There is one thing I have learned to love more than the night and that is you. I told myself I would collect every star in the universe and crush them with my fingers and rub stardust over your paper-thin skin. A christening of cosmos. I wasn’t lying. My breast pockets are overflowing with the galaxies I have collected for you and they are gyrating endlessly around my black-hole of a heart; every beat a year; every thump an eternity. I have named the planets after us:

MERCURY                                   (we met for the first time two years ago)
VENUS                                                 (we fell in love quickly after that)
MARS                                       (we had our first argument that broke me)
JUPITER                     (but we’re gods, remember, nothing can separate us)
SATURN                  (not the seeds that sprouted roses that sprouted thorns)
URANUS                       (not the blue ocean we found raging in your heart)
NEPTUNE                            (nor the black night that nearly tore us apart)

We are Lucifer and Hesperus across a sky with no horizon, a life with no beginning or end. Sunrise and sunset. A light that burns only to remind us of the darkness that surrounds it.

Colour Series (I)

White

is a lot like falling on the linoleum without sound, as if my life were a photograph, a film still, a run-off sentence with the sound turned down so low that not even crickets can pick up its frequencies. There are days where I look up to see if there are stars, but the light is too blinding and when I finally reach home, I cannot decide if my footsteps on the carpet are padding gently or too loud. I think of myself ten years later and I think of the photographs on my wall stripped down, the books put into boxes, the boxes put into more boxes. All that remains is of my childish attempts at charcoal drawing and the small quote in permanent marker: the earth laughs in flowers. I lie on the floor and look up at the ceiling. White. White-washed walls and white sheets. I remember how the bed used to bruise my spine. Sometimes white light is all I really want. I fill in a blank form and cry.

Blue

is a lot like listening to Joni Mitchell, how I sat and fingered stones that I kept in a tin box that I found in a flea market thinking about how someone had once said that if you wanted to stop a smoker from smoking, all you had to do was tell them to listen to her voice after years of the habit — how her voice-water had turned muddied by tar. There is a certain emotion that I try to convey when I talk about the summer dusk, how every poem should be about that certain blue, that blue that everyone knows as well as I do: the walking-home-barefoot blue, the I still love you blue, the all of this will be here tomorrow and the moon will be even rounder blue. I watch the gradient of the night, start writing in the afternoon and keep writing until it’s so dark but it’s so warm that I forget to turn lights on because I don’t think that this kind of world can hurt me kind of blue. It’s youthfulness in captivity. When I close my eyes that’s what I see. When I listen to Simon & Garfunkel, that’s all I feel. You can tell a lot about a person by what colour they see when you lay beside them in the dark. The colour of secrets. The colour of loss. The colour of the night my father had a heart attack and I sat under the shower and cried my skin blue.

Brown

is a lot like seven year old me having swimming lessons with the first boy who taught me how to love. We swam ourselves five shades of tainted childhood and didn’t care for sunscreen lotion because we were too busy trying to love each other. The purity of earth brown. I thought of how I felt then and how I feel now. We all forget sometimes how young ones know the world and all its beauty so much clearer than we do. Two months back I bought my heart a grave and buried it beneath the soil. I vowed to leave it undisturbed – nothing but metaphors resting six feet under; a fading away sort of brown. Two months back I watched a flame slowly turn my brown journal black, and to ash. Two months back the world was a sad hue of brown and black. But that day, a girl at poetry slam with deep eyes and brown hair that buzzed again her scalp read a poem so beautiful that if I were a man I would’ve fallen for her. I closed my eyes a few days after and I saw the same colour. Brown. The colour of earth. The colour of your skin. The colour of a place I once fell in love with.

