Love.

Love. Like feeling complete amidst papers and schedules and deadlines. Like pickles in summertime, and rum cakes for winter. And green tea as an afterthought.

Love. Like poetry that makes sense. Like fleeting whispers in your soul that leave you groaning, and moaning with a furious appetite to be bathed, consumed, and baptized, in other worlds. In sunshine. In timelessness. In words; marching gracefully together in a lustful trance… Conjugating…in Love.

Love. Like a feeble sigh you almost always miss. You could grow into a wheezing storm in my chest. And I’m afraid I would be okay with that.

…Love. Like the ocean that calls me. So helpless, I go weak with intoxication. Her fingers tug at the very strings of my soul that I left behind in her waters. She makes a puppet of me. Enraptured, I cave… Making my way to the only place that can ever put a finger on me. The only place that recognizes me. The only place that finds me.

Love…Like longing. Like being cased inside the yellow-gray mist of a future I know nothing of. To want to experience it all, and still, desperate to skip to the end, even if for a few captivating seconds of paused time.

Youth. Ironed skin. Endless time. And possibilities. Love.
Like you. I could write sequels ending in sequels of everything we could be. Love. So much a stranger. Like a cosmic sermon you explode.. so stellar, into my nothingness. Frighteningly real.

What if I give in? What if I allow the vacuum to spit me out. What if I let you in. Would you want it all?

Love. Like Silence. So painfully loud that my ears bleed from the absence.
Love. Like Hope. Like sunset that makes my breath fail me. Like alone. Not a feeling, but a state of being. In tall dark towers under charcoal skies. Love. Even in the midst of constant failing.

Love. Like an example. Of maybe, how it should be.

In silence. In chaos. In madness. In failing. To love you… A thousand times again.

Clouds

What are you. So bound to the earth yet distantly unearthly. I look up at you as the planet spins itself to that disconsolate time of day. When the earth’s creatures begin to come alive in zestful preparation to slow down the hours before this country loses the intimacy of the sun. Such is the liaison we witness everyday. You and I.

You’re going everywhere and nowhere aren’t you. Just like I am. The children impugn this space we share with their energies. They’re laughing. Playing. Running. They don’t understand yet that no form of vigor and vivacity can break this moment we share. This silence that domes us in, within the earth.

This is the only time in these absently labeled twenty four hours that we go nowhere. You, up there in the stillness of the approaching dusk, and I, within the quiet of my being.

But look at you. So comfortably distant from us all. Closer to the sun. Closer to the stars. And so close to the edge. I envy you sometimes. As I watch the Sun bathe your contours and see you soaking in the many colours of heaven. I envy you sometimes. When I see you light up so golden, white and gray. Yet always away.

I love how you change colours. From white to glitter and the gray you know I love so much. Like in those vast capsules of time when you are a reflection of my darkness, and you bleed out onto me. Pouring down on me through frozen air in a moment of bliss. So much bliss that I almost let a tear slip out in a sigh. Your darkness meets mine. Heaven meets soul. God meets mortal. I am touched by you as you spill out the sighs and wishes you soaked in from hopeful eyes looking up at you.

But I wonder…Can you see me?

You look so pleasant in the sunlight that I can almost see mythologies come alive in you. I want to tell you that there is something so pure about you today. Up there, cradled by the falling remnants of the leaving sun, that I can feel words light up in your name and touch you.

Yes. I envy you sometimes. Sometimes I’m weak with want to touch you and fall into you. To have you hold all of me and teach me to trust. Sometimes, I want to bottle a piece of you up, just so I know you’re mine. As much a part of the earth as me. But keeping you would kill the light of hope. Aren’t you the unattainable ladder to something more? How could I ever keep you.

Yes. I can say it today. That if it weren’t for you, I would be defunct. If it weren’t for you. I’d never look up and dream. If it weren’t for you, this here, this planet would be nothing but a vast and unending cage bound by Time.

But on evenings like this. When you and I are found encumbered by the crawling advent of the slipping sun melting into dusk, I feel you. Caged here, within this falsely labeled time, just like me.

Don’t give in today. Not this time. Don’t let the wounded sun bleed its ego into you today. Because just as you turn into clotted purple-orange splinters in the sky, a part of me shivers with some ancient haunting that still lingers at sundown. Don’t give in today.

Unless…You’re just as much in love with the night as me.

