September Brought the Heat

Lip service, to you, bounces like mercury
Then seeps its way in: toxin between our sheets.
My worship turns you caprice
But you, my opioid, I must keep.

I made a nest in your concaved chest
Prickled my ear against your restless murmuring
The tremors in your cage within my reach:
So close but further still.

If I could wedge my fingers between your ribs
(the same way god drew Eve out of Adam)
If I could sync my pulse to yours:
I may know your Eve within.

September brought the heat
Plums soured into aubergine
You took off; restless feet
As I learned to love what was missing.

The Morning After Pill

The morning after our earthquake
I examined the canyon between my legs:
Your swelling, ebbing and withdrawal.

The morning after our completion
All my jigsaw pieces grew new edges
Yearning to be part of a whole that would never exist.

The morning after our journey
I set sail in a paper boat folded from your letters
Watching myself drown in the ink of your fickle words.

The morning after you left
I could not swallow the pill:
Your promise of life left me itching; wanting;

Craving your withholding as much as I hated your giving.

Orbiting

Let us pollinate our minds tonight.
Let us spread our cerebral tapestries on
My yellowed ceiling like glow in the dark stars
That hung above my dreams from two to twenty-two.
We will peel each other open like old photo albums
Leaking sepia onto our fingers with each memory.
And when we are done, not even the morning can sever us
For between these sheets we have created our own galaxy,

Our own gravitational forces

Our own orbit.

Rune

Carve upon my bones
Your esoteric alphabet
The sharp edges of your tongue
Your instrument of inscription.

Your words are ancient but indelible
Etched upon lichen bones you used
To divine our omens. When my blood
Was not enough, you left these ruins

For another city to conquer.

Your runes are carved on my ruins
If I run my fingers against them
I can almost remember:
Your ruins felt like magic

Like resurrection

Like love.

Night Sea Yearning

Paisley rocks, flowered stones blossomed in your eyes
You told me to follow your chartered constellations, but
I was only led to distant, crustacean shores. Here,
Your words wash against me, foaming gangrene seaweed in your wake.

My ears, curled with the same canals of a conch that
Remembers the ocean’s voice to sing in memoriam —
So will I cup my ears, to hear your voice once more
These murmuring sirens, calling you from an alien shore.

You are still cetacean, impenetrable like evergreen
On cerulean coasts, bewildered and bent but never broken.
While I wait, I will sail your tessellate, undulating mind
So I can navigate you like tides of my turquoise night sea.

________________________________________
Apologies for my prolonged absence. In the past month I had to deal with a seismic shift in my life, including completing a university degree, moving houses and going away for a family vacation. But now that these tectonic plates have calmed down, posts will resume regularly. 

Wooden Belly Beast

My father tried to warn me
Once your soul found form
In a wooden body
It would never be free again.

Do not learn an instrument
Anything hollow with strings
Do not fill its cavity with
The abundance of your waters

It is an unquenchable thirst
A language without words
Writing more histories than
Any papyrus, tablet, ink;

At dawn, he will writhe inside you
A mute symphony, welling within
Crystallising as notes you swallow:
Gastric memories, digested by time.

At noon she will draw out your thoughts
Like your bow, elegaic and unforgiving
Carving more emotions than
Moons, oceans and their swelling lips.

At midnight they will wind and unwind
These pegs that hold your heart together
Even the stars will become a trite memory.
My father’s strings were broken before mine

He warned me, too late:

Once you surrender your heartstrings
To the gut strings taut against your belly
You will never be able to
Move without strings attached again.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Happy

Silver ice covered this purple fig
Heart, commanded to bear fruit no
Longer many winters ago, when
Selfish appetites stripped it bare of life

You braved the violent winter that year
Spun away the bitter cobwebs, the
Frozen sheen I had adopted as skin
In lieu of budding fruit devoured by cold

Darling, I know that after the frost
I will bear fruit one day.

But when we curl up against the draft
And you drape your sanguine aura
Over my gnarled, frozen shoulders

I realize

You have become the warmest winter I know.

The girl who cried Woolf

Fill your pockets with stone, each pebble
Measuring the exact weight your lungs
Are accustomed to carrying, for
Every breath is an exercise in recycling
ashes of your own internal entropy

Your mother and father’s fractured shadows
Your brother’s calloused hands on your thighs
Murky forms are the only clarity in amorphous
Hours, when you succumb to bitter convolutions
That harden as quivering multitudinous words

Like paroxysms of love that follow their absence.
They catch your breath when all you want is to
Prepare a dinner for your doting husband, but
When you’ve internalised all this external trauma
Even the certainty of his goodness cannot save you.

Virginia learned the hard way
If she cried woolf too many times
Her own mind stops believing. Then
The only one she trusts to carry her weight
Are waters that drown her with applause

So she would not be caught perpetually Between the Acts.

Drowning Fish in Bell Jars

Everyone has their own Bell Jar, said Sylvia (or did she) 
While hers roasted in an oven, incinerating
The Mad Girl’s Love Song, never sung again (I think I made you up inside my head) 

If god considered what he made in seven days (does he exist?)
He’d see an ocean of fish trapped in oxygen jars
Drowning and undrowning in unique suffering  (No one understands my pain) 

It was Pandora’s fault. She held the first jar
That birthed the jars trapping all, without even
The semblance of hope that they can shatter (Your pithos became our prison, we think)

Struggling beneath frosted glass, we fail to see
Other jars and other suffering, but if we simply
Strained beyond our own fragility, maybe this

Veneer will fall away to reveal we were never alone, and never need to be.
(But I am alone in my feelings, surely?)

Narcotic Night

I cup my ear on her skin, eavesdropping on
Her dallying soul; the chiaroscuro profile;
Wondering if
Its shape mirrors the brown Japan on her clavicle

She lines her eyes charcoal; blackened pits
Swallow me whole in her rhizome labyrinths
Watching me
Fall into her brown Japan as she falls into me.

Together, we awaken into the narcotic night.
The promise of a carnal symphony plays as
She laughs
Leaving imprints of her mercurial lips; bruised.

She pulls me through all my synapses; tender
I, hungry, dig into the filigree of her epidermis
We surrender
Even while knowing the same sides of a magnet

Repel.