THE DOOR

Wet days I sit by the break in the old stairs,

listening to my musings as they creak their way

past the arcs of my tired eyes.

In the distant blur of sound

my name calls me softly back to safety,

away from thoughts of you. There are

other dreams than that one, I know. I know.

So I turn away and leave that door closed.

 

Dry days are no different.

The sun smokes my scalp

and buzzes your name in my ears.

Those thoughts that pierce my bursting head

right between my eyes, delve deeper

into today’s bright, burning pain of losing you.

My pillow is soft, soft in the afternoon sun,

so soft it sinks against the hard bed beneath it

until my head hurts.

 

I never found out

how the wind knew all the spaces of me

that were you; how it knew to tease

the storm inside my head out into my hair,

the way you always said you loved it.

Too strong, that word love -

even the wind cannot say it like you did.

Instead it whispers, whispers, whispers,

other secrets in my ears, other lies

you never told but left behind.

 

Following me from past to past,

this baying whirlpool of unfinished fights

drags me again face to face

with our aged arguments,

faded in the half-light of my despair.

Empty? I will fill over time with other worries,

other drowsy folds of darkness

draped around me until empty

is only that room behind closed doors.

All I ask is that you shut the door

behind you when you leave.

 

 

MIRROR

Standing tall, and taller now than me,

now taller – growing still – my silence

fogs this silver slice of light, and blunts

the pain of the clear divide to fill

the deep inches between my two selves.

 

Into the glass, out from it.

How can this same mirror

pour my gaze out and trap it

in the quick closing walls of my soul

too near to see? Reflect!

Each step back sows new hollows

beneath my heels, new holes

in the dusty half-light of my heart.

Until the sudden darkening

of an unguarded eyelid finds me back,

this side of me. Reflect?

I have been beyond the mirror!

Dulled the prickling emptiness

of questions that answers killed!

I have surprised ideas

into thoughts into words

into truths to have them

pursue me back in my own image. 

Reckoning, reflecting, reliving the ignored,

until each naked encore of perfection hurts.

MOURNING LIES

She sighs. She lies

in your arms. She lies

of sticky coffee kisses

that melt into sunrise.

Toasting in your morning warmth,

weighing down your heart she lies.

Her breath meets your lips. She

drags the shallows of your eyes.

Something flickers; dies.

And still she lies.

Still. And you watch

the colours ebbing

from her water-colour eyes.




One definition of "drag" from the American Heritage Dictionary is "To search or dredge the bottom of a body of water." People do this when trying to find a corpse, a gun, a sunken boat, or something else that might be lying on the bottom and not visible through murky water.

MIDNIGHT FINDS ME

Midnight finds me
in the whisper of your fingers
as they peel the shadows from my body
and I watch them dissolve
into the eddy of your eyes.
It lurks in the rising tide of my breath
as you unbind the air that holds me together
and gather the fluttering fragments
of who I was before they slip
through your fingers and fly free
into the throat of the winds that breathe me in.

In the scorching silence, dark eats into dark,
gnawing at my voice until
the ragged edges of sound gently fade
into a single rhythm that merges our pasts
and lies undiscovered in the tangle of our feet.

WHERE MOONLIGHT IS RED

This city seeps into your blood
and dripping from your veins,
trails after you,
invading each new world you visit,
grafting itself onto the embryo
of each new birth,
an extension of your new self,
and you know
you will not rise from the ashes purer.

Yes, you, hybrid of your past and today,
of tomorrow’s promises;
you know you will walk
into a tarnished future,
and cut your feet on broken dreams.
Fallen city!
Powdered under the weight
of a hazaar well-heeled, work-day feet.

Child of the city, woman of the world,
with your eyes brighter than traffic-lights
in the smoky evening heat - step away!

But where would you go?
Your pulse is the blur of buses and trains;
the song of car-horns,
and engines croaking moodily past us
on the burnt-black crumbling tar.

And this city will be
the shrug of your shoulder,
and the after-taste
of the sleeping scream in your throat;
in the deep glare of daylight it will be
the shroud that saves your skin.

NEVER REALLY OUR BAR

Our bar and yet tonight
We are strangers.
The hour draws to a close.
We draw far, far apart
And the silence dances the distance
Between my breath and yours
Mocking the low buzz of possibility
That fragments of conversation around us
Offer up, along with salted peanuts
And greasy chips.

Your eyes plunge into your drink,
Emerge drenched
And pour themselves into mine.
The way they used to.
But this time is different.
You speak and your words
Twist the emptiness between us
Into knots that wrench me closer.
You say you love me and wait.
The way you used to.
My silence swallows your soul.

Your words carve themselves
Into the numb planes of my face.
You love me and I can’t breathe
I hurt but you will bleed.

Whittling deftly, slowly then faster;
Your words hack their way
Past wooden smile and staring eyes
To fester in my chest
Trapped in my ribcage,
Imprisoning me.

I am not clay for the sculptor,
Warm to your touch,
Moist to your fingers,
Malleable, tender, yours.
Stronger from the oven ordeal.
How blind can you be?
I am wood, and right now
Pieces of me lie on the floor.

Why couldn’t you bring me to life?
Instead, you take my hand across the table
To sweep my words onto the floor.
The way you used to.
Just as you sealed my lips
With kisses, and buried my words
In the silence of your bed
Until our silence lulled me to sleep.

And now someone else's whispering breath,
Racing through my veins,
Nudges me awake, and
Springs to life inside me.
And you say you love me and you wait
While pieces of me lie on the floor.

