Little rhymer

He found her in a cafe, drinking a cup of tea,
her breath filling the window with a fog of frost.
She had bags hanging just underneath her eyes.
She said, "I didn’t realise I was lost.”

He asked her, "What are you carrying?
With all those bags, it must be quite a lot."
She spoke to the glass instead of him
when she replied, “All the places that I'm not.”

They looked like crescent moons to him
but he couldn’t tell her of her fate.
“They look heavy,” was all he said.
“I’m not surprised anymore of weight.”

He wanted to tell her so many things
but she didn’t look at him for a while.
“It’s like being at the bottom of a lake,
now something feels slower when I smile.”

Not once did she show even the hint of a smile
so he decided to try and outdo her.
But it seemed like this was one he couldn't win
because his words just went right through her.

“You are a foreign land. I have a compass.”
“No magnets. My grandmother lives alone.”
“My sister has stopped playing piano.”
“I’m afraid to answer the telephone.”

Her eyeline had woven its way into his.
“I like the sounds it makes as it rings.”
He asked at length what she’d do with the bags.
“I will learn how not to break things.”

Fragments.

Sometimes people ask us the wrong questions
so we can't give the right answers
and that's okay and everyday for everyone
but it is not okay when we become those people
and we ask ourselves the wrong questions
because we are just afraid of what we know
and of hearing the right answers.

Rooms partially lit, yellowing

as evening seeps into night

and then it's morning, 

one spent ignoring

the tsunami as it taps 

a warning. 

There is still ash on the sweater I was wearing

the day that bridges started burning. 

Terrible things happen to good people everyday.

That is why I don't mind so much 

if I'm not one of the good people.

I'll be one of those terrible things. 

You told me to look the universe right in the eyes 

but I am not brave enough,

at least not yet,

because I'm thinking of what you said you found

when you looked and you saw

only the distance between the middle of things,

the nucleus, and all else around it,

all the feral electrons,

and how everything you thought you could hold

was slipping away from you

between your fingers 

until you finally felt it,

the universe,

the emptiness of space.

the Morning After

Here it is.
Here is the little hole in your warmest socks.
Here is the emptiness of ice.
Here is the sound that loneliness makes.

There it goes.
There is the sun drunk with days whirling.
There is the delirium in sultry fever.
There is the aching overwhelming, blood returning.

That was the anaesthesia.
Here is the morning after.

Look, listen.

If you can, just listen.

Listen to me, now.

Since you last took a look

I have already been changing

so you are not in the place

to decide what I can be.

Stop speaking of me 

as you have been lately. 

You’re describing a ghost.

Fugue-Boy and the girl they used to call Penelope.

