question mark?

17.06.19 (edited an older piece)

heartbreak is a familiar hand slapping me across the face
I have been hit so many times, I do not feel each sting
but an ever-present pain.

I prefer this sociable sea to the white of
blank canvases they sell off as art. Unfiltered light
traversing my eyes is much worse than any kind of dark,

The only way to lend colour to grayscale wonder
is to survey through rose-coloured glasses-

so what if sometimes they simmer a broken blue or the striking green
of wanting somebody to want to talk to you?

I do not care if red makes my blue a burgundy,
dried blood is more vivid than no colour at all.

I have bled because of some specific incisions so deep,
that now I only see
the lids of my eyes (as life’s fluids drain by)
flutter, the untrained wings of newborn butterflies.

This is a game of lost and found where I know what it’s like to be lost
and to keep wanting to be found,

we play hide and seek,
only you stay hidden behind sheets that I seek
to unwind, and at the end there is never any prize,
only price for letting myself think
“just friends” could be your lie,
just like mine:

acting like I’m really fine when all that tumbles
in my mind is the lingering trace of hope,

maybe “coffee” means a date and maybe “my place” means more?

the nature of love

15. 05. 19

I’ve been wondering for a while what sets love apart – what makes it so much more than just another emotion. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

Pretty much every other emotion that humans are capable of feeling, humans are also capable of engineering. You want two people to hate each other? Tell one that the other messed with the first one’s wife. You want to make somebody sad? Kill their best friend. You aim to excite? Tell them the love of their life is ringing the doorbell at this very time.

Love can let you manipulate the human mind into feeling pretty much any other conceivable emotion. It is, in some way or the other, the source of every feature we use to distinguish ourselves from the all-encompassing category of “animals”. Passion, war, invention, and despair are all consequences of the overwhelming presence and absence of love that we all walk around with. How unfortunate it is then, that love itself cannot be fashioned from any combination of events, traits, or emotions. It isn’t something you feel in reaction to a certain set of actions or appearances.

It isn’t something you feel.

Love happens.

That’s why you often don’t notice love grow until it’s going to overflow. You feel only its side effects until almost the very end. It is a dream you need to wake from to be able to recall rationally.

You sit up and find yourself finally able to attribute all the cranky episodes and highs of the last few days, months, years, to Love, which presents itself all at once. The mechanisms of this revelation can be many. Maybe you call somebody up and realize you want to do that every day for the rest of your life. You see them ask another girl out and feel yourself die. You get caught up in conversation. You lose track of time. You find yourself unable to stop thinking of the exact color of their eyes. You replay not the kiss, but the moment right before, when hope of something more lies suspended like a fog of confetti. You feel like the world and its words can never be enough. Love threatens to overflow.

And overflow it does. It is the leaking bits of love that form the foundation for all the other stuff mentioned earlier on – sadness and hope and anger. It is love that is always at its full effect. This isn’t to say that the quantity of love itself is always enough, but that no matter how much of it you may have, that amount exerts profound effects. An intense love, receding love, a kinda-too-comfortable-mediocre love, the lack of love, each though varying in quantity and quality, are equally full when it comes to influencing the moods and ways of humanity. And since, as has already been established, we cannot seem to fabricate love,

we drift through life waiting for love
to happen, for when it arrives
it brings with it the tides
of every other vivid aspect
of life.

hindsight

29. 04. 19 (prompt: meditate on a past emotional event)

In hindsight, I loved you.

In hindsight, every time I looked away from work towards a screen that gleamed your name at me,
I became an iron man athlete drenching herself to wash the day’s sweat away.

Every time we wrote words we wish we could speak talking ’bout acts we said we’d get to when we’d meet,
I felt myself rise into the sky and onto a ship on board of which resided just yourself and mine.

We wrote. That was the problematic start of it all; we wrote.

When you tell a writer that she needs to spread a quilt upon the heart of somebody
she tells herself she is in love with,

the words become impersonal; the words are what she thinks the words would be if characters she makes up left crumbs within the woods to lead each other piece by piece unto happily ever after.

The words are not mine anymore. The words belong to Sam or Ann or whomever I’ve made up.

