Maybe the difference lies entirely in perspective

I see the winter tree, seemingly lifeless and barren, a hopelessly sad thing

The tree, having shed all—leaves, flower, fruit, and burden—has never felt more free

 

Of late my heart feels like a house
that's been left locked-up and empty too long
Visitors appear occasionally
Some to see if they can live here
Others to satisfy some arbitrary curiosity
They leave marks in the wrinkle-less sheets of dust
Only for time to smoothen them out afresh
The ghosts of the past never leave though
They are here to stay and to drive the visitors away
They are the friendly kind though, even with their haunting ways,
They keep the ghosts of tomorrow and the marks the dust won't protect at bay

Gentle, be gentle

For everything moves when you do

As you forge a path among the slim reeds

Some bend and sway while others snap at the neck

For everything moves when you do

 

Gentle, be gentle

You are billions of atoms displacing hundreds of billions of them

Everything you touch or don’t is moved by your existence

The life you lead is happening to so many others too

For everything moves when you do

 

Gentle, be gentle

Everything you’ve ever said and done and thought

Everything you will ever say and do and think

Is an arrow shot in the dark bursting into a million more

For everything moves when you do

 

Gentle, be gentle

The hubris of brash youth, it may not seem a vice 

Putting yourself first, every day and every night

You leave prints, cast your shadow, a you-shaped bruise

For everything moves when you do

 

So gentle, be gentle

 

 

 

A debauchee’s ode to self-love

All I have known of loving men is emotional labour

And by that, I mean back-breaking, soul-sucking toil

Oh, the relief of carrying nothing but yourself

Oh, the relief of taking nothing but pleasure from their sex

So, I put on my scarlet negligee under my ‘third-date’ dress 

That hugs my ass and rides up my thighs and slide on

A miniscule thong and my reddest, wettest lipstick for him

To eat off my face like dessert when I meet him at midnight

We’ve only just been shooting words so far, and yet

You can hear the pistons firing from a mile away

There’s no shame; even a brief, sweaty glow of coital elation

What he lacks in niceties, he makes up for in hunger and

With his fingers and tongue and all that phenomenal foreplay

Even after all this is over, there is no sense of either longing or loss

(Bonus: I've always wanted to fuck to David Gilmour’s solo

You know, the transcendental one at the end of High Hopes?)

All the while, I keep myself safe; there is no danger of love

(No, don’t correct me; it’s a veritable fucking danger) 

But humans are creatures of habit; so, if we are doing this

It must be punctuated – by time or space or both

Or the new old(er) guy who needs to tell me I’m a goddess 

Although I'm already wrapped around his hips and wondering

How not to roll my eyes; instead, I roll away after I’ve had my fill

Leave the bed tousled and unmade and back the way I came 

The night air, cold and crisp, embraces me once again

(Just as he did behind the surreptitiously-held-open door)

Alone again, a giggle escapes my lips, waking the watchman

The jubilation of knowing that I’m my own and no one else’s

Deliberately marching only to the sounds of my mind’s voice

Heck…everything else is noise, everything else is noise  

I dreamed last night
Of being plagued by a stupendous

Hunger
And seeing the moon turn into a tangerine so

Ripe
Of plucking it right out of its silky, tousled

Bed
Of biting hastily into it, breaking past its taut

Flesh 
Consuming its innards, the sour and sweet

Juices
Spilling over the curves and corners of my

Lips
Tracing sticky saccharine paths down my

Neck
I wiped my overfull mouth with the backs of my

Fingers
Opening again to languidly run my tinging

Tongue 
Over its ridges and calderas, the untouched

Crevices 

Of inhaling the heady scent of its moonshine

Sweat
The sound of moaning and the mounting

Rhythm

Like drumbeats rising to a lascivious

Crescendo

My eyes flutter open; not strangely, I think of
You 

And so I drink all the poetry I can find,

Letting it spill and wash over me 

Letting the words reach the places I can't 

A Pinter pause

I’ve been holding out, turning the outside inwards

The truth is, I was (and am) trying to find the words

The right ones to describe what I feel

(Will I ever find them like I once did? I cannot say.)