We’re out on the rooftop, just us two, moon-bathing in shared solitude and lungfuls of the sky until our skins are a little tender. Even though what’s up there looks empty in comparison to the corridors downstairs, where we are frostbitten by the nurses’ eyes always watching us, trying to make their maps of us, we feel more exposed to the moon than we do to the white-coats. We formed an alliance, the Fugue-Boy and me; he calls me Pinocchio. Inside we stay silent so they won’t catch even a drift of what’s on our minds in truth. The times we have spoken aloud, we moulded our words into old English puzzles. Up here, more in the universe, in our paper gowns and the blankets we brought, untangling moonrays from our hair, we are trusting with language. You can't help it really. Anyway, the moon must drop eaves on the fluttering of our conversations as we sit in a jumble of missing parts.
“They make marmalade out of meanings,” he says, and his voice is digging. I know he gets angry when they treat the patients like children instead of poets, but he seems to react with a resurrection of his little-boy self. I don’t know why but I don’t ask. I just listen the words he spits out all sharp, like bites, like bullets made by his lips in between their pulls on his cigarette.
“It sounds so awfully like gibberish.”
Nodding, half daydreamed away, I reply, “Their throats get dense, being so bitter. It makes me queasy.”
The wind whips up a little and the hospital robes cling to our silhouettes. We’re just two ghosts now. We might as well have disappeared with the others.
“It tastes bitter always stubbornly pretending.” He looks over at me with those eyes that combed any pretences out of me when we first met, and any connection to the girl people used to call Penelope. She was always looking in daggers at the world, sharpened knives. It just looked spoons back
“You need to fix those eating habits,” his expression has become criss-crossed with various frowns. I don’t like it when he gets irritable and fights, but I know he’s afraid of losing me- that I’ll cut the string that anchors me in my body and drift elsewhere, or that I’ll be moved to a different bed, and in either case he’ll lose his friend. Without an any alliance, they break you down pretty fast They did it to George-Goodeye and Angelhead, two boys, both writers, who got cut into pieces exacted by the nurses, and they gave away everything intimate. They didn’t have our rooftop, and I think they were afraid of a real alliance. Fugue-Boy thinks they were both gay but against being gay. Their family made all their decisions about how they spread things like that, or their money, until they had not much of either leftover for anything but hospitalised poverty.
I look down at myself, and it's vague but I see skullheads glare in my knees and wrists. “I’ve been eating more because I get hungry thinking about things,” I confess, and he’s not tender in tossing the dart of his reply, “You’re all eclipsed, you’re going blue and I think it’s bone-death.”
I don’t know whether or not I have got that in my veins but I’m wordless.
Quickly, he is back to his schoolboy natural, “I want to get irrevocably drunk.”
He is always in the mood to drink. He says that he's in the "moon" for it, and his tongue gets longer with each swallow. I think it helps him breathe his real madness out. He reminds me of a song when he is drinking and I don't even know the tune but I know I sort of like it. I always spill and come over all sleepy. But I don’t falter when he pulls the vodka bottle from under his sheet gown and offers it with an expression that makes him look just like something that’s perfectly fitting to foxes.
The drink deadens my muscles at the first sip, like different hands surrounding me with pillows. He opens his throat again and pours back more. Even more like a fox, in my daydreamed sea.
The spreading of the galaxies and their wings feels tender as if the whole sky is there for our protection. I don't say this out loud because he scolds me when he thinks I'm delusional for grandiose thoughts such as that. He doesn't understand that it doesn't have to be real to feel something about it right in the roots of you. Well, he does for some things and not for others, but aren't we all like that?
I feel my spine against stone when I lie down, pressing my back to the flat of the roof, letting the night peel away my layers one after another, slowly, and get itself into all my corners. Once it's settled I declare, “I want to play with my Doctor's typewriter.”
His voice drifts away and I’m rising on the surge of an onslaught of words. A dictionary opening to empty all the pages' contents in a clatter over me.
“If you want to be a fantastic writer,” is the last I hear him say, “you’ve got to stop using those apostrophes.”

The Wildflower and the Weed

 


One of the two was a wildflower and it was everywhere in her, feeding the soil until underground worms felt their world quiver.  It seemed as though she didn’t need to rely on any stem to elevate her, already so buoyant, so brimming with beauty to the point of explosion that a booming sudder whisked up the air around the proud petals as they poised themselves. When she faced up to the sun and let it sprinkle her with golden glitter, she preened for the sky and all the passers by, who couldn’t help but stop to admire. She was not the sort of beautiful flower that one would pick to tuck into an assorted bouquet, or one of those chosen in the art of flower pressing. Other flowers flocked together, all unidentifiable so it was impossible to tell one apart from another. But this wildflower was found standing alone, but by no means lonely. As they wandered past, their eyes could not resist becoming hooked on this self-assured, soley graceful and flower. Her scent beckoned people close, enraptured by the allure that did not fail her. Even the scotch-swilling bankers who could put a look in their eyes purely for the purpose of seduction, a shine pollished to perfection just like their city shoes. But she kept it for later stages of her imagination, uninterested in stroking egos but nonetheless almost violent in her passion, with which she plucked the heartstrings of bus drivers and postmen and schoolboys all over. This allure was nowhere in particular, just everywhere. All burlesque and ostentatious, her bellicose, winsome voice; her lips that left their blood-red stains on hopeful cheeks, suggesting the promise of some later--on passionate kiss, but at the end of it all she would either disappear like an overblown breeze that swept through open windows and whipped all feet off the floor, or indeed she would stay and she would kiss, but she’d bite off their tongue, before escaping as though she’d never been there at all, but the aroma lingering in her wake that could not be used as evidence  to prove her presence at the scene of a crime, but was inhaled in lungfuls by the men who had looked upon her, overcome with lust. Everywhere she travelled, she would flourish and then ramble on, leaving behind a trail of wanton wilderness.

