Every night I coax my beloved to tell me again how she loves me. “I will never choose you,” she says with a steady and a voice that betrays only boredom. So many years now, but to my ears it still sounds as brittle as the breaking neck of a tiny bird. The mistake is […]
Tag: you
Leaving town
It’s been a while since we met here, hasn’t it? I’m sorry I don’t do this oftener. It feels not dissimilar to gutting myself with a cheese knife. It’s not for lack of things to say, words, or even how I feel. It’s just measly armour. So pathetic. Always prided myself on such courage but I […]
Everything is for you
To write to you is butchery. I might as well take a carving knife and have a go at my thigh. I may as well make fillets of my tendons. Only, writing is worse. To write, I have to step out of my clothes with immense caution. I need to undress for you with such […]
When you leave
Sometimes you have to go. You don’t leave, but you do go. I had often thought about it but I didn’t know a person could really do that. You can. You do. And as much as recognising the difference is a comfort to me, it still means an absence. It still means you’re not here. […]
A letter for old love
The sum of my years has been spent knowing your body and learning the puzzle of how we fit and connect into each other. The plane of your flank flush with my arm. My face flat against your belly like a memory foam pillow. The sweep of your back meeting the convex of my front. My nose settling into the […]
Let me kiss your knees, Helen of Troy
Beloved, To tear myself away from you is nothing short of sin. Your voice like a single melting marshmallow, like warm custard on the sides of a saucepan: soft, sweet, a mouth hug. Only I know how it is to love you and not have you. Challenge me with this. Show me one other human […]
What to do with a beautiful thing
Nobody speaks of the woman so beautiful the sight of her brings tears to men’s eyes. Nobody speaks of her anymore; the woman with hair like the monsoon; her lips like ripe figs left too long on the vine. Nobody says a thing tonight of her walking the streets in red, a blur of a […]
You bring out the man 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 […]
Let what you lose have no power over you
It takes a tragedy to remind you of what truly matters. And tragedy, like any other word, can be defined loosely by all, and specifically only by you. My epic tragedy may just be your comedy of errors. Your little catastrophe may be my little denouement. So you lost her. So you’re in pieces. So […]