I’ve made somebody up because I cannot keep telling myself I love you any more. I’ve made somebody up to now project what I should feel and how I wish that were enough.

I’ve made somebody up because I could.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty on a test that carries forty marks. You only let yourself remember the easy parts. When nights feel like lengths of highway I want to speed upon, I tell myself you were the ride I could not make things work with.

When guilt comes crawling into stones that want to crack I tell myself we’re better off alone.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. We split the past into two tales; we tell the one when scenes recall, with half the clarity, for twenty on the other side serves a different mistress.

In hindsight, I loved you.

In hindsight, I did not.

The sight that seems to make most sense when both views collide inside my mind is flashing signs that do declare, “not enough information available.”

Like a trick math question on some test, our love did not carry the rest of all the details we needed to know. Words and photographs can only tell the truth when those that write and click want them to.

You and I?

You and I only wanted love. We did not want the truth.

In hindsight, I loved you.

spontaneous disintegration

28. 04. 19 (yes I wrote this a while ago, but it’s too beautiful to not share)

Tears are just a symptom
Of an inner agony
Of an emptiness that threatens to fill the days and spill over into the night
Of a vacuum that makes balloons explode and hearts collapse and talks in code
Of photons that transfer nothing and everything
There is so much light around me yet it feels like nothing matters and I am on an infinitely fast moving journey at a stagnant pace
Time doesn’t exist,
I only measure my life by the number of people that have thrown me to the curb trying to pretend they care

They see me a beggar on the streets, meant to pity from afar but not to love
Lest the act harm both the actor and the audience,
All the world is a stage
I stand a straying tree,
Blending into the background
Of monotony,
No character chooses to talk
To me,
No body really wants to get to
Know me,
No one to care or give or take from –
I am a constant and when you differentiate me you get nothing-
The lack of any change in my state vaporises my entire being spontaneously,
I decay
Exponentially, and though reduce fast,
Never quite disappear into the void of non existence,
I am forced to die on amongst the living.

man vs wild (alternatively: the sun is also a star)

23. 04. 19 (the next few days are going to be super busy! I’ll still try to churn out a poem a day, but it may be low effort 😦 anyway, prompt for today: something related to animals)

do I love you?
can I love you?

there’s those that would say
the attraction in my brain
is just a ticket for the day
to ride the living train;

they’d bravely proclaim
I could not and did not
feel, that I forgot
after I healed,
and that my family
was a social construct
designed to keep all of us alive;

they restrict the program
of humanity to the human,
a creature of the sea
like my own and even me
is as useless as a distant star
while they photograph the sun;

I say:
the sun is also a star;

those that hold their own above
are no different than those
they bury; their love
is no less convenient,
their emotions, no less driven
by the need of nature
and of the living to hold hands
while we fight off in bands
those that do not shine
like the sun or the stars,
those that aren’t a subtle part
of the peoples (how brave are I
to include myself in this heart)
that have been forced to try
to love, and must fight
their selfish innards
every night;

yet in consideration
of an exclusive group
I hypocritically do accuse
of the very same crime
I commit, so I might
doubt my own
and of those around

what kind of groups
are mechanisms
to harsh out the storm

and when do they earn the right
to be called
a home?

do I love you?
can I love you?

full stop.

18. 04. 19 (prompt:  write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail)

The floor. The first full stop is always the floor. Voices spin in the distance asking if you’re fine yet they only serve to send your mind into a state of complete lock down. The sights and smells that dance around the edges of your awareness fade away and the steady, silent square of kitchen marble or cobblestone directly in front of your feet centres your emotional weight. You proceed to shift around – wave an arm, blink an eye – any external movement is preferred to the shifting of wrenches inside your heart. The other tries to do her part by pulling you into an embrace but you think you just need some space. You tell yourself that vastness around will forget the empty area abound inside due to news broken with the force of dynamite.

The fire inside forms walls that circle your soul so you crawl into yourself wishing they’d just go. You walk into another room and find documents spread across the bed. Documents. A certificate that qualifies the facts you just heard. An invite calling you to an event meant to mourn on this recent result. A text from somebody third making sure you know. You can no longer escape the woe that settles like dust upon the still life that you now try to make sure you don’t forget. You read all his texts. You cry into a cushion while reminding yourself of how he’d bring you home from the bus stop. You write a letter. You bury the letter. You take a photograph and throw the letter into a stream hoping you will never have to see evidence of your acceptance of this sad dream ever again.