No one would ever dream that they were bound by blood, this flower and the other. The other had started to stretch into life first, but somehow never made it as far. She was not a wildflower. She was afraid of the wild. She was more like a whisper, this wishful weed, who belonged in a boneyard; very small and very sweet, but underground her roots were twisted, groping blindly out in search of some place of permanence where she could plant herself. It was unfortunate that her name when spoken tasted like sugar on the tongue, because the boys whose mouths moulded it became giddy to the point of disillusionment, and that always ended in damage. They threaded thoughts of her with endless make-believe fields where they could go nowhere or they could go everywhere- run off with any wind that they wanted or else lie in the softness of a light-white-pink-gold petal carpet, where the flowers would shyly reassure them of their souls. But whispering flowers were not what was waiting when the boys came aglow with idealistic expectations. Visions of anything like freedom, or any semblance of a pillow on which to rest one’s cheek- those were washed away within the first weeks when boys brought their love letters to a girl not pure white but gradually turning grey. She tried to comfort them but did not have the comfort of blossom bedding they’d imagined, because she rarely frequented a bed of her own, and she was so brittle, so prone to spontaneous breakage. As for her voice, they got it right  when their assumption was shy.  Shy became a stammer and a stammer became a stressor and you’d never learn anything objectively true from these words. Her speech was too lyrical, meaning irrelevant to the listener, and the world from her perspective was always distorted. One may have guessed rose-coloured glasses, but her lenses did not always see a half-full world of bright sides and silver linings. She could shine with optimism, with a smile of childlke genuine joy. Yet she was so easily frightened and also could not control the deepening pink of her blush when bashful. Around the time at which night fell she would talk of shadows and so what? She doubted everything, but herself most of all. Such a tiny flower could not bear much weight yet sometimes in the soil she felt the weeping of the whold world. In these moments, she curled herself closed in the profound sadness of a cup that would always be a touch too empty.

They could not differ more, the wildflower and the weed. And this tale has no surprise awaiting at its end. It was not long before the weed was uprooted from the soil and too weak to speak up when she was stabbed in the back. She was used in a long thread to make a necklace that someone would put on, glowing with the pretty little string of weeds they wore. Meanwhile, the wildflower continued to plant her own glow, boisterous and beautiful as she strode in and out of lives, a trail of hearts left broken along the way

Laundry lie

Hanging out my fresh washed sheet,
I'm paler but forgot to eat.

Starshatter

The night knows all my secrets.
Sometime plucked from between imaginary stars
during that night which just passed
I misplaced myself-
again.
This morning I find fragments scattered about-
don't remember
anything breaking-
kitchen counter, bathroom tiles,
stairs, crumples on the carpet. Never in one piece.
I want to find tiny bits,
tiny pieces, in characters
and phrases between pages
upon pages in thousands of books
until I'm whole-
again?
Just keep reading.
One day all the nights will have my story to tell.

Of walls and windows.

I unearthed this story I wrote when I was 18 when empting the drawers of my desk. I wish I could still write like this, without so many neuroses and such a spinning mind. I was so free with my pen at that age. What has happened to me? 

Winter had thus far only seeped into her bedroom, like dust sleeping in all her drawers and picture frames. When he came over he opened her window, and then the winter lived there comfortably. Walls have very little work to do when windows are open for they protected her from nothing but the hallway. With each passing day she had lived in a different box.

She began to like all the big warm galaxies outside which belonged to other people; the neighbours and businessmen and the postman, their many rushes and concerns. They played board games together, even though he was a rampant rule-bender. In the past, when it was cold, her eyes had always become frostbitten, small and too precise, but now she paid more attention to bird and trees instead of her shoes. She began to read patterns and maps on the backs of her hands, despite the any inches of night-time between her glance and her skin. At a keen eighteen years, she was used to grandiloquent excuses for beauty and thriving off some borrowed edginess. But she would never tire of the handsomeness of someone different, who sees things not through the windows of others or through a convex mirror, but in ways that made her realise she had been living her life with eyes closed.

At Christmas she asked for time to read every book and listen to every record that had ever been recommended. She asked for an end to walls and symmetry.

Her name changes seasonally now. She keeps the books and records in her car and they continually grow in number. Th others wondered where she slept and why she couldn't stack her books there. She talked of vaulting over the too-large world and finding a place where she could distinguish stars from planes. And she she woke up in her morning, she found that he was there too.

Wordless

Finding the words is like trying
to find a single vein
in the vineyard of your body.

The whole day

is a feeling,
and the words are all caught
at the front gates, teeth.