Take me Somewhere Nice

Where I can lie in a warm blanket of light. Illuminated. Take me somewhere quiet. Where my heart races into a vacuous calm at the gated shores of your eyes. Take me somewhere nice. Where our whispers echo and bounce off the shimmering leaves of golden trees that house us. For one timeless day and an undying night. Take me there.

A place where I crawl helpless liquid across the curve of your lips. Crimson, your love braids powerful silken robes into the pores of the shaky canvas that is my love…Painting us in one still moment of soundless sighs.

Yes, take me somewhere nice. Where I can’t tell the difference between a kiss and an escaping shiver. Where your thoughts sing out in symphonies that illuminate the skies above us.

Take me somewhere nice, where a few questions can be answered. That I may plead for a cluing in, a ring of bells, a nudge, perhaps a sign from the universe telling me where destiny ends and my will begins.

Can I keep you? Can I keep you wrapped in what’s left of a heart that once was mine. Can I keep you here, so I can keep me from flying. Or can you keep me instead?

Just take me somewhere nice, before the melody crosses over, before time catches up with its long escaped prisoners, before we realise the moon will never travel, the sun will always rise, and the glistening calls of every day life can change our paths- letting direction supersede the ever failing idea of love we see our countless neighbors hold.

Take me somewhere nice before I wake up and quotidian needs poison us. There is more, surely there is.

Take me there.

Unstitched

Feathers. So painfully pointless without the wings they were born to carry. Feathers. Babes of the wind. The insignia of dreams. That ticket to roam, closer to the clouds, to sing in the wind. To feel the sun bleed into your pores. Feathers. Instruments. To maybe spin, and swirl and dive right through the skies. To scream joy in a tongue only known in absence. In the absence of words. In the absence of pride. In the absence of all conformity. To scream in the language of Silence. Where you are just a voice. The wind just a thought and everything around you is vacuum.

I wish you could’ve seen me. Spotted me right on through this masking flesh. I wish you could’ve been there. Father. Brother. lover. Friend. I wish you could’ve caught me before I left floating so far away. I wish you could’ve chained down the flesh and held on to the flight inside. I wish you could’ve come with me. Or maybe taken me with you:
I could trickle away at the sound of your laughter, the twitch in your eye, I could stay put in the folds of the books you read, or maybe curve into every word you wrote, dance across every T you crossed, hummed a whisper with every H you hugged and chuckled at your every E. I could bounce off of your every hiccup. Anything. Something. I wish that you had kept me. Or maybe taken me away. But that comes too late. I wish that you could have held me. Held me back from these precarious edges. From these lonesome winters and this clueless clueless time of day.

I don’t understand the mornings. And I fear the nights. I wish you could’ve been here. Maybe you could’ve taught me to keep my feet tethered to the ground.

And now, I would rather leave everything open ended. A possibility in some unknown branch of the future. A tiger afraid of the wild. A bee of a hive and fish of water. I am dying, don’t you see? Father. Brother. lover. Friend. You can see these bones turn to glass, you can see these eyes turn cold. You can see this mind whisper away into the wind like kisses on a lonesome night. Always remembered like a fading adage in longing.

Can’t you see how this memoir ends. Amidst the careless laughter of a world unknown, where does such a naked stranger roam. Even your heart scoffs at the silence it never understood. So I would rather leave everything open ended. Every smile. Every touch. Every thought. I would rather leave the day unplanned and the winters hidden. I would rather let the night slip by in wordless love with the moon. I would rather these leaves catch each disappearing end of these tears, that like a single unearthly drop of dew, it may fall, and fall, leaf from leaf, petal to petal, that it may kiss the bending stem with its caress and slide down, down, down into the earth till it’s nothing, but a memory of every pain, joy and dream it once held.

I would rather leave it all un-ended. So you can be free. Lover. Brother. father. Friend. That you may be freed from the burden of peeping into my silence. That you can too, float away in your own directions. Free. From all the meaning I tie to your love. Not daughter. Not Sister. Not Lover. Not Friend.

Just another chasm in the grand scheme. Just another vapour of ever shifting light. I’ll leave it open ended, like a feather without its wings, a glaring peccant of hope. Screaming out the possibilities of flight and far away skies. That somewhere it will be worth it. All of it. This floating mind. The aching silence and the void you left behind.

Maybe someday you’ll catch me. Spot on.