Age

I have always imagined you permanently.
The sun curling against your ankles
To form shadows in the leavened craters of your sole
The edges turned white as though there is only so much
Of light that you can reveal yourself to
Until you begin mirroring it.

I imagine you slowly being washed by acid
That leave colour shadows into your skin
Something that breaks through skin made me believe
You were delicate-
Someone only had to whisper your name
Before you turned into, washed into
All the colours of the ocean.

I wore your presence like the hanging beads of water
Breaking from the valley that flowed
Down my spine every time I was anointed.
As if to imagine how light broke against
The twist of your finger and ended in sunset
Where your edges ended
Left me tainted by you in a way
That could not be cleansed.

There were lines somewhere, that you added with age
And created ripples over the harsh edges-
Some thing lost to life every time
You tossed a fragment of yourself in the air, as if
Testing what could change you, what could dare to take that
Ankle that broke the wind in a burst of light
And sully it with the spittle of mud.

When I see the cracks that have split open
And left incisions like tiny rivulets
That have forgotten to drain out,
I touch them like you could not be touched
And feel the sudden edges of your face
Like I could not brush the end of your heel,
And leave the faint taste of skin that only
Age can
Taste.

Bed Time Stories/ Fuck Phases/ Litany for Future Loves

1
We're on the verge of something beautiful.
Babe, I'm a poet.
In my head something expanded and exploded the moment
You decided to let go
Of the toothpick
That was holding your skin together.
There is something in peeling your skin off that
Tastes like your soul
And I would have it no other way.
I know you envision me as a predator and you're partly correct
But partly I'm sinking because
They don't tell you how slight and wanting raw is
They don't tell you that if we are on the brink of breaking
We are going to hope
Something larger than us dismantles and shifts in the sky
And all we can do is hold us together and pretend that
There is something greater than us
Something cosmic, something numbing, something soul-shifting
Something we are protecting.

2.
Tell me we'll never do normal again.
The stains on the edge of the table, the nail paint that spills over the edge,
That scratch on dry skin, that little one-inch gap in the window, Promise me we won't do normal again.
That tying down that daily schedule that waking up with definite knowledge the fill in the blanks we fill everyday with the same word our limited vocabulary
words more words
words to feed us when brokenness is starving us
hope we're going to collect like alms
tell me
we're
never
doing normal again.
Tell me we're drunk at the edge of a precipice, tell me being with you
Is being drunk on the edge of a precipice
Tell me your presence or your absence will mean one thing only:
I'll never know normal again.

3.
That thing about 'ever after' ...
No, I don't want you to give me a shoe on a fucking pillow
the fucking pillow is fucking bullshit
And you know glass shoes would fit me but I don't want to wear them.
I didn't ask for normal, I didn't ask for you to stay
In a shape I can constantly find and know to be Prince Charming,
Keep your damn Prince Charming.
I don't care for shapes, I care for how you are colouring inside and
Funny how 5 years old fill shapes in art assignments with single colours
Give me the whole damn colouring box
Because I don't care that you're marked 'R'.

I want magic.
I'm looking for a spectrum.

Mind Games

I think we were inviting an end from the beginning.
But you know we like stretching and breaking
And curving into one other like white lines, white lies,
White lies we spelled out over and over again with our hands,
sometimes with our mouths because
It is easier to just keep walking
than summon the effort to read a map
At least that's what I am, at least
I think that's what you are
At least I think we are, we are.
Remember that old game of tearing flower petals
Making physical deaths of our own indecisions
I think we could make our legacy the flower we gave, the flower we tore
The number of times we got the flowers wrong the number of times the flowers
Weren't flowers at all but kisses, sometimes a little more before it was enough
And I mean the 'Oh God' the 'Oh yes' the 'Fuck me' the 'Back the Fuck off'
We read words that didn't exist because sometimes lines criss-cross in pages and we're too reckless
To actually find time to use our fingers to trace
What exactly a word was meant to be
Sometimes we've broken into fits of giggles, clutching our stomachs like we were preventing every bit of us from losing absolute control, like there were some things
worth holding in
I think that's how you invite an end:
When you laugh in a way your toes curl and you lose your voice
and you hurt so much inside and you realize the only other time all that can come
it will come with water.
Sometimes I think you can only spin a bottle so many times and choose 'truth' before you
Realize that all it takes for you to break open/even is a bottle
Because the bottle is the only time someone really asked you something you felt your organs needed to feel too
And I think this is about claws
and I think we're good at growing them.
Let's go slam each other against this wall and cry a little bit because

