Good Mood

I am in a good mood today,
I wear it like a birthday cap,
a little tight around my chin,
I will clap my hands a little harder,
Sing my grocery list a little softer,
Today, I will turn on music
and it will not speak of art,
it will not speak of auroras,
It will have no words, actually,
I will move my head like ribbons,
but my smile will not tell you of lies,
I will give you some chocolate,
No, don't ask me why,
I have enough lemonade today
to give out glasses to everyone,
I must be kind more often,
the glass is completely empty sometimes,
My head is not an orchestra today,
Sit besides me,
why don't you now?
We will talk of your temple roofs,
of olive oil salads and lazy winters,
Ignore the confetti on my shoulder,
I have had a crazy day,
I am in a good mood today,
and I feast on it like my last meal,
That is why you know of my sadness,
Thank you for not mentioning it.


Image Source: Daniel Perkowski

Loud Music

There are times when I turn up the music
loud enough to not hear myself think,
The bed is filled with knots of cotton
and they push against my aching back
like guns through faded bedsheets
but I cannot get myself to buy a new one,
I cannot get myself to leave this room,
to force the slow career of my thoughts
into changing its golem-face that smiles,
sad grimaces of my forgetful making,
I have created monsters and skeletons
and they sleep on my bedroom floor,
ambush my dreams before they find hope,
My midnights are an album of memories
that make no sense when opened
but haunt the mind long after closing,
I forget how to find blankness again
and wear faces that I will leave in a box
when morning comes, it always comes,
although I haven't seen it in weeks,
Mornings are too full of opportunity,
they light my door and mock my inertia,
throw challenges on eyelids as if to say,
"These are not smoke and mirrors,
All of you is broken; your loneliness is."
I pretend I do not know what peace looks like,
that happy is a puzzle I am still solving,
my pieces are missing and I am not whole,
all of me is not a pile of cardboard pieces
I hid under my blanket ages ago.

I do not leave my room but listen to music,
loud enough to fill the empty in me,
until I forget the sound of my name,
I am not,
I am not.

"Yes, you are."

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Forgetting Nothingness

I tasted the joy between your fingers
until oriental philosophies made sense,
until the nothingness of a Monday evening
was the highlight of my week,
the longest page in my diary,
the most difficult memory I ever wore.
The funny thing about our breakup was
that I went into it with such confidence,
as if you had left instructions on how to forget you
on the same tissue-paper where you scribbled my name
against a monster that looked lovelier
with every note of laughter it stole from you.
I spent my nights becoming that monster,
pinching my "Hello"s and laughing louder
so that I looked a little less like the me you left,
a little less like the me you fell out of love with.
Apparently, there is a rule that says
you may only bleed out your darkness in ink
and that is not really a rule
but a lie poets tell themselves
so that their art is not emptiness made beauty,
You are not poetry, in form or spirit,
You are not melancholy, you never were,
You are the nothingness that makes Mondays last forever,
and I am not empty, I am too full of words,
too full of pretty lies I tell myself
because talking is better than the silence
that reminds me of oriental philosophies
and everything just is,
but I remember what nothingness feels like.

Broken People

It is effort, I know,

But cast honest eyes around
And you will find broken people everywhere.
These are sunflowers that turned too much and broke;
They carry their own Suns now.
They carry a jar of honey with them
Because wounds and infections are too common,
And sugar is useless.
Their hands and brows are knit
with lines they did not have when they wrote their first love-letters;
The graffiti on their skin
Cannot be contracted into creation.
Look away, then,
They are too much effort, I know,
Their covers are leather you cannot afford,
And their stories will have you looking for references you clearly don't have.
Walk up to them and become friends,
But they are not pure scripture,
Do not expect your deeds to sit alongside theirs
You will breathe their air and your body will be revolution,
Their colours will find friends in your shadows
And paint murals inside your chest,
Until you cannot piece apart their thunder from the quiet of your flesh.
Taste their unbecoming and
You will yearn to shatter into nightmares
That you may become the master of your dreams.


Image Source: http://alicexz.deviantart.com/art/Airplanes-200997113

Reignition

No red-lettered date marks
the national holiday on which I will step outside my house of cards
built with razor-sharp memories,
But I trust that day to come.
And then I will not think twice of its random collapsing on my flesh,
Of being buried under metal edges,
Of losing old skin.

I will have sewn myself together
And made a backpack of every patch you kissed,
I will stuff all doubts in it, carry it without choice,
and search for broken people that have reconstructed themselves.
I will scout for love so hot
that it burns your hands just once
I worry that the scar-tissue on my fingers refuses to understand warmth again.
I will look for brazen gamblers
Who can cajole me into investing my life's savings into untapped opportunities
after having slept on streets
through cold nights.
I worry I have become a miser.
I will dig their backyards with tired hands and find skeletons we can bond over,
Ignoring the smell of your gardens beneath my fingernails.
I will trust the pepper in their lies
The way I did yours
when all your footsteps were the correct direction.
I will crush the chalk in their bones and draw on their living-room walls
Until the misery of our experiments with other people
Become the preface to better stories,
I will add your name to a blank page
And be grateful for being the flint
That taught me ignition.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Give Me Your Fingers

Give me your fingers,
see how I tap your knuckles softly
with the grooves on my fingertips,
You are lost to the silence inside you
but I will talk to you,
I will talk to you of the rolling in my days,
the cracks in my shoes, the film on my eyes,
I will tell you of circuses and expect fake smiles,
but I will keep visiting your darkness,
tell your fingers to telegraph my starlight to your ribcage
until your heart cannot ignore
the fact that there is crimson in the sky after sunset,
there are flowers that grow so far away
that the eye does not know they color the world,
The dead in you tells me something lives in you,
you are where things grow and kiss winds
until everything around is in bloom,
You are allowed to shrivel and fall down,
that is what struggle looks like,
you push against shadows like you were born to do it,
You are the ocean the night doesn't leave,
I will tear the sky open until it rains its auroras unto you,
You were made to shine, rise into mornings,
become the rustle of autumn leaves,
I will drown you with my waters
until you become the whisper of old rivers,
Talk to your sadness until it becomes poetry you wear on latenight balconies,
and the moon will call you beautiful
and you will not believe it because the moon is unfaithful and changes faces,
Look into my face and tell me you're not beautiful,
I will tax those words until your lips cannot afford them,
You will become the smile you wear today,
give me your fingers,
I will remember you until you remember yourself.


Image Source: Antoine de Villiers