After love My body is like a country After war I touch your pictures on my phone like it were your skin. That’s a lie. I have no reverence for my phone. For you, there is all that – wonder and awe, trapped words and a choking that belies how deeply you move me. I…
Keep nothing you can’t carry
lover – you are the mistress of departure your leavetaking is a catalogue of exits one way in, so many ways out who left last, who stayed is this what they call travelling light?
When the world was lit by lightning
You know how the clouds sing in thunder When you walk into a room Yesterday on Diwali the night came ablaze Fireworks enough to make an arsonist cry The world was lit by lightning The sky had cast its eye on you Seeing you for the first time
Let me write you poems you’d hide from your husband
I am waiting for the disaster – for the inevitable – to happen to me.It sounds terrible: the way a tragedy | travesty | catastrophe is terrible. But on some days just the cataclysm you need. I hear beautiful things happen in collision-collusion: accidents can be serendipity.Bumping into past lives, new love, exes, tomorrows. Running…
My necessary hunger
Teach me words I can use to love you with. Help my mouth meet new shapes and sounds, form them between my teeth, and blow into them life and love. Helen, I go back to your voice notes again and again. It is like a dying man in a desert finally having had sight of…
If you are looking for a sign, this is not a sign.
This is an emergency. Moments of startling clarity and then, nothing. Days spent with you a fog in my brain. My mouth full of sounds that mean nothing in a room where silence reigns. I am collecting words like memories because my words and I, we don’t speak anymore. You’re no longer here and there…
Burying
Thunder in my chest Earth under my nails I dig a grave For my own heart
No Detritus
Neglect litters the shorelineThe hug of one giant waveAll is forgiven
Saltwater lover
You are saltwater Tears, sting, and ocean spray My perfect thirst.
Let her have roses
More than anything tonight I want to give you roses. But not another’s words or laments. Not another’s passion. My own. To pluck a seed from my chest and bury it into the black fecund earth and wait for love to take root. I would lay with my belly flush against this soil and whisper…
part-broken, part-whole 