Double Decker Bus
'Pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing.'
Nineteen. Happily on my way to being a cat woman with never musty books and pancakes for breakfast. Everyday, really.
Can you see the rain?
I want to collapse on you like a raindrop on unstepped soil,
motes of dust (not sparkling) in hopeful rainbow light.
Lon(v)ely poets will call us their favourite smell,
and I’ll waft and seep through your grainy wholeness, enrich your colour and wrap myself tight around your earth, learn and remember the taste of your dryness and how you look in the dark.
Drifting vapour, I want to condense again, even though it hurts to fall.
Steady there, let me fight the wind for you, steady steady.
Wait for the rain.
The other day, you called me a horseshoe.
It was a well-thought out setup, when I turned to see you sitting on the sofa, watching a documentary about a farrier. “Do you know you can’t really tell when they’re in pain? Horses, they don’t neigh or groan or fidget or, well, you know.”
I nodded, and set down the coffee. That evening, we spoke of Penguin book covers, the difference between shrews and mice, Alfred Noyes, and our favourite Sufi poets.
Quietly, we were mourning our equestrian paced countdown,
and we knew,
we knew.
Continue, v.
It’s been seven years of resentful Mondays.
You’re standing on the pavement, squinting at apartment numbers,
how easily my eyes superimpose upon you your youth,
cleverly blurring, sharpening, the black formals turning into faded sneakers,
In a whirl, the face turns, the same persistent cowlick and embarassing feminine eyelashes,
the city snaps playfully, a lazy canine, these streets are an adventure again.
Carefully tapping the spoon on the edge of the cup,
a perfect glimmering quantity of ‘everything will be all right’,
swiped in a subtle semicircle along its rims, a slow happy dripping of contentment.
A concerned novice physician,
seeing sun spots in the room from your feverish eyes,
the bursts of temperature between the cold soaked towel and the heat on your skin,
like a delicious hot and cold dessert to devour, random like moody cravings for anything decadent and cocoa,
in sickness and in health, I do.
Paradox, n.
You are in my way, and I cannot reach you.
I cannot love you back,
if you drown me in all of yours -
But I have loved you so much,
That I have drowned in mine.
(Source: startwiththealphabet)
A dilemma resting between the warmth of my fingertips and the chill of the iron grills,
the brown moth camouflaging lazily in the sun,
I’m looking out of the window,
all that I look for is behind.
Dandelion puff,
Are you the warm breath, tumbling through the little shelter of your lips, a little moist, pulling the little filaments of me apart?
Or are you the little white stars, the little threads of feathery fuzz, blown away like snowflakes pushed from brown earth?
The seed of this snowflake, its ordinary core, that’s me.
You are the parachute, and we would have soared far for our home,
They blew us away, and thought you were flying,
no, it was a breaking,
we were scattered.
A bonfire of you,
with the acrid smell of plastic which won’t burn,
painted dolls, the rose of their lips staining their faces like blood and bruises,
old winter clothes from the closet, smelling of moth balls and their age,
the fire lending itself to the melting curls of paper,
wood shavings crackling happily to their ashen deaths.
These gusts of breeze will swirl and sting these remains into the anatomy of our eyes. It will burn brighter, for a little while, after its swallowed all the memories which made it. It is, after all, a bonfire of you.
Quips about the news of the world,
and how it all fits neatly into the crinkle possibilities of the daily paper,
My favourite one is in the lovely contradiction,
conclusion I can reach.
If we coyly begin assuming the cliché you are my world,
and if I could begin each morning with black and white impressions of you at my doorstep,
you wouldn’t be contained, would you, in headlines and emboldened dates and regional languages?
There’d be no end to all the yarns and tales,
a little unbound Grimms for every dreamer’s night,
exhausting my ink worded soul for the sound of the printer churning you warm,
the words on paper reminding me of the ones in my head.
There would be no end, only a merry sleeplessness;
of more writing,
of more you.
Fine, adj.
Why for all the hello’s, and the how are you’s in a day,
For the crustiness on your eyelashes as you open them to forgetting all that you dreamt last night,
You wonder why the grey-eyed boy said words of wisdom let it be as he walked past you,
and why that old lady who smiles and cries toothlessly at the pavement wiped your punctured skin with a riddled blue scarf.
The soundtrack to your dreams, darling, is no rhythm or melody at all.
In the morning when you wake up and turn to me, I’ll laugh and make believe all the names and pieces of books I don’t like,
tell you all the things you’ve never said in hundred odd seventeen mornings and nights,
weave you blue dreams to match your blue eyes,
lie smoothly to you about my quiet amused laughter as I surprise myself with imaginative wordplay.
How do I tell you,
the truth?
How do I look at your blue eyes,
and tell you how each dreamy night you dream cry and reach out
for a love I make myself believe I’ve won over?
You enunciate clearly all the syllables in his name, lingering over the consonants, smiling behind your closed eyes all the string bean moments this eight letter prayer chants for you. Humming songs and lines from old letters, words you have burnt and flinch at the sound of in sunlight, you whisper them happily, holding my hand and letting it go like the clenching and releasing of a heartbeat.
I forgive and taunt your subconscious, as I see you waiting at the table when I come back in the afternoon. All the real love, I tell myself, is in this waiting. All the dreams, I tell myself, are just, just a game.
‘That’s all then?’ you say,
‘Grey eyes and blue scarves and Beatles covers?’
That’s all, all you said.
‘Good dreams,’ she sighs, ‘good. That’s fine.’