Where else do we go?
Where else
do we go?

Girl Talk

Hey girl.
Listen up.
I'm writing you a love letter,
Not because I think you need reminding of who you are
Or what you need
-I lack the expertise to unravel that part of your being-
But because I have known too many people
Way too often,
Who've walked around as
Voids
Echoes
White noises
Without realizing.

I've lived too little
To know so many people;
Too many people who've been part of a hole.

Hey girl
Someone's been reading you all wrong.
They've taken out their pens and straightened you up against
The table and broken you up to their own design
Some cartography, some sculpting so that you become
Some stray concept of a globe.
Christopher Columbus
Looking for India,
Finding America.

Why would someone flatten someone
That holds fire and lava and life inside and skin it?
It is no longer about maps,
It is about meat.

Hey girl
Someone once told me
- maybe more than once-
Something that was intensely beautiful
Sunlight breaking apart into fingers
And reaching out for a brook
- Intangible comforting intangible.

I have known too many people
Way too often,
Who've walked around as
Voids
Echoes
White noises
And somehow the 'people'
Are always girls
Girls genetically mutated to talk

Talk, girl, talk.
Tell me about this line and that one and
How neither of them define you
Tell me about how your body was softened and smoothened
Never really stabilized
Tell me about that time the anger was a glacier bursting open
At the back of your mouth
But you 'needed' to hold it in
Tell me how you create winds of laughter
Because in recounting a 'history of abuse',
It's easier to begin with, 'ha ha, it's absurd'.

Hey, girl.
We have our history and geography all wrong.
When I saw the first calendars man ever made,
They were lines in the sand, set in stone,
Scratched out to keep track of monthly blood.

Women made the first calendars.
These calendars
were later adapted by prisoners to mark
Imprisonment.

Separate Verses on Everyday Living

Someone throws a word up in the air
And you run behind it and catch it.
Sometimes someone whispers words
That you engrave into the tabletop
Over which you sit and wring your hands and
Think of the incision on the wood
And how much you regret having made it.

Occasionally you wash your face with cold water
And most of the time it is an act you decided you wanted to do
Cold water dousing any semblance of fire
Cold water abetting cold water
Cold water that was cold water in you.

You have this strange collection of flowers
Flower names you learnt out of a book and
Flowers you collected and stored with a passion
That no one ever would ever understand
Because preserving flowers
Amounts to withering away.

Sometimes you pull out words from a conversation
And draw threads from the words
And stitch a blanket for yourself.
Sometimes you shiver despite the blanket.

Occasionally you sit on the window seat
And press your nose against the pane and breathe
Slow, shallow gasps of air
And you watch the colours of the world outside spilling over
Each other
And you think how real your skin feels and how you find assignments that begin with 'Imagine you are a ...'
Hilarious.
You draw a smiley face on the cloud of air you made solid.
By the time you get off the bus
The smile fades.

Once in a while you switch from channel to channel
Swipe your timeline up and down
Open and shut your refrigerator door
Watch porn, finger yourself, and fall asleep.
You look for a reason.
A word.
Sometimes you find it.
Most of the times, you don't.
So you get another word to tattoo in your veins:
Ritual.

Sometimes you sit at an empty bus stop and watch the buses go by
Once in a while, the bus stops
And goes when you shake your head.
It isn't like I will run away, you tell yourself.
It's just the principle of wanting to.