You think you’ve come to terms with who has passed but you avoid hallways where somebody less gentle and certainly less close may bring up in elaborate prose that they have sympathy for those left behind. There is no meaning you can find. You digest the truth but only as an abstract concept. You don’t stomach that you won’t ever ask them what time they’re free for a phone call again. Won’t praise their ability to let you forget about time. Won’t play a game of Connect 4 or cards. You don’t, until the day you do. The day of arrives. Strangers pour into a room where his essence supposedly resides. You watch them walk around with mascara running down. They show some sign of grief but not that of somebody that couldn’t bring themselves to even hold the brush steady. The only black ink beneath your eyes is that of dark rings formed staying up at night.

You somehow keep yourself intact through the day. Who am I kidding. You cry. After days of pretending this is going to go away, you finally cry. You let yourself believe. You don’t care if they see. You maybe even speak. And then you drift away, maybe a little less numb, but certainly not dumb enough to think the worst has passed. The worst haunts you even when you sprint fast away from its source. There is no force that can whisk away the grief of memory. Through the days that blend into grey, from time to time, you chance upon a sign of the stolen life that stuffs a sob up your throat. You read a piece you know they’ll love and copy the link until you wander into your contacts and recent memory breaks down that door. You think of something they’d say. You want their advice. You want to play just one more game. There’s a slice of your day nobody else will understand.

For weeks that lie ahead
this part of you
lives under the bed;
you feel guilty to replace
your confidant
with any other face,
till the sun begins to set
and you know the only way
to wake up the next day
is to look ahead.

drift

13. 04. 19 (really didn’t have the time today – just threw this together tbh – some of the slant rhymes make me physically cringe)

the speed of light is not fast enough for me to forget
the last time you pulled me in, now again
it doesn’t recede quick enough,
the pain-

you say you love me;
you say you care,
but I don’t want to be
just another dare

or kiss of chance
while bottles spin
and pixies dance
in the dead drunkenness
of the night;

the speed of light is too fast–
the sight of you is flung
past my face in ships bound for a place
beyond my love and in disgrace

I ask if you love me;
I ask if you care,
even though I know what you say
(though you swear)

is just a convenient truce
so you can text me
one more night,
make me your vent
for one more fight you have
with the woman you’re supposedly in love with;

so let me drift away;
no speed can be too quick
and yet any path that leads
us apart will seem too swift
so honey, just let me drift.

oceanic devices

12. 04. 19

Do you know why the ocean is my favourite metaphor?

because tides rise and fall, but even when they leave
one can chase waves on lonesome boats off a stranded beach;

the water may sting of salt and make you cry
but it promises never to leave your comfortable side;

the shores feel weathered down, but know Love only carves
the most exquisite rings to adorn the easy curves of their hips;

channels – the wavering fingertips – meet and leave
they play games but none need to plunge for the other to succeed;

the winds may vaporise her voice, but their tears
flow through sandy streams to return the hearts they steal;

she may flirt with invisible underwater isles
but never conceals the resultant tides;

the ocean, my love

and indeed being the same,

the sanity to my poetic reign,

do you know now why I love thee?

entropy

29.06.18

currents cross the Atlantic ocean and spill
out onto the folds underneath my eyelids
that buckle and bend like the Himalayan plate
grinding against rock and bone to hoist mountains
atop its shoulders

streams run down broken runways
where shattered glass crowds icy marble floors
like shards of chocolate sprinkled across
honey glazed caramel cake waiting to burst
into a beehive of chaos

rain trickles down the car windshield only to be
swept away by doors slamming themselves
upon rooms hiding within haunted houses
with ghosts that leap like frogs waiting
for their princesses

chaos is not just a mathematical theory
but a direct reflection of the increasingly entropic
universe expanding unto nothingness
unlike a balloon that has the whole world
to catch it if it falls

my mind is a hive of nerve fibers intersecting
like yarn knotting over itself and into tangled hair
that lies sprawled across my self
esteem on the bare wooden floor begging
to be swept up

and away into the stagnancy of dustpans
that are reservoirs of motionless marbles so cold
they draw the life out of dragons and slink
across the infrangible threshold into the warm sanctum
of supreme serenity.

