godfather

& when the stones are thrusted upon
your skull will the patriarch finally
ask for his instant gratification?
there is a gutted stomach on the
front porch & we walk about as if —

cigars burn bigger holes in this skin
& the dogs have left for the forest.
my funny valentine, sweet comic valentine,
this garnish of salt is terrestrial.

& this smoking habit is an aftertaste
to cheap city breeze under the bridge:
the grime under your nails, never washed.
when the doctor asks if you have been
a patient before, you nod furiously as if—

words snatched out of this mouth
& the broken headlights raved into
my funny valentine, sweet comic valentine,
this hospital has cauterized walls.

& these eyes are swollen of this rabble, no one
barks at us anymore: rotten chains hold only a
scenic greed. let me press your feet & wash them
with the salt of these wounds so we never ask
of a love like ours & you tighten & cackle as if —

blood stabbed into this body
& the aided guard: blind & liable
my funny valentine, sweet comic valentine,
don’t spill your sorrows with teeth knocked out.

the luxury of community

Vehemently, a product of catacombs surrounds us within the screams-
we’re inside mouths of burning entities, and strictly politically,
we should’ve taped these mouths long ago- a yellow crime scene taping,
cementing how the misshapen shapes in the night nicked
a lot more than some fancy crockery-

as we turn a tender brown in between these broken walls, there seems
to be nothing that needs to be said, and so as we begin talking again,
I can tell you about the houses I’ve marked with hushed whispers in the alley
afraid to articulate the claims of custody that belong to this silent
brooding of dismay, almost a lost child in the house of decay-

the fallible lining of this burning house as the frames collapse forms
the infallible boundaries of our doctrine- there may be very little to savage
from the bloodied mesh of old men with puncture wounds, and sweet
crooked teeth that old, French women are buried with- such an opulent
dome of memoirs and yet, we find the static of theology here-

when you touch my sides, a warning of calamity, I remember who I am again-
in the face of this war we’ve made for ourself, the begging, the pleading
to let the fates accept our lack of sustenance, the intimacy of death as we walk
through our insides, I am reminded of what love feels like
when it is more than just a bargain.

The Hanging

​
The silent shenanigans hidden behind
eyes that swear secrets to their graves
seem to lurk off of the ceiling, these days,
and they’re telling us to hush up that silence,
to gulp down the panic rising from our finger tips
spreading across our toes,
gulp it down as it etches
closer to the vocal cords,
before it cuts them off:
the panic is wildfire within a wildfire and
the containment creating a threatening girdle
around our necks, and our cheeks
are stained rouge with our tendons
stretched to their extremes-
shaking comes naturally,
but we keep steady.

The contentment is dragged out
of our subconsciousness: unconscious,
we’re staring at reflections of
pale faces, gaunt spaces, faded lips,
like a mere impression
of what must be people,
or perhaps what were.

The secrets are laid out like corpses inside coffins:
bare, brutal, crude samples of resources
that will never be utilised;
the silent shenanigans are screamed out
of the vocal cords- no longer bundled;
and the shaking shambles
our bodies to the ground,
bodies function in harmony with
the hunched fingers of death,
and its fingers form the noose of panic, again-
it’s alright now, for
our bodies hang from the ceiling,
our bodies are now dead,
and the secrets are still safe
behind the stench of dying in our heads.

Rage

Come one, come all, today a new God is born:
in the cheap streets of a brothel
there lies a pack of strings,
pick your poison, carve your sword-
the riches you demand, the women you desire,
scream your name in praise-
that strength of worship, of namesakes-
the motels, the bars, cheap liquor and neon
brighten modeled lips which pray in the name
of people who sleep alone in their hearts;

Strangers form alliances in the tyranny of deceit,
a hand held, a string snapped tight to the brewery
where wishes, not people, prepare honey, mead and things all sweet;

Gods will tell you of a bloody sacrifice;
men will tell you of faith; a child, of beauty;
a demon will speak of love and promises you didn’t keep:
there, in the pages of faith and belief,
lies the secret to demise, and to believing-
men teach men of rage,
but the fruit of life cannot obey to living,
men teach men of rage,
for it is vital to becoming:
a parade of lonesome men parry,
each calling his God who breathes fire
into his home, into his woman and children,
till there is none but agony and desire to cease.

Infinity

​(inspired by The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button)

The hummingbird is not just another bird,
its heart rate’s 1,200 beats per minute;
its wings beat 80 times a second,
and sometimes, you find it flying across the cold sea
where soldiers swim into their death, and they call it
defending their country, where the tattoos of a sunken ship
corrode into a whirl of their own,
where you talk until the first ray of light shines,
and sit alone by the river you lost your mother to.

sometimes, you find a hummingbird fly backwards
into the future of tomorrow,
into the present of today:
the trees grow trunks, houses decay,
homes are forgotten and people learn to forget
the spaces of their laughter lines,
and the wrinkles of their face;
lungs collapse, eyes close, fingers remember the
keys of the piano, and the line of the dancer strays:
the mothers, the authors, the actors in the play
forget the comfort of their words
and lay resting inside themselves,
and the hummingbird flies backwards into it,
into the miracle of sewing a button with your own two hands,
or learning to grow younger by
watching all those you loved die,

and if you were to stop its wings from beating,
it would be dead in less than 10 seconds,
and even though you might find the aching
in your bones find another place to live,
and even if the idea of simply being might seem ordinary:
it is no ordinary bird, it is a frickin’ miracle;
when you slow down time, and run it backwards,
when the fruit of life lays barren and lost
and no longer ripe, no longer whole,
when you slow down time with moving pictures,
when you slow down their wings
you’ll find the symbol of infinity:
The hummingbird is not just another bird,
its heart rate’s 1,200 beats per minute;
its wings beat 80 times a second,
and sometimes, you find it flying backwards into
the infinity of simply being, after being.

