There Are No Scrapes for Poets
I was once convinced I wrote in scrapes.
The elders said and wrote so much
I’d thought the well of words would dry
As my letters swell in sentiment.
I read my way through their labyrinths
Not quite long ago,
Lifted by mosaics over mosaics
Of pounding, whispering, glaring
Reverberations of words every turn.
Everyone speaks of the only felt truth
Everyone sings of embracing one’s own heart.
And when the pen gets passed to me
There is no dearth of truths I can’t rewrite today.
Such is the ever-sprouting library
Of lips parting and hearts conjoining
So The Parchment of Poetry
Travels far and full in choruses across eons.
Are There Any Poets in Futures?
She spoke like the last woman on earth
Bones drooping
With duties of poetry – mothering:
“Words
Worms
Whirls
I’m tired of your coils.
Make my earth flat again.”
They stare – mute – marred
They don’t deal in rhymes now
Earth’s machinery rejects reformation now
They know they’ve bombed the last pass
To its tablet of health.
She stares back
Holding remnants of her spine
In arid roots of her alphabet
“You said you’d retrieve utopia.
Are there any poets in the future?
Shall I start sewing poems now?”
Grief Can Be Many Things
Grief is an object.
At first you keep it under pressure
Colossal, hideous, shapeless pressure.
In the morning
It always appears as not yours
You could almost fling it across the void
But as moonlight crawls onto your walls
It comes to life in your beloved’s face.
Grief is a lover’s grave.
At first you water it daily
As if you’re growing flowers out of his toenails
Then weekly, monthly, annually
Until you keep forgetting
But it stays there
And grows an inch deeper in the ground
Every time you step away after praying.
Grief is an altar.
You bring life after life at its threshold
Worthier than before
Like that memory of your son’s first poem
Framed in pencil and gum, broken while moving houses.
Yet every morning you find it mopped clean
You plead there’s enough blood in its marble cracks
But the cleaners don’t forget to scrape it
They think it’s obscene to forget old tastes.
Grief can be many things
Except what it despises –
Being forgotten when everyone’s watching you.
To Love You Less
I read somewhere
“I still don’t know how to love someone
Without swallowing them whole”
And I’ve learned the hard way
In order to keep loving you
I have to love you less.
Thank God for Erasures
When you think about a house, you
Thank god for loneliness.
The dusty nooks of the house that are too otherworldly
To narrate your stories to your kind,
The brushing curtains that conceal your tremors
As you touch them in passing.
Thank god for absence of language,
The absolute knowledge of your house being illegible,
The items being items
And not active speakers in your world.
Thank god for acceptance of being unloved,
The liminal friction you feel in the ether
Of not sharing your sounds of sorrow,
The simple truth your home vibrates with
To confront you, comfort you.
Thank god for erasures.
Maybe this is a world you can enter and inhabit
Without border protocols,
Maybe everything was misspelled in your world,
Maybe their charter of being spelt lone as loved.