I NEEED TO BE KIIIINDERR

I write to you, for you, in stolen minutes spent when my desk faces nobody. I write to you on scraps of paper folded meticulously like notes for no eyes to read. I write to you in a fictitious script, a flirtatious scrawl where I fixatedly scribble foreign senses. I write to you when I exhale and I write to you when I inhale. I write to you on the back of postcards bound for Athens and Nairobi, Geneva and Esfahan, Llubljana and Ankara. I write to you in sealed envelopes with nobody’s address in particular seen through the clear window. I write to you in postage-stamp whispers and officious block letters. I write to you when I tilt my head like I tilt my wrist, so prying eyes might not discern the motion of my hands. I write to you to tell you about my life, and I write to you to ask you about your life. I write to you every day I can find, and I write to you to surprise you after months of literary silence. I write to you. I write for you.

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moaning + morning = mourning

I wake early from a fitful sleep of dreamless dreams to watch the night kiss the dawn. They make love on the horizon, the moon and I act as lone voyeurs to their quiet interlude. Clouds moan in pale purples, trying to swallow the sky who blushes in reds and oranges. The day delicately blooms in shy ripples and I ache to take her on my tongue, the taste of dew and dandelions. Femininity at her finest, from the east. I hug my knees to my chest, rest my cheek on the corporeal shelf. The seam of my smile sews a quiet acknowledgment to the grass that tickles my thigh, caresses my skin. The sun breaking through the horizon is the piercing of the pleasure point, a drawn out climax. Slowly sensuous as she languorously climbs the ladder in the sky, one rung at a time. I miss you already. I wasn’t ready. The dance between day and night is well-rehearsed, even if the timing isn’t always right. They’ve perfected the act, teasing and tempting and not for any observers, let alone a lonely moon and a lonely girl. I miss your fingertips, even. The moon and I lament your loss together, she feathers out in the sky as the sun rises, rinsing off the night. I feather out through fading. Our pale faces look back at each other, then she’s gone. I’m still here. If I sink into the dirt, I’ll sleep closer to your bones. This is the waking dream. A reunion of flesh and blood under a moaning morning.

Strangers

The first and last time I saw you you were sitting underneath a streetlight in an old t-shirt with a wisp of thick hair over your eyes, reading a book about geology with your legs folded criss-cross-apple-sauce in front of you, and when you started to smile into the page all I wanted to do was say hello. Or, buy you coffee. I still can’t tell. On a weekday in this tiny island, no one ever stops to sit and read. No one ever stops to say hello to the florist who needs it the most when the sky is as gray as it has been these days. Everyone’s heading somewhere instead of always being at the place they wanted to get at, but you, you were sitting like a still-shot in time, with your elbows rested on your knees and scars on your legs, maybe from one of your childhood adventures, one, two and three times and enough for me to want to fall in love. There was a sign in front of you asking people not to sit down but it had fallen to the side and no one could read it but you didn’t mind because you were laughing about tectonic plates or lava rock or thinking about the first time you kissed a mountain on the lips. Around you the world pulsed. Cars shuddered. A woman with braids in her hair walked past, crying. Plates were shifting somewhere in California. Nothing had changed except you were sitting there underneath a streetlight in an old t-shirt with a wisp of thick hair over your eyes, reading a book about geology. And my heart spluttered when it saw you and my hands shook, and when you looked up at me a volcano erupted and covered my cheeks in a landslide of red. I asked you what book you were reading and I didn’t know how the words formed. Your hair was the colour of the coal in North America. Your eyes were springs that a girl would get naked and swim in in broad daylight. I asked you where you were going and you said nowhere, really and I thought that was the most beautiful thing in the world. Nowhere, really. I’m going nowhere but here. I wanted to ask you where you came from, where your home was, what kind of rocks you loved the most, but all I could say was “I hope you find whatever you’re looking for” and I I walked away smiling. The first and last time I saw you you were sitting like a small gap in the middle of an ocean. You were there and you were home. You were home wherever your skin wanted to be. I wanted to tell you were going to have a hundred poems written about you. You’re a walking poem. You could rearrange continents with that smile of yours. I hope you find this somehow. I hope this verse runs its fingers through your hair while you lay in its lap. I hope it tells you all about the November rain and how its first kiss felt like mist rising over the roads post-storm. And I hope you kiss it on the mouth with your eyes closed and think about your Argentina, about the woman who you see when you think of every country you’ve ever made love in, and how you stood at the edge of the world with a beautiful girl beside you, and how you never thought that you would spend the rest of your life looking for that same feeling in a hundred different ways.

