alive

Oh, to be a fish,
to feel eddies lick your gills,
to defy mazes of coral, to dart,
to disappear, to move as one with many...

To see the bait,
to take it unblinkingly,
and swallow the razor sharp hook
latching onto your innards.
Oh, that cruel blood:
a reminder of life and a harbinger of death
--but a simple death for there is no distinction
between instinct and temptation

But I was born human

Halloween

"Focus," she said, otherwise life will grab you by the skin
of your neck and dunk your head underwater and lead you
to so many apples your teeth barely graze as your dying
breath escapes from lungs too fragile to resist drowning
in an ice cooler of temptation:

A precious smile, one corner upturned, one corner
a scowl dotted with stubble you wish he wouldn't shave
pigment has crept out of that little patch of gray
he's salt and pepper
good for your palate and bad for your heart

You wish for a second, a minute, that the pad of your index finger
landed on those albino whiskers, the pad of your middle finger
on his carotid, the paint rubbing off and coloring you yellow,
your thumb on his lips, guiding his jaw gently towards yours

The last grain has tumbled from the top of your hourglass
down your sternum, sticky, into your navel and stuck there
it stays and the clock perpetually strikes midnight and
the pendulum swings and you both close your eyes and your conscience
steals that kiss

all you have is the haunting
the memory of lapse
and welts on your nape from those forceful fingers of fate

Anticipation

There are no stanzas for the unfaithful, no words for those
addicted to words, no couplets for your fingers scrawling out
letters, tracing alphabets of foreign languages they never learned.
The calloused tips flutter over a novel of temptation you want
to wish you never succumbed to but Hemingway's lemonade parted
your lips and circulated blood to your cheeks and every word
is a miracle, orgasmic, an uncertain god who will surely vanish
in your most desperate moment. There are no haikus for that kind
of crumbling, I-warned-you-so loss, no sonnets for the fading memory
of a fading smile, no poems for a broken man.

Soham

The day you learned that everything must end
in love, your heart began to sprout its wings;
the pain tremendous, reciprocity
a demon slain, with hissing hair of snakes
glimpsed in the mirror of a sword and turned
to stone, a bleeding rhythm to your pulse,
veins oozing syrup on the bark, you gush
away your karma. So the solitude
has left you: dessicated, sweet, and whole.

drums of affliction

Human drums, we are
human drums more resonant on the upper back
than the thighs, the sacrum.

These moments we share are a serein on
the brightest day of summer, the red sun setting
like a sweet lollipop swallowed by the most devoted demigod
over a concrete jungle, reaching for each other's
lifelines--yours broken, mine too long

And we beat and thump and tap and clap
this rhythm distracts me from my dark night of the soul

And in hermitude I will wait for the dark knight of the soul
to hoist me onto his shoulder and away from this life

the way I am

some things take a long time
but we're here for less than the blink of God's eye
so I will listen to this song on repeat
when I should be sleeping
because sometimes it's better to grant yourself a wish
instead of obsessing, brooding, fantasizing about
humming along to this sultry sweet song and feeling
the vibrations in my vocal cords
reach my jaw, my chest, my sternum.
like a muse, a goddess, a siren
just hum it:
one and done.

we are all God
and I will laugh and cry at once
as I appreciate the way you Love me

and share how beautiful your imperfect devotion is
with the universe

and hope that tomorrow morning you have two minutes
to dance

oleander

there are reminders, coming in daily now,
that this canvas is covered in vomit
because you inhaled too many paint fumes and passed out
and your body tried to detoxify itself

"are you married?"
the standard question you ask a woman covering
her shoulders
her back, her clavicles,
her breasts
with a shawl

categorize me because you have no other way of understanding me
because you loved your own kids too much and they
were not selfish shits like me who lie
like corpses fantasizing about dying alone
in a warehouse of paint and infinite palettes
replete with a cruel twilight zone twist of blindness
and this is why I vomit on the fucking canvas
these sunglasses hide what I can't do with these pentacles
the universe placed around me

"I wouldn't give you a second look," he said to my veiled form

it was the right answer
but it was not the truth