It feels like knowing Polish
without being able to speak Polish.

pacific pillowtalk

Lying under the silence of waves,
tangled in blue and green roars,
a splash of marbles
fall and disappear to the bed
and I'm just dreaming of the feel
of you looking at me.

Being loved

Flowerbeds


There is little I prefer to the sensation of his planting
two kisses on the top of my head before sleep.
Only now have I realised how funny planting a kiss seems,
as if all kisses are capable of growing,
and if we wake up one day with our pillows full of roses
we'll know that they grew from those night-time kisses

Before the summer I turned seventeen, I was blindly faithful. Afraid sometimes, but not the way I am today, and the fear is misplaced. I know, because the worst is behind me. Back then I couldn't fathom the reasons why I was wanted. When you have no knowledge of why, you feel powerless. For the first time, with him, my intricacies are brought to light. I have felt the very bottom of being and he was always there. Once I was back he could not stop smiling because he'd been waiting for me there.
Now I am confronted with what I try hard not to measure. Feeling one of his hands against the ladder of my neck, his fingertips measuring, calibrating breaths, I imagine he is considering the enormous burden of loving me. He says he is wondering how he became so lucky.
When thoughts clash like that, everything is confused. Maybe that was where the chaos came from. My fascination with the Butterflychaos Theory and continuously imagining all the parallel lifetimes I may have had, and all the small things I have passed by in the world that shaped me into what I am today, that gave me this lifetime instead.

Train of thought on a train

I'm beginning to think that I'm not real, and that every self-judgment is only a small projection of how I fear just existing. All of me could be disproved, And even if my body was real, it would only be there so my mind would have something to float in. Still, when I see my reflection in windows and doors I am taken aback because I forget I'm not invisible. I forget how my body and mind go together, that I exist as a physical thing even when I cannot see me or mine. But I don't want, really, to give up on being haunted or needed, of wanting to hold on to any semblance of a good thing.

Sleeps.

Outside, golden hands make the light change colours.
Hypnos tells me it’s okay; I tell him I’m fightless.
Cold daylight chews me into nighttime pieces
 and perhaps if I tell the sun what I’m reading it will stay a little longer.

Everything past the window is uneven and loud like the ocean,
Melancholy and pointed like knees and fists and teeth.
September falls into October and paper stays paper,
Though it used to be trees somewhere in the sun,
But the real truth is that there is emptiness in everything, not just beds.

October is coming in like a train whose whistle echoes for days,
An old steam engine with one hundred thousand windows,
Whole rooms for watching time but no space for little tides, big blinks,
Or eating up a list of books I must read before I turn twenty-five.

Light retires with a soporific goodnight and all that is left is a dearth of sleep,
Imaginary owls and other big-eyed birds contemplating stars.
Morning will sound like breathless trees stretching new leaves,
Clouds whirling, tiny winds darting through my sheets until I am grey again.
Sleep is just dust and I hate feeling filthy.

In memory of people

For a moment she was nothing but a beat of nostalgia
Disappearing on the end of his tongue.
Then suddenly misplaced
Like a receipt under an ashtray.
Or was she replaced?
Quitting cigarettes to grow orchids.

Summersad

And summer comes like a one-night-stand-in-sleep-in,

Blinking at the windows, pouring hot spills on warm skin,

Leaning on the doorframe with come-hither eyes.

I throw a tantrum in the middle of the floor,

Tearing up sheets and books and other objects of fury.

You do nothing but sprawl on the bed looking at summer

As if nothing is happening, as if you cannot hear.

Five girls

When I looked at those photographs, I sometimes wondered if all five of us had been born pre-fabricated, in paper grocery bags. We were all clean and articulate, even in our squabbling. We hated naps and we broke buttons, bruised knee bones, penned letters from invisible fingertips, fell asleep in warm bathtubs. Do you remember? The grass was itchy mid-July.
Later we would burn ourselves with cigarettes at parties and dance on rooftops. Our eyes would change colours with the eye-rolls and attention we got. When we kissed boys it was like burlesque, all ostentatious, as though we’d bite off their tongues.
They’ve all become so tough and able now. I try to make my features point inwards as though I’m suspicious of my own cheekbones, which should protect me from affection even though I spend countless hours asking for it. It doesn’t work. I still look like open windows. My hands are so little that bigger hands fall out of them. When I wake up in the night, my shouting doesn’t sound like anything.