One Witness

My wife tells me
That I am especially
Romantic when I am fast asleep.

She felt my fingers
Start at her closed legs
Tracing away at her head.

I remember nothing
Of all of this cuddling
And feel thoroughly cheated.

Waking Her Up

Her eyes are closed
And hotly kohled,
I kiss the oil on her face,
Waking her up in parts.

I lift her kurti
And close my lips
On the soft fat
Around her back.

She makes noises
I can place as happy
Despite the complaints
From her body.

Motivations for Connecting

I look at you and know
Exactly what we are capable of
If I drop the matchstick
On all that falls from you.

Pillow talk without sex,
Stories that can perform,
And lots of tea.

I look at you,
Speak of your forests
And leave without incident;
I have enough fire for now.

Deep Sleeping

I am not as light a sleeper
As I need to be, my father says,
I sleep as if the sheep have returned,
The pastures are empty,
And my day is done.

Sometimes I wake up
And a whole day has passed
And I feel the truth of my
Complete replaceability.

.

I hug a waist in front of me
Before I am wakeful enough
To fear rejection --
Perfume and sweat
And I am content.

Getting Through

Your smile is fake and beautiful

Don't let people democratize

Your right to stir yourself

When you can't move a muscle.

Deep breaths, deep breaths,

People around you can afford

To fight and break and make a mess,

Energy is cheap and abundant.

Deep breaths.

Try to talk after the polite nod,

People can't see you busy

Deep inside your chest,

Servicing invisible demons.

Let yourself fall, love,

There is more to you

Than what can fall

And break completely.

Weak Love

My love is weak-shouldered, love,
When the blades in their pits ache,
I look for the sting of the cold
And hurry my warmth around you.

My love is slow-cantering, love,
When the sun rises in the bloom,
Half of my legs create distance
To better see your blush in pastels.

My love is closed-handed, love,
Your smiles light up the coins
Hidden on our valleys of frost,
I spend my summers making walls.

My love is high-fevered, love,
I contract contagions like a trader,
All of me is a battle-field, waiting,
You're my death-bed every time.

In My Hands - A Ghazal

Iron and fur brooked the cold in my hands,
Long before there was gold in my hands.

Too many stories end with morals,
But I write of the mould in my hands.

Dreams are won on fields outside dreams,
That's where I met the bold in my hands.

In closed rooms inside my chest there lie
Victims of what I sold in my hands.

I was worn where the dream was won,
My story is the old in my hands.

It is this: my youth is my age lost
Beneath every fold in my hands.

To survive ambition was to leave
All that I could not hold in my hands.

Miss Me For I Am With You

You miss me and grow envy
In the eyes set upon lovers
that can see the space between
Their toes.

Heart, you forget that love is inward,
To miss me is to have me to miss,
My hands and kisses are only
Your skin.

Losing at Poker

Sometimes, when thoughts settle,
I imagine dropping through city air,
Waves buckle inside my chest,
I fall into falling careers of cars,
Sometimes when thoughts stay,
I imagine myself imagining death,
And it makes me sad to know myself,
I pity the pity in me as if to
leave my weight on the fast winds
that lift others into solid mediocrity,
I am a character in a musty book
and happier readers air my sadness,
Swirl it in cold glass to deepen flavours,
Speak of sacrifices made into chasms
with the abyss looking into me,
Confused with what it was expected to do,
Reminding me of the lawlessness
That governs the heaven as we string it
on numbers, to prophesy inert whims,
I am failed prophecies and gambling,
Poker games with a sleeping universe,
I am the space between decimal digits
That causes stars to collapse.

Carnal Knowledge

Your lower lip needs to be a book-cover,
Dog-eared, pink-papered, full with knowing,
My fingers will never stop with the preface,
They will grab your jaw where it falls away,
Pull your flesh down its slow cherry path,
Fetch your eyes from their cloudy heights
into cupped hands that wander your hair
like lost snakes of Eden feeling their way
into Paradise, one soft truth at a time,
break the tresses where night undresses;
Bend the stem of your neck into me,
I shall wait for your hitched breath
to learn your body in unfocused eyes
and mark your skin with knowledge.

Balancing Act

Did you count how many kisses I gave,
planted like clumsy hands in wet mud,
eager to shape them before rains leave?
How many did I hold behind my lips,
inside the chest tongue calls home,
afraid to spend the night over your ear,
as if swallowing the cheer in your eye
before it reaves the soft between us,
tears everything into fluid forgetting,
before we discover the taste for blood,
and call carnivores to roam our flesh.