 

scream

(kinda impromptu; probably needs a second edit – suggestions are welcome; just wanted to put it out there anyways)

I thought that if I spoke, it’d be enough.
I thought my voice would be enough.
I thought A Voice would be enough –
but it never is, is it?
It isn’t enough to speak.
We need somebody to listen.
I could scream until the voice inside of me became a voice outside of me and my skin felt like a semi-permeable membrane through which I exchanged my voice with the outside world –
I could become a plasmolysed cell,
and still it wouldn’t be enough
if no one fucking listened.

see something we tend to forget sometimes
(we being a term
for the artists of this world –
the screamers and believers
born of this earth)
something we tend to forget sometimes
is that homo sapiens really shouldn’t be able to write
or question their own existence or dance or draw
we kinda seem to know
of some kind of magic that makes us
raise our voices
not just to warn the tribe
of an incoming attack,
but to inspire the weather worn pack
we invented math
not just to count the number of apples that fell from the tree
and divide that by the people of the clan
but to define linear vector spaces
and understand the composition of quarks

and – the point of this isn’t to say
that we are special – there is no doubt
of that – what I am trying to convey
is that apart from that last example
on math, our “unique” comes from weird acts
that feel like the dissertations of our souls
rain that should not care about whether the ground is their to catch it,
but like rain, falls only because of the gravity of someone to catch us as we fall –

I could scream until my insides dried out
like a sponge the washerwoman squeezed too many times
and have nothing left to say,
still it wouldn’t be enough
without a bucket to hold my tears
and catch my words
when I cry.

We need somebody to listen.
I could scream until the voice inside of me became a voice outside of me and my skin felt like a semi-permeable membrane through which I exchanged my voice with the outside world –
I could become a plasmolysed cell,
and still it wouldn’t be enough
if no one fucking listened.

string theory

27.04.18 (can’t believe I’ve made my way through nine-tenths of this with just one glitch; I might do a second part to this later dealing with the multidimensional postulate of string theory; this is kinda unpolished oops)

string theory

I am a vibration on a string
shivering up and dancing down,
heart squeezing and releasing
as a function of time,

oxytocin periodically 
depleting, conscious mind
one-third asleeping,
dopamine irregularly secreting

ions ferrying across the fence,
adrenaline streaming for defense,
heart rising with dense hope
spiraling down negative slopes-

I reach up and fall back down,
I rise and sink, come back around:
 
I am a vibration on a string.

liquid lies

20.04.18 (kinda slam-y)

Living is for the dead –
those content enough to glide
through a stop-motion world,
are hardly more alive
than dead fish in the sea,
flowing with the current,
no guarantee
of a ride back later in the night.

Living is for the dead –
if you are a punching bag
for life’s idiosyncrasies,
and say you swing right back
when really you are being worn down,
you tell yourself lies again and again
until they seem like the truth
and you don’t know what that
sounds like anymore

You tell yourself:
I matter.
I am alive.
I grow.
I am alive.
I matter.
I am yet to die.

and because you’ve heard it so many times,
those roads worn down
in your mind,
nerve signals go down the easy path, they climb –
the lies – into your brain, and set up camp
the whispers begin again –

through synapses, they say:
I matter.
I am alive.
I grow.
I am alive.
I matter.
I am yet to die.

and when you hear me say “living is for the dead”,
you think you must not be living
because you most certainly are not dead

(
You are alive.
You matter.
You are yet to die.
)

by any biological means,
the blood in your veins may be black
but it receives a feeble whip
72 times every dead minute,
at least, when you run, it races,
and when you die-

but you are already dead.

Blood flows through plastic veins in operation rooms
at 72 a 60 second too,

those tubes – just like you –
only simulate humanity,
ebb and flow
for someone else,
you merely lend out rope
to those that drown,
a single buoy upon the lonely crowds.

But when you hear me say
“living is for the dead,”
you think you must not be living,
because you most certainly are not dead

The liquid lies in your veins try to scream:
I matter.
I am alive.
I grow.
I am alive.
I matter.
I am yet to die