dreams & conversations – part-broken, part-whole

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…

Come on in, 2022

I wish you cause for great laughter. Genuine connection. Deep conversations. Authenticity in all your encounters. I wish you joy – pure, unadulterated. And peace – quiet within and calm without. May you chance upon fleeting moments of excruciating beauty. Sunsets upon sunsets. Cool breezes on the warmest days, sunshine on the coldest. Ice cream…

December is for letting go

I still carry her last words. “Look after yourself.” In my broken brain, it sounded like, “I’m not going to.”

A good book is worth the ruin

Once, I could not imagine that a book might hurt me. It’s like this. Not much different. Reading, like lovemaking, is among our most private of pleasures. An act that asks for you to leave your armour at the door and wear only your vulnerability. Books and their secrets. Books and the secrets they cannot keep. Like…

Letter to a young writer in NYC

…It’s funny you know, but it feels as though I have a better relationship with my father now he’s gone. Our relationship was always tumultuous. We loved each other as much as we disliked each other, and those are the most intriguing connections we share on earth; more so because the absence of say,…

You bring out the masculine in me

You bring out the man in me The muscle and the sinew of me The ripping forearms and The sweat-dotted brow of me. You bring out the musk and the male The husk and the hewn Firmness of the flesh of the thigh of me You bring to awakening my torrid heat My tenuous passion…

Reading broken, writing drunk: an open letter to Clementine Von Radics

Your books are maps. This is what I understood. I never went anywhere without a poem lest I lose myself in places where girls like me should not be lost. Places like the cleavage. Or clavicles. Places like love. Or worse – possession. Places like wounds that must be tended to, and places…

For all things that must end

I am now thinking of what marks finality. I believe sometimes it can be just where you… Well, stop. That should be enough to say ‘it is done with.’ Of course nothing is ever truly done with, not as long as there is memory, and attachment, and possession. We may hold on to…

A love letter to my father

Baba, So many years have passed since I have done this. I do not remember the last time I wrote to you, and it has not been for lack of need, or wanting to do so. I need to be honest: at some point, I just gave up on you. There did not seem to…