Cut your feet
While you wait for my voice,
Cut your feet on your way to the door.
I will hurt more than you can possibly bleed.

And in case you were wondering,
It was never really our bar.
I couldn’t stand the music, but hey,
At least it drowned out the silence.

EXPERIMENT IN RUSTICITY

 
 
The afternoon numbers

ate their way into my skull,

and the ceiling fans had long since

hummed themselves to sleep.

The heat would kill me if the numbers didn’t.

 

The day before it had been nouns.

They hounded my dry half-sleep

of dusty dreams that night,

until all I had left of words I knew

were sounds, crackling in the yawn

of my stick- on smile, ready to pounce.

 

My pounding temples screaming protests;

this not that, this not that, NOT THAT!

I was ready to leave the village on foot,

risk taking directions

in a language I only half understood

I am no teacher.

We were preaching cleanliness

to smiles belonging to faces

washed in a river kilometers away.

More fool us.

My age, these girls were my age!

The days melted into each other

like our new aches and pains.

City slickers!

 

Mornings, they bathed in the river.

Evenings, we washed that same river

out of our hair and skin,

snapping a bunch of noisy photographs first.

And in that same way

we would later shower clean

of their embraces and their shy-eyed smiles.

 

And so we watched the swirling rush of the river

with the same eyes that would one day follow

our memories of chunni-chewing faces

disappear into the foam,

down our pristine bathroom drains.

THEY FOUND MY VOICE

They found my voice in faded ink
on scraps of paper floating from
the fallen sky. And they said
to themselves: This is how she feels.
So they rushed to my side.

I will never forgive them.
Those words were torn up
in another lifetime; thrown.
And now they are stuffed back
into my shocked mouth so that
when I spit them out it feels as if
I am saying them still.

What does it matter why? That
tears once smudged my eyes
is all that strikes them. That
I was struck too, and flattened
by the blow until I turned over
in the breeze, they do not care.

But I did and they are guilty
with excitement to see the older,
other side to me that is me no longer.
They do not care that those words
unearthed a face that was dead
and was buried. A face that I killed.
So they rushed to my side.

And with them they brought
a cadaver that rose to greet me,
a carcass that said: See, I am not dead.

I wonder how I will sleep tonight,
with two faces on my pillow
and one voice between them
as they throw more words
into the black winds of the night.

PICNIC

I remember
- that time we went climbing in the ravines –
watching the raindrops dance
upon your shoulders and how
when you turned to help me up
I saw them nestled in your curls,
twinkling in the sun.

The rocks were hard beneath my bare feet
and the sharp thorns scraped my shins.
I cannot remember the pain.
But I can still feel the tug at my ankle,
hear the snap of my silver payal caught in the shrubs.
I remember watching it fall.

The lake we swam in was muddy
and the clay cool between our toes.
I remember how the reeds wrapped themselves
around my feet like little snakes.
Of course I screamed and grabbed your shoulders,
forgetting for that moment that I knew how to swim.

The rain fell harder, big, glistening drops
swallowed whole by waves glinting golden in the morning sun.
Dripping, trailing reeds and mud, we walked back
to the bus, chappals dangling from our hands.
Mine were blue.

I remember how we returned home dry,
all crumpled T-shirts and faded shorts,
my bare, burnt feet caked with mud.
Standing at the gate besides those rows
of carefully parked cycles, sheltered from the rain,
talking, laughing, teasing.
Not knowing how to say goodbye.
We must have, though I do not remember it.

In the bathroom mirror, the face that stared back
at me was brown and dry. Wild hair, and worse -
treacherous kajal smears beneath my eyes.
Was this beauty? That day I thought it was.

I remember glancing at my watch,
and the time was only noon.
I must have seen you later that day,
fresh, hair combed, and kajal tamed.
All these years later, I am sure of it,
although I cannot remember it at all.
In my memory the day always ends
with me searching in that bathroom mirror
and seeing you in my face.


September 2007

WHITE LOSS

 
Symphony of molten tears
steam and crackle and hiss
hint at what is not to be;
never to be; had always been.

White time. White dreams.
White seas of grief. White
ashes in my funereal feet;
white pain between my eyes.
The slow steady drizzle
of prayer a riot of white
on white, a buzz of loss
around your lifeless form.

The single diamond dancing
past our sunset eyes and down;
weaves despair into wishes
into loss into love into pain;
into the long drawn scars
that sleep in yesterday.
Say my name once more
in your faded colourless voice.
Call me once more and
this time I will come.

OF SOME NIGHTS

You say you hear it too,
You could be one of us. We,
whose nights mature before our eyes,
shrivel, die; and reborn from the ashes
of our dreamless thrashings,
our mornings, still-born sometimes
from between cushiony bunched up thighs
of bedclothes pushed roughly to the side;
living reminders of the night before.


Perhaps you might understand
how some nights my only lullaby’s
a plea, a keening siren’s call;
a burning yearning, white-hot bleeding,
churned and flung at blank bare walls
that close in, closing all around me -
what would I give to watch them fall?


Who fells them? Whose voice
slithers in through lightening cracks,
who shares my window; pushes my walls?
And now this dam-burst - railing, wailing -
released into the unsuspecting wild.
Two voices; yours and mine.


And now some nights my lullaby’s
a dawning, rough crossing into morning,
tracking doubt across my mind.
I wonder if, when I was walled in,
raging, calling, but safe
from the world, will I find that, perhaps,
I was saving the world from me?