Category: Poetry

the garden of herbs
swirls around my windowsill
as ideas in my head
pass slowly
repeating comfortably to myself
the lyric of
foreign languages
the poetry of the language barrier
makes learning words
and filling blanks
much simpler
because every text i read
requires the poetry
and yet still
my internal tongue
wraps more naturally
around these words
which i only know
in translation
as though familiar
was not excitement
as though excitement
was not familiar
and these needles
in my hands
only contain as much solace
as the yarn
i clutch around them

i float through you
and dream silently inside
where my aching stops
just momentarily
until my heart
can beat again
about catholic
architecture
these huge
gothic churches
and ancient mosques
stolen from the moors
we are only vessels
sometimes fragile
yet so strong
organs
thumping around an ocean
waiting for the dhow
to harbor
in the safety of the sands

my fortress has broken
collapsed under the weight
of so many pillow forts
built by children
i no longer know.

the last breath comes by surprise
as the impact of so many years
meshes with the fragility of bones
and you are only but a dream who is now lost to me

i will whisper to you in our end times:
now i know what it means to be broken
sorry, sorry
i lost all of those apologies i meant to hand to you
like a zillion sheets of paper
an epic poem of forgiveness, eternal
but i was aquitted of these crimes before we started

and so were you.

we grew up together,
learning only to count on betrayal
learning that beauty is the only thing that never fades
growing so old in our young age
the elderly women on the front porch
of your paintings,
articulating feeling almost surgically
as a doctor might stitch returns to wholeness

someday the scars will fade
into aching longing
and i’ve heard these scars make me beautiful
like ragedy ann, all sewn up
i hesitate to believe it
so many lies of false strength
they can’t mean a motherfucking thing

but then,
life is just a fragment
of some crazy scheme
we’ve designed our own histories and

there is only one.

my lips curl anxiously and suddenly the announcement comes
sounding like a fire alarm in your bedroom,
i guess i should go,
but this is not the story of how i left
its the story of when i stayed.

our lips rested around poetry
speaking riftless music
above the aching hymns of the violin
so strained beneath our soft, soft sound
what words are these you mean for me?

love is just a vocabulary
a collection of meters, rhymes, and creative licenses,
i am the poet and you the apprentice
and yet, there is no boundaries between fiction and reality,
i am the apprentice and you are the poet.
these words are not ours; these words belong to us.

the imperial bedroom empties and
as i speak like an echo, can i read the next?
your compliance turns to your waiting
for your conquistadora to claim
a poem for her conquer
what do these words mean as they spill from my silence?

boundlessly, i sit.
telling long-winded tales of bloodshed
as though it were the norm,
as though violence were human nature,

i’ve learned to confess my sins aloud.

my lips curl anxiously and suddenly the announcement comes,
sounding

every space between words
not to mention the line breaks
are intimidating.

they scare me from the hint of solace in the silent echo of a poem.

the iodine stains our skin red
as we craft lie after lie
trying to scrub these walls white
and our love is a dungeon
(beautiful and dreary)
you whisper to me
in the tragedies that follow us through life
we keep painting new pictures
to create new paths
but picasso didn’t have to tell us
that guernica was an ugly battle
for our hearts to ache
at the laughter
surrounding the bodies,
so frail
so frail.

maybe we’re all just fragments
little pages from a book.
meant simply for reminiscience
but nothing else,

you were wrong to think of us
as something to hold on to
we’re tangible and unfeeling
just a few sentences of escape?

just drive deeper to the center
of your unbelievable plateau
as we remain inanimate
and pay no attention to our words

we are just thirteen
fourteen
fifteen solitary lines
and you (sixteen) no greater as the asignee

lo-fi humming noises,
controlling conversation
in the way that time moves
from hour to hour
;the man in the moon
is this newborn woman-girl
staring out of a watch face.

your eyes weep, remembering,
and endless in their stream your tears flood
the cool corners of your downturned lips
and my image fades from black to grey
in the melodramatic fashion
of a soldier being laid to rest
by a woman who sent away a boy
and was returned the humourless body of a man
whose battles she could not know.

you would not, you could not, you should not
let me know you.
and the guilt in my eyes falls triumphantly all around you and i
lighting the trail of mourning i’ve so recently discovered
you die behind the silencing parapets of my past.