyone I love again, already grown old,
To old to ever dream, but what a dream,
A lovely bliss to know that she was my friend.

One day, when the time is right, we'll find it,
This feeling again, of wild spirited joy, campfires,
Of following the forest path, now innocence lost,
A time that is long-gone and past, and if it
Never happens again, the darkness of night
With quiet whispering, story time moon light,
I will never forget her, never will I forget that
Beautiful freckled face, those beady eyes,

*No, never forget you, not for all time.

He doesn’t owe me the very breath I just savored
so I yell at the stars,
“I think He owes me a favor.”
He does not.

Yet, there's mercy.
Even more, there's love,
and still I spit
on jewels wrapped in burlap
I don’t need You.

What more, I plead and bargain
for light to peak through a crack
in the crevice of your soul
that cannot feel, nor love
because precious, precious jewels wrapped in burlap
do not compare to an explorer’s find of Alexandrite
in the cave I call your soul.

A fool, an explorer – one in the same,
there was not one jewel in burlap,
but many.
What imprudence! I still long for
one glimpse of Alexandrite
hoarded under hate and lies,
deception and malice.
What nerve! To demand for
light to leak in caves
that are not mine to reconnoitre.

An explorer is a demitasse
for when she is graced with eternal diamonds
she selects coal instead.

Lighting strikes the sky,
Blissful liquid meets the Soil.
Clouds thunder, winds run fast,
Night darkens,
And he changes his colour.

Ruby, his eyes look like,
full with passion yet brimming with anger.
I shuddered at his looks.
He was the cyclone,
and I was the silent waters.

It was dawn,
enticing orange glitter adorned the sky.
His Ruby slowly changes to emerald.
They were calm and healing.
Like the serene sea,
and I was the ship with smooth sails.

Sand glimmered in the sunlight,
waters sparkled,
waves washed the shores,
leaving behind the trails of past.

He walked ahead,
kept changing his colour.
His aura had a yellowish tint,
He was the beautiful colours,
And I was the canvass.

He had a song,
but incomplete,
I had a wish,
To whisper it back.
We both were mum,
None wanted to speak.

The day ended,
We sitting face to face.
I asked him,
Why he was the change,
And I the constant.

He told me,
He was the World,
And I, the confined me.
Truly, he was the Alexandrite,
And I the diamond.

Remember when we
cannot remember anymore,
the Sun shining through
windows sealed shut,
when we talk about it
we do not talk about it, we call
it with a different name: aberration.
I cannot remember you anymore
so small and languid in this
life. Everything pales in comparison --
offered by chance, filled with hesitancy
as if obligation, emptied by coming
into the fullness of it, saying it as a plump word
with the same accuracy of knives
tucked within the soft recess of the kitchen
counter that same day, you were different
as any other when we cycled through
Alexandrite Street, the world new again
like we were born in the similar moment
splintered by much less of a force waiting
outside the black gate of the home, and so
much more of a name slipping away
from the cliff of my chafed lip onto your
body's sustained pit, the drop barely an
indent, only as if of limited exertion but
possibly a weight for us to solder
through and through. I told you I could never
indulge into the fray and hold armaments
of it, but twice-told this battle I can
fit in: you, my accoutrement for war,
hallowed you are in excess of flow and march
through rain and light smiling through
opened windows with a blank circle of lightness
that is your face held close and memorized
before taking the commute home, force-equipped
with time's persistent pleading and our
untoward compliance like a reciprocal of stiffness:
you are the wall of your home and I,
a suspended pendulum with a dumb clockhand
     in a stalemate.

Baby called me Rusalka,
having the same number of syllables as my name.

Moonlight tossed me in a river to awake
fins from my toenails
to bird-sing to the handsome until I am unalone

mortality, mortality
as clean as the banks of a landfill.

Our child would nap in a basket of ripe fruit
strung to a willow and birch

description of me, “perpetually wet from something”
or alexandrite
golden by dusk though with a jade sunburn;

hair so long
would *** a rainforest’s feet if it had a pair.

Suicide on the tip of one’s tongue
now saltwater buoyant on the roof of a mouth
I was out of wedlock,

mother anchored my wrists with tangly fieldroots
right below our old tire swing

and

Baby simply meant I touch
everyone with my laugh, and it makes them dead.

“I haven’t yielded a tear lest deep within my soul,
There sets a sea that could flood the entire world,
I reverence at the essence of her solemnity,
That of cerulean or that of a forest of beryl,

A diamond once in the rough now the rarest of all,
Many wondrous souls bare emerald or sapphire,
Much rarer to me is she in nature an alexandrite,
Withal above alluded to see all the afore mentioned,

With each passing day I have found another treasure,
Of the infinite provenance of her being whom she is,
She who is that of corundum of ardent ardor,
A composition of paragon soul perceived by the Gods,

I am betwixt with the brine of love encompassed of me,
The archipelago and the brine fortitude water reinvigorate,
As the interwoven fiery spell of love has so endowed me,  
This my ardent corundum of our eternal,
Sacrosanct of adulation"