Love. Sex. and disaster on an ice cream cone.
experimental bliss on unicycles
and hurricanes topped with whipped cream.
amaranthine tomorrows
keep skipping beats
like my heart on repeat.
Fall. Get hurt. Get up.
Go back to start.

It was night. I sat beside you as quiet as the needles on the pine trees behind us.

Sometimes. When it rains. I sing. Sometimes I tie myself up in sentences and throw myself in a burst of black ink on pristine white paper
ruining it. Making it as I am.
Smudged, unformed.

You turned towards me. Your features were hidden. You took a breath. Held it for a minute then expelled it.

I’m sorry that breaking my heart hurt you.

I lit a fire for the flames. 

An ode to forever composed on onion skins.

All I have are pieces.

Sentimental as a cat, she was,
that haughty feline smile. The red dirt of the roads
eschewed her skirts. The sky swallowed her up
and spit her out. The sun refused to warm
her and the wind told his breezes to mind their
distances. It is a question of arithmetic. She was
subtracted from the rest of them. The remainder
after the divisor did its business with the divided.
Stone cold reality hardened the edges of her smiles
and the sea turned green under her eyes.
her legs spread wide and poetry denatured as
nature colluded to a synchronized damning of the
woman in red.

“I don’t like love songs.”
Juliet, drunk on red crystals of heartstuff, announces to the bemused world.

Any errant romeo (notice the lower caps) will tell you that love songs are cliche. As are violins (and villains) and caviar (too salty, the nutritionists say). All the cool people now slash their wrists (horizontal, they don’t really want to die) and eat pomegranate.

This world of fairy lights, double faces and corrosive (say it out loud and feel it on your tongue, yes, just like that) desire that eats away your skin and mine, and reveals your bloody heart to mine.

I seem to be dissolving.

I composed a militant monologue that year
full of trenchant words that regarded their
neighbors with a zesty suspicion. The
vowels felt threatened and w__ld d_s_pp__r
randomly. Randy soldiers polished their spears -
the ones made of flesh too - and hapless women
called it survival and spread their legs. The flowers
were particularly red that year and everyone preferred
the songs of the violins. Courage became a coveted quality
and I hear the Apothecary sold it in clear glass jars filled with
tiny blue pills. The battlefields were not very far away
and the cannons provided nice lullabies (though the lack of
stars was noticed). The luckiest ones, however,
were the poets. Inspiration and the beauteous Muse lurked
around every corner. Tragedy sold cheaply those days so everyone
got a broken heart. It was in fashion.

I wish I could speak a language,
one in which you didn’t exist.

Then I wouldn’t feel like a metallic kitchen
on a winter morning:
a blue tabletop, one abandoned jar of cold milk,
the dew on the windows and
white oblong tiles with a star in the middle.
Clean. And barren.
I wouldn’t feel like that.

And when I hear footsteps
I wouldn’t think it’s you
And when someone touches me on the back
I wouldn’t turn around and expect it to be you
And perhaps when I wake up suddenly
it wouldn’t be with your name on my lips.

If you didn’t exist,
I wouldn’t be like that thick glass, do you remember it,
the one on the window above the front door?
Still intact but with tremors of cracks embroidering it.
I wouldn’t be just like that.

I wish I lived a life
drawn in charcoal
Then how easily I could have reached out
and erased you from it.

I flagrantly disregard tradition
in turn, tradition ignores my existence
I am singular. Yes.
The world, my world, calls it a sin.
As if mercy comes with a ring.
Glow glorious, Sister, spread your wings.
I am forever jumping off bridges just to see
if I can fly.
I can’t but the bruises always fade with time.
There’s a certain prurience about you
as if the air itself doesn’t know who you are
or what you can become
I am all grace and no heart
I gave it away. Broken things are cumbersome.
I desire to be a mannequin
Plastic perfection, grimace constructed into a smile,
composed of frozen profanities and perfect breasts.

Mud slush love
Two missed calls and
one unheard voicemail love
Bamboozling, money guzzling
bright metal blue machine love
University boulevard and a millenia
of ignorance steeped in academia
Fairy walks through trees waking up from winter
and a deep brown earth love
Eyes drunk with sleep and lips tilted in a half smile with
November peeking through the skin kind of love
Chocolate melting on top of cookies and coffee scorching
the roof of my mouth
Loud music and a louder silence and a contradictory kind of love
A sad poetry, fragmented and defracted by the prismatic kind
of love. Airport lounges and midnight calls to strangers. A residual
life and a “I’m home” kind of love. Chaos and entropy and a little island
full of mannequins. Thirty minutes till I sublime. Two little bees, one plastic flower and a stereospecific kind of love.

