heirlooms

I keep broken souls
in a locket
where memories dance with fire
to keep themselves warm

and I collected you
like a lost prophecy
because
you
drenched your soul in vinegar
to keep the flies away

express aisle

I still
sing your name
at night

but somewhere
in between screams of hysteria
and ecstasy
I discovered
they never have your eyes

because your eyes grew up
in a location
that couldn't afford
the luxury of things like remorse,
and they shoot
apologetic glances at me shyly
as if
the only exchangeable item
in the refund line were
emotions too expensive for your tastes

anachronism

I held your uncertainty like a first kiss
and we teetered on the brink of security
scrawled verses onto our lips while
you embedded rhymes in my poetry
spelled out sonnets in archaic alphabets and
told stories that danced on the tip of my tongue;
searched for words like I need a body
anybody

ubuntu

I will see your face
when I set my computer screen on fire
and the flames will dance like
fingertips on the keyboard

---

I will build pyres
in your name
and sing elegies
like memories
because
I have run out of
things to mourn

austin

my hometown
is
a love story

and I find a bit of God
in every snowflake
that I catch there

I don't need your good intentions
cause last time I checked they were empty gestures that
hid somewhere in the grosgrain of the social fabric where
you wove bitterness between the threads of memories;
embroidered resentment with needles that dyed
linen with blood-strained pinpricks

made promises of upgrading with improved hopes and dreams
but our lives are an installation piece that can't be erased as easily as
you destroyed our happiness

minced up contemplation

chopped up thoughts of you
flow through my veins like
ink incarnate
stopping up highways
with blocked traffic jam aneurysms
at 3 in the morning

And it should disturb me,
but I'm just left with your silence

traumatic encounters with the real

you act out realities
as if that 4th glass wall
that actors never penetrate
wasn't there
talking straight
into camera obscuras that
sparkle like pupil pinholes as if frivolities
like subject-object interactions were
foreign to you because
Freud was a fraud only in the sense that
even he
had no idea
what he stumbled upon

your irises are tunnels into the 9th level of our imagination,
creating myths of retribution from holier places

and the chosen dialectic that dances lightly on your tongue
lies like a societal constraint,
tucked in under blankets of deception

the l word

I memorized the bridge of your nose. I hope you
Don't mind too horribly; I trace it in the air as if the
Thin wisps of dust my finger trails through can
Recreate your eagerness the first time you mounted me

---

I can hear my mother screaming angrily
in the squeak of the faucet
and in the insistent creak of the floorboards like
broken eggshells I've walked over all my life

---

some days ago I was told
"you don't have to be in love
to fall in love"

sitting near windowsills
contemplating on toilet seats
nowhere is not there
nowhere is now here

--

with everything falling apart
there is some sort of simple solace in
the inspirational scribbles on public stalls that survive
(but only barely) next to pleas for self-esteem and sex

Siobhan

I found you sitting outside drawing circles on the concrete
My hesitance hiding in sewer pipes
My stomach hanging upside down in grassy fields