 

Things without legs still crawling up and down my spine at night

They whisper things in my ear and fill me with dread and fright

I hum aloud and try to drown their voices and the noises

I scrub myself raw to wash off the feeling of them on me

 

I recognise the dissociation, the practiced breakaway

But haven’t you left bits of you in haunting places far away

Some distraction, some potion for forgetting

Some liquid courage, some warm body to lose yourself in

 

I’m a hoarder of memories of any and every kind    

They lie askance in the dusty attic of my mind

The proud stand centrestage; others lie shrouded like a life’s remains

That way I can like the world better, even like myself better

 

Poetry knows no pretense; these verses, they cannot lie

Thus do they betray me, leave me lying naked beneath the night sky

Like a great still lake, the velveteen expanse mirrors my darkness

Leaving me no place to hide, no place to run away

 

I don’t mean to eschew these feelings forevermore

Just some time, some silence to mend what’s sore

To take what’s left and start afresh, build anew

To reclaim myself, to be (maybe for the first time) whole and true

Blocked writer

All ye who love the written word

Has it to you ever occurred

A glorious vision conjures itself up in your mind  

A lacework of gilded thoughts of every colour and kind

Only to dissipate prematurely like wisps of vapour

Alas! Too long did it take for pen to meet paper

Yellow-white the sheet of paper
Stop running, it says
Drop the façade, hang up the cloak,
Sit, it's time, it says

I know you, I will see you
In your hastily pencilled (erasable) words
Some barely whispers and others gashes
I will take them all, it says

There's bloodletting overdue
Drain your excesses here, won't you
Tucked away I am from all and sundry
I will never betray you, it says

There's a stoop in your back and
A draw upon your mouth
The spark's been fanned into an inferno
Put it out before it kills you, it says 

Always haven't I been your receptacle
Give me your absolute truth, it says
I will be your mirror, your sanctuary or
your keeper forevermore, it says

A question of belonging

This land does not belong to me; It is not my land, 

Through no act of volition was I born here,

Instead of the across one of those concocted borders,

A chance event, nothing more; for better or worse, I do not know

This is not my land any more than that clear azure expanse is my sky, 

Or the sun that warms my bones this cold day is my sun, 

Or the wind that sweeps my hair into a frenzy  is my wind, 

Or the ocean that spiritedly spritzes me with salt and sand is my ocean, 

This land does not belong to me; rather, I belong to this land, 

This belonging, a roughly hewn and sewn garb, 

For here have I laughed, longed, loved, lost, lusted, laboured,

Here, on this land, is the only home I have ever known 

This land to which I belong never asked me if I have a god,

Where my parents came from; what tongue I spoke, the colours of my ensign,

What I put in my mouth to sate my hunger or what I drank to sate my mind, 

It didn’t ask me who I love; nor did it worry about the things I hate

Now you say that this land belongs to you, 

A you made up of those who raise these questions,

A you of who'd spill the blood of this land's children upon her, 

A ‘you’ that won't let there be an 'us', a 'you' that defines a 'them'

But this land does not belong to you, it is not your land,

And it's only time until you are extradited from the 'you',

By the very lines you are carving into her red-golden-brown-black earth,

By your flesh and blood, your kith and kin, your peculiarities painted onto your skin

And when it's your turn to lay claim to your home,

I bid you remember who threw the first stone,

Who off-ed the heads and broke the backs,

Of all those to whom their home belongs

Eigengrau

At this agued, Cimmerian periphery of existence, how hard it is to conceive, 

Of a day when everything danced, nay, skittered in the blinding, blazing sunbeams, 

The blistering heat underfoot, the plump looseness of the flesh around unfrozen bones, 

The thirst, the undying, relentless thirst; the constant perspiration of supple skin, 

The abandon, the licentiousness, the gluttony obscured by the benevolent rays

Long gone are the colours, the crunchy-crispness, the ripe-juiciness, 

Replaced by a monochromatic greyscale, all’s dry, brittle, withering at the hemline,

Which life is it that’s real I wonder… the heady rush of yesterday did so paint a pretty picture,

And in that intoxicated state, I might (I am almost sure of it) have become a blurry, obfuscated thing, 

Blinded in the summer blaze, deafened by the roaring skies, muted by the esurience of the sultry nights

Now a few moons it’s been since I woke up to find someone else inside my skin,

someone not me, an anti-me... what's the opposite of a shadow?

