This Messy Life

There was a poem hidden there, I think,
as we said goodbye the first day
after walking down West Street
to the taxis that will take me home
for the next ten weeks,
when the palm of your right hand
lingered a noticeable second on my back.
Like street kids vying for scraps of attention,
deconstructed clichés loitered
in the periphery but I was
too distracted by delicate kisses
of fragile butterfly wings
inside my stomach
hinting at things to come.

There was a poem that night
we walked along the beach.
The moonlight licking at your curls,
your hands stuffed in your jacket pockets
striking facsimile of a seven year old memory.
Anthropomorphisms
lurked in the Indian Ocean
just beneath the inky blue waves
crawling towards our feet
again and again.

There must have been a poem
when I nested myself into you
tangled in hotel sheets
and allowed contentment to unfold
itself upon me
when I forgot to wipe the smile
off my lips.
It was right there when you held my forearms
branded by melancholy
between each thin white scar tissue
meters, line breaks, stanzas.

There is a poem here
not just because I am flying
not just because I pull you down and let you in
not just because I swoon in Durban's warm embrace
not just because I see you brimming with potential
but because rhyme and form are always tucked into
this messy life.

Ship in a Bottle

November

thirty days of falling leaves deserting
barren branches for the soft ground
below, leaving them half naked to weather
the encroaching black-hearted winter

this is a month for harvesting ripened
remnants of loss, regret, and senses,
for tracing your writing scrawled in books,
each stroke and letter trembling of cancer

some four centuries back, on an island,
men plotted assassination of a monarchy
fittingly begging, remember, remember
their destinies fated and engraved in stone

it’s a time to honor those who sacrificed
in times of war and gilding vestiges of glory
but I would not dip your army jacket in gold
and rob it of the natural faded maroon

still stars leap forth from midmonth nights
landing their futures in the refuge
between words you loved famously spoken
seven scores and seven years ago.

so they say it’s time for giving thanks
for chrysanthemums to bloom, but I think
it’s time to battle the gray descending curtain
of emotional anesthesia, so remind me

just how red was the blushing maple
at the entrance of Sloan Kettering ?
how stubbornly did the birch outside
your window cling to its summer dress?

how deeply were the scars from the burden
of history and tragedy on your neck carved?
but most importantly, tell me, in the six years
since you left, why hasn’t a single day been easier?

Let the world spin madly on

Found a postcard from you while decorating my apartment, a picture of the Capuchini Bone Chapel, morbidly appropriate, considering everything. On the back, your handwriting occupying every millimeter of space. Ironic isn't it, how intensely you held on to what you said you felt, and now it seems that I was the one holding on to nothing at all?

And these things that remind me of you have been losing color for years, Phantom Planet missing from my playlist, I can no longer remember what roads we took to the reservoir where we spent starless nights screaming, or recall your eyes (caramel colored perhaps). Even the monthly dreams of our reconciliation have abandoned me.

"I think of you, and where you've gone and let the world spin madly on."

Wrapped up in books - Belle & Sebastian

Summer's hastening on,
I'm trying to get a feeling from the city.
But I've been unfaithful-
I've been traveling abroad.