beyond the sycamore tree

​over and beyond the sycamore tree
your darling sits and waits for me:
her burgundy dress is now a pale white,
a ghost is shivering in your sight;

trembling hands write around the curving stones,
her feet, her eyes, her hands all bones,
seem to float with the scenery: too silent,
her lips stutter of the blood spilt, too violent;

in the stillness of the Earth that fateful day,
her heart thumped slow, the bugs flew away:
your stairs creaked and begged to jump at the chance:
the ghost is two ghosts now, and both of them prance

over and beyond the sycamore tree
where your darling sits and waits for me,
her burgundy dress is now a pale white
and two ghosts are shivering in your sight,

under the Earth, in the sea, a withering frame
from the hills in our dreams is to take the blame
of the forgotten scent of a burning house
where two men, a woman, pale white, arouse

from their act of tyranny, love and shame;
there’s blood on four hands, and fire to blame:
the two ghosts sit and wait alongside
flaming locks of two hearts, one a bride

over and beyond the sycamore tree
your darling sits and waits for me:
her burgundy dress is now a pale white,
the ghosts no longer in your sight,

when the roots of them find the deeper Earth
there will be the scent of us in their hearth:
two ghosts and a dead man who left his fate
to the branch that mustn’t break of his weight

and the fruit which smiles of him will bear first
the paleness of his skin, and then the blood of his thirst,
of lovers who forgot the memories of trust
with the delicate noose of a looming lust

over and beyond the sycamore tree
your darling sits and waits for me:
her burgundy dress is torn, her torso unzipped
as the red of the fruit finally catches my lips.

Broken

​Her hands pinch the pain in my mother’s head
out of its designated place-
like the resonating haunt of its voice,
stabbing, would stumble out
not to the heart but to all
the veins and arteries that make it;
after all, she’s a sum of its parts.

The heart mustn’t ache its way out
of itself and neither should
the weary hands that stitch
the rips of the sweater
I outgrew two summers ago;
like unattended customers at a bar,
her impatience sits on the crook
of her forgotten brawls.

But her hands feel soft on my skin:
measuring my sides, they wonder if
she’ll ever know my fit;
the lining of her skull frenzies into hills
but the inside seems like it’s been pulled apart for
some fresh air and a smoke to
clog whatever’s left to fit in.

My hands run over her shivering arms,
and my voice slithers back in
and my mother’s hands ache:
the sweater never fits.

The History of Future

​
The pages of the foretold past
are going to be held in shivering
hands, lips stuttering syllables
as they spell out the untimely death
of stories of little children and
little hands, and little hearts, all
offered as a bargain to keep the
disputing heart at bay;
the dried up blood, the broken
pieces of people covered in white
sheets will be too pale and too two dimensional,
the pixels carelessly dilated into the empty
eyes of the people who lived and lived;
there will be elaborate euphemisms
in quotes, they’ll quote us in their
notes, they’ll swiftly put the input
of how terror woke the unsuspecting
sheep, how the wolves howled,
but the bears and their bigotry
shot and murdered and pulled at the skins
till there were none to speak,
the mouths will cajole the harsh “r”s
of terror, like a flower bud pinched
to drown out its colour,
but that only happens to our skin:
the chapters of their history will
drag out the troubling world of
fear, and all they’ll say
is that we wrote poetry
about the love we never gave to our kin.

Floating

How fickle are the heavy minded,
trudging to whatever satiates their lies,
whatever makes them as they were
the guise of the future is hidden behind the proletariat love of life,
the insignificance that lies in the heart of my soul is light.

The embrace of the cradle of love is heavy,
it digs deep as the fickleness of my mind
it swiftly procures the screams of my mother
as I leave her house, under the impressions of a lust for life,
the closeted emotions that surface as tears escape the sights of my neighbours are forgotten.

Incredulity struck me, the gravity of symphonies
carrying with it the terrible lightness of being,
crackling the fire of love and distaste, burnt cigarettes and hands
that were choking hazards to their own chemical composition,
unsettled in its atmosphere, sits the loneliness of life, the terrible life of being.

maniacs

​[set in a psychiatric centre]

 

i.
Our eyes dripped of dust and caked sweat,
hands caught up in between explaining
the mechanics of living
to the heart beats
that felt dead inside,
our fingers frozen in the gestures
they forgot to make into words,
into the words we would rather
spell in the empty air about us than speak;
the chronic symptoms of depression latch
onto your neck, dripping the colourless blood
they call therapy and
my lips shiver when they
unground our bodies from the skin of our beds,
the skin of our skin, the skin long slept-
mother told to stay away from them:
“the clairvoyance reeks badly,” she told me-
lips sealed, lips curled,
perforations dwindling extremities
safely, I learnt how to scream silently.

ii.
The lines foretold
our hands braised
of the afternoon when panic came for us,
our clothes discarded in the coffee shop:
“they were seven years old,”
they were seven years old,”
I heard you mutter under your breath.
How eyes cross checked each blink
like the memory of a lost lover was surging away
and the words we speak,
your voice wouldn’t repeat.

iii.
I remember a lot of screaming
and blue, doctor scrubs,
and my hands crossed on my knee
and I remember a lot of screaming-
was that usually me?-
in the halls, near the ECT,
behind the trashy literature
they insisted you read-
you never did,
you never derived your secrets from their mechanics,
you drove right into the nuthouse
and I refused to talk-
mother thinks of us, she told me:
“sisters, no blood,”
and I keep weeping.
you broke the desk
they wrote everything on, yesterday,
its dark red splinters calling out the raven,
dust collecting on my cheeks and your lips
as we sat still for years:
the silence still pleading us
to go back home
to breaking things,
to fixing us.