I love you for all the wrong reasons

Like - the satin whispers of a velvet night
The caramel blush of your skin against mine
Your sighs, the heat, the lipstick stains on your
shirt.

I love you for all the words you keep from me
your honeyed lies and that smile of yours that
stops halfway to your eyes.

And I love you when you are not here
but your warmth lingers
I am content enough with the memories of your body
phantom touches and a poignant climax.

I love you for the sharpness of your actions,
the quicksilver pain that accompanies your casual
dismissal of the time you and I accrue together.

But I love you the most when you say goodbye
claiming, every time, that this is it. This is the end;
when, perhaps, you know better than me

that you will sing this song again.

My mouth is a flower
And my words are nectar.
Drink me in
One adjective at a time

Listen.
This is a story about a careful construction of helplessness. Of futility
dressed in blue.

I? Merely am. But you? You are plural. You are in my hair, in my eyes. You are of tomorrow and you linger from yesterday. You remain while I become ephemeral.

You appear in front of me with your hands already dipped in blood and ask,
“How shall I break your heart today?”
And I, dressed in blue, stand up to die.

These are the wanderings of a mind prone to winter.

You see? I built this helplessness in three stages.
First: I let myself love you.
Then: I perfected the art of crying without tears.
And finally: I learned to like the space a broken heart occupies in a chest.

I love you for all the wrong reasons

Like, your almost inaudible whispers in the night

and the caramel blush of your skin against mine

For all the words you keep from me

I love you when you are not here

but your warmth lingers indefinitely

I love you for the sharp, sweet pain when

I discover the lies that you tell, that orange

ache my heart recognizes as its own

And I love you the most when you say goodbye

claiming, every single time, that this is it. This is for ever.

When, perhaps, you know better than anyone else

that you will return

to me.

The city streets boast a different
kind of love these days. On smooth
gray pavements and in rockstar hangouts, those in the
know call it a ceramic kind of love.
You can find it in a room full of needles
and manufactured 15 minute bliss. It
sings sweetly with each sharp sniff. It exists in the darkest
alleyways where strangers push against each other,
faceless bodies straining towards release.
And sometimes, it is laced with every sip, in the mornings,
during the nights, gliding softly down throats,
evoking a concentrated thirst for more
of the stone coloured bitter kind of love.

It’s a cold, calculated love, this.
Stalking the next lovestruck - a little bit of red
in a sea of white. It chooses you by the
darkness you hold cupped inside.

Once lovestruck, you stand poised, on either side an abyss.
You will fall, that is true. But then, they didn’t tell you, this is a
shattered kind of love.

Since these are only words
and I don’t have to mean them -

I wish you would build me a forever
from the forgotten feelings of the beginning
A fine mist and an early morning
when the day wakes up and stretches softly

But -
it’s as though we are fighting Autumn
Sewing each leaf back on the trees,
moving backwards on escalators

The desultory taste of the night
like the scent of old cigarette smoke
clogs my throat, coats my tongue
and my eyes smart.

I suppose if it was Wednesday
You would hold my hand and give me a yellow daisy
Not because you love me but because
you love Wednesday.

The record is stuck on that same damn note
Something about dark heat and rain, the timbre of his voice…
He sounds like fresh crisp snow.
I am stung. Even with these words which couldn’t
possibly mean a thing, couldn’t break your soul and carve me into it,
even then.
I am stung.

Yours,
with inkstained fingers
and nothing else.

Ignore the discoloured poetry and the mechanical pain.
I welcome you to a convention of poets.
There are booths offering inspiration for a sliver of your soul
and virgin’s blood (a rare commodity).

In the right hand corner, there is
the poetry of exhaust fumes
an acrid scent of rubber on the road
(a love letter from the spurned traffic).

And on the left hand side of the exit,
is the poetry of a long gone childhood.
Empty playgrounds, a perpetual dusk,
a single shoe (sized two) abandoned by the road
with a Kewpie doll for company.

In the far corner, in the booth painted
a melancholic hue are odes to hearts
(broken and whole).
She bought stilettos to stomp on your
tenderer feelings.
and you woke up one day to a stranger’s glassy eyes
and careful, awkward smiles.
It was a case of the missing beloved and
salt.

In the evening there will be a fire
(tickets will be sold at the door)
For the liberation of the verses
(wear a hat)
and all the unsold poetry will burn
(like my heart)
and the poets will drink a glass (or two)
and prepare to bleed
again.