3am minute poetry, mmm not a good one but here are my sleepy and raw words

You’ve always been a silhouette, could
never quite see you clearly, could
never cross over the bridge of your nose, could
never reach the end of your tunnel-eyes, could
never sort out your theatre of expressions, could
never hide away from your stalking beauty, could

still find love,

could let you cross the bridge to my river-heart,
could let your fingers tunnel beneath my spine,
could spill entire poems about each shift your lips made,
could drown in your entirety.

And so,
as you were backlit by the sun,
I leaned forward to kiss the hole in the light.

I no longer have the desire to make rules for myself

winter’s love letter

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t written to you sooner, or at all this past season. Have I hurt your feelings? If so, I’m awfully sorry. I’ve just been so busy with my holiday and a silly little website called WordPress which I spend all my time on in the hotel. Both are very time-consuming but I’m happy. Don’t be upset, please. Don’t cry anymore, I’m begging. The rain is ruining these cute olive flats that I have and causes my hair to frizz even more than it does normally. I know you’re angry. I know—I know that most people don’t respect you because you seem so cold and bitter and gray. We turn our collars up at you—quite literally—seeing as how we have to protect our delicate human skin. It dries and chaps quite easily in the severity of your winds and you know that. I wish I didn’t need an umbrella, secretly. I wish I could just step outside and not mind how cold you are, how you chill me down to the very marrow in my bones, causing my fingertips to prune and my lips to tremble. But I do want to apologize. I’m sorry that we don’t always realize how enchanting you are, how absolutely breathtaking you can be. I always take a second or two to pause and admire the droplets that rim the roofing on the hotel, like the butter-cream icing used on gingerbread houses to decorate the scaffolding. I find myself wanting to pick a whole bunch of them, of your watery stems, and string them together into a lovely little bouquet and give them to a close friend or a lover. Watery bouquets are so awfully romantic, though quite fleeting because their shelf life is even lesser than that of a regular bouquet of roses. I think the receiver would try to hold onto them a little tighter, admire them a little more. I like how you glitter in the sunlight like diamonds, like the entire ground is made up of pearl-and-crystal rock. The smells we give to your season, like warm bread and holly and cinnamon and wrapping paper. Your perfume is one of my favorite things, Rainy; even held above Sunny’s flowery musk and cloying jasmine and robust sandalwood. I like that you contain my favorite holiday. I like that when the first rains comes, you never disappoint. You always manage to give my breath reason to catch and out out out come the knitted sweaters and thick coats and denim jeans. You turn cheeks rosy and give a sparkle to dark eyes. You bring out an otherworldly beauty to us, to people. You make us something to see. You cause laughter for the brave ice-cream eaters and window-mist artists and you make curling up in a little corner somewhere with a good book and hot chocolate so much more inviting than normal. But you know my heart also belongs to the Sun. You know I love her nearly as much as I adore you. I long for her sunny skies and tulips and the smell of fresh cut grass and their crisp mornings and longer evenings that fold neatly into the night. You are loved, Rain, but the Sun brings her own delights and deserves to be seen, too. But don’t worry, don’t you cry. By the time we see each other again I will have longed for you three times as much and when your icy fingers come to envelope me in your lovers’ embrace, finally, I will hug you back just as hard and maybe even cry a little bit and you, ever so thoughtful, will hug my tears right on my cheeks, then flow down and kiss my neck. And I will laugh and spin around a dozen times in a circle and hug myself and sing, sing, sing until my throat aches. And then I will jump in puddles and ruin my olive flats and let your fingers frizz my hair just this once. Because even though you’ll never admit it, I know that you’ll have missed me too.