As the bruised horizon swallowed the wine-infused ocean,

My yesterdays became estranged from my tomorrows,

I’ve lost my way down this anfractuous path---this  web for human spiders

I ache for that which I used to be, 

That voraciousness, that yearning, that appetite for life,

That suppleness, that elasticity, that lightness of spirit,

That hopefulness, that faith, that effervescence of delight,

Am I an imposter now or simply metamorphosed?

All of it settles upon me like a fine film of dust,

This newness, hardness, coldness, starkness,

This greying, sagging, gnawing, clutching,

These implements for a life meant for living, not leaving,

How does someone become a stranger to themselves?

And carry on living, carry on loving, 

Carry on wanting and needing,

Carry on giving and taking,

Carry on thinking and feeling,

Carry on... just carry on?

The faithless faith

Moon,
Full-bodied, jaundice-yellowed, sullen-lipped,
Leans drunkenly against the navy-sapphire night drapes,
Heavily-lidded eyes watch the ingrates calling for God in the all the wrong places,
In the pits of humanity where the saffrons and emeralds lock horns and spill sticky ruby-red-russet,
A little girl sits in her grandfather's lap lapping up lore of the victory of good over evil,
She watches, wide-eyed, the old man's old fingers—sinewy, gnarled—playing out the pantomime of shadows on the walls,
Her faith is birthed somewhere between the peeling walls that smell of senescence and a hole-y undershirt surrendered to decay.
This moon
Laughs, sees the cretins’ strife for their holy places and
raises them a little girl’s grandfather’s meager chamber
She laughs, this moon

Moon,
Half-faced, bleached-white, terror-stricken,
Obscured but half in the azure vast beyond-ness,
Her ears puckered as the drums roll hysterically, their manic voices rising to a shuddering climax,
They worship the Goddess, put her on pedestals, dress her in vivid vermillion and glittering gold
A faith that wraith-like twists itself into a noose around the young-spring’s neck,
The appendage she stuck out among the torrid-tangerine barbarians,
Shuddering still from the nightmares that sprouted from their
hands, and eyes, and words, and mouths on her
the men of worship dressed in habits and the men of intellect dressed in power,
Rub their hands and dance in glee as the sprig is cast into the pyre,
Fanned by callous-conniving cahoots and ablaze with slander, disrepute and abasement
This moon,
Shudders, witnesses the black shame of the cardinal celestial being sinking
into the deep, murky blackness with the visceral remains of a thousand springs
She averts her eyes, this moon

Moon
Star-dusted, crescent-backed, pincer-bound
Fractiously pinches the indigo, empyrean domain
Obligated by its nature to stand by, the all-seeing eye, never to testify
The commodity of ‘God’ wrung out and left to dry,
In establishments where godsmen transact, or in other words plunder and loot,
puppeteers shake pillars of faith just enough to orchestrate the multitudes
to crawl out of the woodwork, to ostracise, demonise, sub-humaise a few,
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit
In the name of the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer,
All the while the chanting goes on and on and on, their essence slew,
There’s no riches to be had in devotion, no power to be had in surrender,
No lust to be satisfied in empathy, no thrill to be had in kindness
This moon,
Weeps, has had enough, so thwarted she retreats,
To darkest end of the night, if only to escape the vicious vibgyor-ed faithless faiths
She fades away, this moon

Not so fast...

Lying flat on my back,
Palms open, eyes fixed on the sky,
Egging on death with such force of life,
That I laugh out loud at the irony of it all

Unyoung-ed

Something's a-coming,
As I face the mirror's judgement,
my jawline blurs and I metamorphose into my mother,
Only, I have reshaped her lines,
Only, I have folded into my own wrinkles,
All the things I have been have found places in my flesh,
Now there's someone else in darkness of my eyes

Something's a-coming,
I don't bend in all those places,
that were warmed molten by the desire to please,
I burn from the edges in, a motley collection of unreadable words
on charred bits of paper; I'm at home in the fireplace,
Like a gash on the lip—painfully pleasurable to bite,
I chew on wounds and grudges and unmet expectations, 
Now there's someone else in the thinness of my mouth