Waking Up At Night

I breathe in the night and fall awake
the way I fell into half-shut eyes that
demand godless oceans into becoming,
My lips play your wrists like flutes,
woodwind songs race up your spine
and spill hotly into your recesses,
All of you is waiting, blind curiosity,
My teeth mark the places you forgot
to breathe like a cave of twilight stars,
Your eyelids fold oceans to leave
their angry weight on my breath --
I am dry throat and slow industry.

Knowing Myself

I know myself in the after-noon morning,
Curtains over windows to forget light,
I woke up half a conversation ago,
My hair is a sexy mess of whirls,
My voice is all throat, no sound,
I haven't spoken a word but I talk,
Somewhere between turning in bed
and staring at a cosmological ceiling,
I know myself in the after-noon morning.

The Sound of my Breath

The sound of my breath is louder
than the silence of the walls,
I am lost between sighs that
tell me I have no control,
This is what free will looks like,
My chest heaves without gaps
between the black of my eyes
where I held all my maps,
The sweat on my nose
is the past in my rest,
where I trickle down my spine
and dwell on my best,
There is no tomorrow then
inside these forgotten deaths
but I remember my blood only
in the sound of my breaths.
The sound of my breath is louder
than the silence of the walls,
I am lost between sighs that
tell me I have no control.

Pretty, Little Stones

I sat in the library until closing time,
Penning the sharp-edged rime
Of pretty, little stones that shone,
Pretty, little stones dull as bone,
Igneous stones so light they float,
Little clouds caught in a mote,
I remember collecting the chips,
Pressing their lines to my lips,
Their names were all it took to seize
the mineral design with solid ease,
I always wrote things I couldn't hold
Promises that keep growing cold.

Fires That Spread

There exists a fire born to spread,
Find home in embers long dead,
Pull apart the weight of dreams,
Shake the hopes on hollow beams,
There are walks in the park
That you must take in the dark
To see the full wonder of your face,
Faintly lounging on the empty space,
Make the threshold of night
The balcony to relentless light,
Find your rapture in new bones,
See them breathe life into stones.

Confession Poem

If I wrote you a poem,
Soft, but grand in expectation,
You'd tell me I dream too much,
You'd tell me I know you not,
What scheme do I draw you on?
What remains of "you" in me
when there has not been "we"?
This is the irony of poems-that-make,
Of songs that bear themselves
like a universe summoned into being
out of nothing broken, nothing spent.

This is why it will not have roses,
Roses are gentle and thorny,
Any rough hand can take them
with fingers careful to feel,
No.
I'd tell you of the sunflower instead,
The blind seed grows to the Sun
when it does not know what moves it,
The ripe stalk bends backwards
as if it heard the rapture of being
inside the passing sunbeam,
stroking its petals with the glow
of fires that it does not see,
of fires that it cannot see.

This, then, is a confession poem,
I am blind and burning,
I know nothing of you,
But that is hardly the point,
And you know it.

There are softer things than love confessions

There are softer things than love confessions
stoppered in wine bottles left on stone,
Drier promises feel crisp between palms
and stay quiet across telephones.

Open my diary and run through the bark,
You will find truth flickering upon liars,
The territory knows the map's unbecoming,
All of my cartography is forest fires.

There are softer things than love confessions,
I wear their crooning beneath cold skin,
There are promises I have never kept
and my breaking is slow burning.

Loving Truth

There once was a man who loved the Truth,
He had gold-nibbed pens in pearly inkwells
and a sky-blue collection of recycled paper
upon which every night he would labour
to spill his research of the day's working
so that tomorrow made more sense than today.
One day, he swung his inventory on a shoulder
and set out to survey where the day pooled,
because the jagged shorelines held old names,
and the streetside music was inherited secrets,
These were names and secrets he needed to write down,
you could see him sitting against a dropping sun,
after a long day of hot bazaars and cold companies
and wonder at the arcana inside harbor air,
Every morning he would clean two squares of cloth,
write the Truth on its uneven fabric,
and paste them over his eyes as holy ritual
Thus he wandered the world with blind justice in day;
At night he would wax into his memoir
that the world was strung of a single thread
and that there is beauty to be found in its discovery.

Display Picture

I compliment your display picture
and become a superficial spider
strung on the world wide web,
I don't tell you I want to trace you
in my words like I know your lacework,
like I know your baroque and grotesque,
I know the cipher to the divine in them,
I don't tell you I don't know you anymore,
The furrow beneath your lip hides lies,
I am not qualified to know them now,
I skirt your inside with patchwork smiles
and pretend that the gold was in your skin,
that my temples were made to your beauty
and all your divine was always in hiding.