Everyday, you reserve an hour for mourning.
You turn off the lights
Because you know displaying feeling and confronting them isn't the same
And you're trying to muster enough courage for one.
Everyday, you spend an hour crying
Over the things you knew
Over the things you wish you knew
Over all the things you do.

Air (Version B)

'What does one want in any body but the world?'

1.

The other day,
I drove to the pond we grew up near.
I don't know how to drive
And the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
But that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

In the recent past, I've learnt that.
I've learnt that how are you is a question spilling over with potential
And doesn't necessarily formally inquire after your emotional state
I've learnt We exist in the spaces we create
Between our individual selves
And we can't breathe when we talk because
You can accept either the words or the air that existed in a body.

I'd rather take the air because there is something you can't control
And swerve and veer and stop and slam the door on
And there is no safety valve, no fire escape, no water to swallow pills
No first aid no punctuation no rehearsal
No moments of indecision over conversations and situations you handpicked
And stitched together in a patchwork of
Bad sentences, bad beginnings, terrible conclusions, a body that
I completely ignored because of the ringing in my ears.

No, I'd rather take your heavy breathing into my mouth
And your heavy breathing when you slam the door
And believe that both of them is love.

2.

I watched the light break open against
The surface of the pond
And ripple through the water into a somersault of fire.
Some part of me still believes
Everything I touch can burst into daggers of light.
That is the part I want introduced to the quiet
Because there is so much that is wrong about
Thinking of breaking open and thinking your fundamental state
Involves thousands of glinting daggers.

When I was really young, I read this story where
Somebody killed so-and-so and created mouths
That only spoke silence because that is what the dagger- god
Created them to be.
They did not need to speak betrayal to claim betrayal.

In my head, each mouth was purple and red and drinking in the air
Like tasting a slow, long drag of smoke
Before letting go.
Like each wound chose air because there was something
In the silence that the words would be interrupting.

3.

Interrupt me
With your silences.
Interrupt me
By your presence.
Interrupt me.
Break my silences with the sound
Of air.

I do not need your voice to twist around and form words
That let themselves into the receptacle of my senses
-My senses are vacant.

I need what comes naturally
The rise, the fall, the ebb, the rise again
That steady rhythm that is permanent
The constant presence that
I will find shadows of in every person I meet
That requires nothing of us
Except to simply be.

I need.
What comes naturally.

Consume me.
Drink in the silence I have to offer.
Accept the air I have drunk and let go of like the thousand
Words of love and hate whose meaning we've destroyed
Time and time again.
Teach me again
How is it that we breathe.

Air

'What does one want in any body but the world?'

The other day,
I drove to the pond we grew up near.
I don't know how to drive
And the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
But that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

*

In the recent past, I've learnt that.
I've learnt that how are you is a question spilling over with potential
And doesn't necessarily formally inquire after your emotional state
I've learnt We exist in the spaces we create
Between our individual selves
And we can't breathe when we talk because
You can accept either the words or the air that existed in a body.

I'd rather take the air because there is something you can't control
And swerve and veer and stop and slam the door on
And there is no safety valve, no fire escape, no water to swallow pills
No first aid no punctuation no rehearsal
No moments of indecision over conversations and situations you handpicked
And stitched together in a patchwork of
Bad sentences, bad beginnings, terrible conclusions, a body that
I completely ignored because of the ringing in my ears.

No, I'd rather take your heavy breathing into my mouth
And your heavy breathing when you slam the door
And believe that both of them is love.
*

The other day,
I drove into the pond we grew up near.
Because I don't know how to drive
Because the distance will always be too much or too little
For a drive,
So that day, I drove.

It was quiet, it always is.
When I say quiet, I don't mean silence, I don't mean peace,
I mean the stillness we knew to be palpable
To be so delicate that even whispering it would be
Acknowledging it
And acknowledging it would mean
Destroying
The silence which was truly that.

It's a safe space, not because it offers comfort,
But because it doesn't offer danger.

'Of course it is happening inside your head. But why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'