Something's a-coming, 
Winter sways bashfully in the horizon, 
The air holds still; gathering it's cloak around it,
It smells like pandanus flowers and wood-smoke
It smells like a jubilation and melancholia all at once, 
I have forgotten the meaning of loneliness, 
My dreams are bereft of youthful yearning and hopes,
I've become too much of me, or just enough,
Now there's someone else in the stillness in my chest

Something's a-coming,
A tempest waiting to hit,
A deathly still waiting to take grip,
Steady, steady, they go my two steady legs,
Between my ribs there's nothing aflutter,
Only a trudging on of this life's drum beat,
I am ready for this—whether equinox or solstice,
Now that there's this someone else inside my head

  

An ode to a dick

What is it about being born with a penis that makes you such a dick, 

I was raised to be a nurturer, I assure you it isn't an attribute of my second X chromosome, 

What were you raised to be? A hunter? A gatherer? A purloiner of low-hanging fruits? 

My 'no's were sifted out of me early, just like your empathy was ironed out of you,

My mother, she thrust upon me the unrelenting urge to acquiesce,

Your mother, she gifted you her universe, you at the very centre,

For too long now, you have felt like the light, like the source of all gravity,

Let me shatter that illusion just a bit, 

Just like you did my trust, pushing past needs and thighs just the same, 

Penetrating, Penetrating, Pene-fucking-traiting

What is it about being born with a penis that makes you so entitled?

Is it what makes me, a  cunt, such a sucker for punishment? 

A cunt you want to fuck, a cunt you want to fuck with, 

Another planet to orbit you, another cooing breast to nestle in, 

Another salve for your peach-like ego, 

Another glutton for a life of servitude,

Serving you, who is 'blessed' with a penis

What is it about being a penis that exempts you,

From all those shackles that have disfigured my body and mind?

Who burdened  me with shame? Who acquits you of all blame?

What gives you the right to ask me to hide myself, when you are the monster that hunts?

Hunts in the night and in the day, on the streets and in my home, 

from my bedside and from the unknown, from childhood to menarche,

What gives you authority over the clothes I wear, the choices I make, the thoughts in my head, the words that leave my mouth, the colour I paint my skin, or the way I sin?

You say you want to protect me? You say I need you to live comfortably? 

You say I need a thing with a penis?

Save me your #notallmens and your repugnance,

Save me your disdain and your benevolence,

Save me your pity and your chivalry,

You weren't born with it,

You don't need to be more man,

Any more than I need to be more woman,

You'll only be a prick with a penis,

Unless you can step up and unstrap that,

Unless you can be more than that,

That thing that makes you  a dick with a penis

I woke up last night at the witching hour,

Neither with a jolt, akin to the plucking of an unwitting, un-ripened fruit,

Nor gently strirred out of slumber, like a cloud unveiling the moon,

When I woke up last night, it was as if I had been awake all along,

I wondered what had woken me; I wondered whether I had been asleep at all,

Yet, here was the fresh memory of my subconscious gestating within the soft folds of slumber,

I could almost taste the warm tones of its tranquillity;

I could sense the flutter in the exhilaration of its dreams,

I could still slide into the longing of its afterglow,

But here I was, a-woke at the witching hour,

What woke me, I couldn’t say,

It could be any number of things, a multitude of reasons,

Like life flashing before my eyes, so did the permutating possibilities,

They didn’t matter though, these reasons,

When I woke up last night at the witching hour,

Neither jolted, nor gently stirred,

Lying awake in my bed, still as the stillest of nights,

I knew,

Once I was asleep, and now sleep had left me,

So was I once in love, and now love has left me...

Jasmine Stains

 

My hair smells like jasmine,

From the wedding I went to last night, 

When I tethered my untameable hair with flowers,

I will never be a bride again, I will never be a wife again, I will never be tied nor chained ever again, 

My hair smells like cigarette smoke, and as I stood in the rain, 

Draped in silk, and grey clouds escaped my red lips,

A man told me that it was erotic, which he thought was a compliment,

They ask me what my husband does, 

I hate how defensive I sound when I say, "Actually, I'm a single parent."

In case you were wondering, 

Their ‘Oh!’s are the colour pistachio puke, and taste like discomfort,

I can see the question in their eyes,

"Which D was it - death or divorce?" 

They wonder which is worse,

Once the faces told me,

"Leave him; he doesn't deserve you;

You don't deserve this pain,"

They didn't mean it of course,

You see, leaving is not a woman's prerogative, 

It does her well to cast her eyes downwards and dye herself in fragile feminine forlornness,

I have a reputation these days,

Of being a seductress, 

Of being a temptress, 

Of being a skank, 

Because the tattoos on my body, 

Because the promiscuity of my skin,

Because the debauchery in my eyes,

Make a man consider leaving his wife, 

Make a man fall infatuatedly into my arms and between my thighs,

Make a man an adulterer, and what he does with me will only ever be illegitimate,

My reputation makes no allowances the state of my shattered heart, 

My reputation disallows the consensuality of this 'seduction',

My perceived immorality does not deserve the same forgiveness as his,

After all, I'm collector's item, a crown jewel, 

A dusty curio on a dustier shelf,

That thing between my legs must have no will of its own,

A thing to be protected (read possessed), 

Or a thing to be prosecuted (read persecuted),

My father says, it's irrelevant whether it was the leaf that impaled itself on the thorn of if it was the thorn that pierced through the leaf,

The damage is always bourn by the leaf alone,

The leaf being a 'woman's character', 

The thorn being any of the ample barbed fences on which a woman can impale herself, 

I've thrashed against so many fences that I am now a sieve, 

All light passes through me, in and out, 

It's pitch black where I am, so forgive me for lighting a fire, 

There are as many 'type’s of woman as there are grains of sand by the sea,

I'm an ocean of unknowns to you,

You are not eligible to name me,

My flesh is on fire, with smouldering sexuality,

So unless they want to fuck me, they absolutely hate me, 

And even then they don't like me so much, 

Desire is a man's turf, right up there with moustaches and Adam's apples,

I'm the apple, I am the snake, I am Eve, 

I am the vibrator nestled between flimsy, cheap lace underwear,

I am the shame, of saying I came,

Though it's not even funny how much I didn't! 

My tongue is drugged from a decade's worth of answering,

"What's for dinner?"s and "Where is my ________"s,

I'm more than the answers to these questions, I think,

Yet, I've got generations worth of guilt in my soul,

For being too busy, for being too free, for having friends, or not having too many, for indulging myself, for not indulging some significant other, for not knowing how to be woman enough, or being too much of a woman, 

Damn! I'm more than this guilt, 

I want to put down this burden; I am exhausted from carrying it,

I'm got boxes, and barrels, and tanks full of anger, 

I've got the superlatives embellished with expletives of this anger,

I've got screams, I've got battle cries, I've got bellows that rot from this anger,  

And I try to summon my inner duck,

And let it all roll off my back,

And all I'm getting is my inner wolf, 

And my haunches are raised and my knuckles are white, 

And I hold tight on to my little girl's hand, 

And promise myself she will be stronger than me,

And promise myself that this stain on me is not something hereditary,

And I tell her, 'Baby, house doesn't always win,

Not if you refuse the oldest game ever played,’

My hair smells like jasmine,

And smoke, and soot, and thorns,

And lace, and sweat, and perfume,

And spices, and blood, and milk,

And paper, and dirt, and tears, 

And all the things that make me much more than what's between my legs

And now that it's done,
All I have left of your love,
Are the dregs in my soul,
And the bitter aftertaste of crushed hope

So many songs sung about you,
Poetry that blushed pink only for you,
The skyscraping claims, the conspiring whispers of your name,
They have all been in vain,

Now they ask me, 'What happened?'
I shrug and say, 'It didn't work out',
It betrays you, me, and what we used to be,
To have these years reduced to those words,
Four words that replace three,
'I love you', 'I love him', 'We are together'
All gone and now,
There are no words, there's only pain,
And there's the fear that I might never love again

Purgatory

There are so many definitions of hell,
Mine's wondering if you'd have fought harder,
Had I been someone else