timing

i am in therapy

he seems so small
in this dim
dying light,
pillowed on my chest,
shrouded in sheets
like a veil,
and he hides our love
from God
just as i
have tried to hide mine
from pain.
hide it like
it is such a delicate thing,
and he looks like it too,
he seems so precipitous
and tremulous
and the trouble he brings
seeps into this
cool evening air.
he reminds me of
the journeys to
and from
these intangible places,
the shifts you see
in the mirror when
your hair grows,
your smile fades,
your lines deepen
and darken and linger. his eyes
do the same.
but they’re closed right now,
and he has no idea
of when i will
have to leave.
will my feet carry me? this shame?
this grief? the thought of losing
much more than i give?
he seems so small,
and i seem to be
the only one in the world
who will ever notice.
the part he plays is magnificent,
he blends into my space
and plays with my bounds.
he has havoc in his heart
and he knows not
how numbingly beautiful it is
to have shared it.
still. i am cognizant of his shape.
my listless hands.
the thralling buzz within my blood.
and when he pulls me in,
closer, tighter,
i remember how small he is,
how small i am and how
small this sliver of time will be.
but now is not
the time to leave.

birth

my cosmic brilliance is unparalleled

her reckless soul,
born of billions of bursts,
bright and early
she writes about
the carelessness
of this cosmic fold, our
endless drift, these shared words
she spins again
and again.
shall we share
her burden too?

what am i worth,
having been born of this earth?
shall i wonder too
if i was meant to wander
in search of something more?
but love is right here.
glistens in the trees
and seeps into the ground
and i am feebly scouring
the skies to find it. sounding off
my sorrow into the abyss.

 and she is
falling into it again,
beginning every day
the same:
wondering what it means
to be worth the space
she claims.

worth

i graduated bmt yesterday

i do not pray
for things to change;
strangely, i often find
i am exactly where i am
meant to be.
instead i wish for peace,
release from the fragility
imposed upon me
from times of turmoil
and hurt and pain.
but in turn
pain’s worth is no less
than love;
endures and burns
sometimes so soft in candor,
bleeds between our breaths,
and sometimes engulfs
our hearts, sets them aflame,
trembles with temper.
both seem to ache the same,
knowing i am worth
no less than love,
knowing i am exactly
where i am meant to be.

lingering

i will try
to remember you like this,
when absence leaves
my love
lingering at your lips;
these brief moments of bliss,
of bravely bearing my shame
when i beg him
to prove the pride
in his name.
he bears his burden so well,
and in my mind
he returns an inquiry that
i’ve learned i should not
take the chance to recall:
“remember me when?”

as if we don’t burn
when our moment subsides.
averting my eyes
when he heaves every breath
laden with lust for a time
when parting is only
a turn for the worse.
never once shy with his words,
as if we don’t ache
when left wilting once more
before our moment of break.

leave me like this.
lingering like our myth of youth.
i hope you shall remember me,
knowing that it
pains me too.

same

i have not been blocked, just busy

it has been far too long;
this touch has become
such a rare thing for me.
last time, i spoke
when every frigid word
broke inside of me.
i have always maintained that brevity
is some sort of
the highest form of bravery;
so many times have i seemed
a trembling thing, dwelling
on my breath that left its death
upon my lips,
a telling tongue, choked up sin
and this voice within
bearing all i have left;
a simple tale of swearing in,
swearing i do not look the same
as i did back then.
i swear i do not look the same.

living

feeling out of place

here i am, i am thinking,
(surely that’s enough),
“what a world i live in.”
and how many times
have i tried to write
about the apathy
only as i’ve read about
some soft-spoken love
lapsing through?
limping back? traipsing through
the shame; and i wonder if
i will be found listening
or limping too.

soul

feeling like i’m losing parts of myself

i have written about
nearly every inch of my soul,
forevermore it grows
and it is growing old.
how tired i am when i wonder
if anyone has ever loved
anyone if i
have never loved.
i have proven to be too much at times,
and not enough,
i am smaller when i speak,
so many tales
of my tell-tale heart
have never been told
but i am always hoping
someone is listening
between my lines.

i am mourning touch,
and loving loss,
and the morning touch
has lost its love for me.
i am loving how life begins in spring
and i am falling asleep
when the sun wishes to speak to me,
i am losing time when i’m trying
to write about how a broken heart
will heal every other part of me,
but have i ever loved
if i have never loved
like anyone else?
i could never live
without hearing a woman’s voice
once more, let me listen
one more time,
a man can’t amount
to this; i forget
i am smaller when i speak.

i wrote
not so long ago
about being someone else’s ghost,
making peace with missing pieces
of my time, trying to catch the traces of me.
my brother has my mother’s smile,
my father’s wit,
but i am 4,695 miles away
writing about how he has
bared his soul so bravely
and at times it is mine
to write about
and i’m here, it’s the morning,
and i am wondering if
i have loved someone
the way someone has loved me,
someone cannot live
without hearing my voice once more,
let me listen just one more time;
she should know
she is stronger when she speaks.

anything else

it never really goes away, but i’m doing okay

i have come to know
it never really goes away;
do you?
and something’s telling me
i don’t need to say anything else…

i wrote about my brothers who
bear their burden of living so well.
it’s only God and i
most of the time,
and we both know we’re missing something
but we’re polite… i don’t need to say anything else.
i’m dancing in the shade.
i’m catching a glimpse of the sun when i go
to capture the breeze and someone comes
to erase whatever trace of me was left,
it feels to me there can only be one at a time;
my hands start to buzz and
my head starts to thrum,
i’m wishing i was back in London
wearing the wrong shoes because
there’s a cry of “don’t you want to disappear?”
and i do.
God and i are too polite
to say no.

i don’t need to say anything else,
says the window with the light
streaming through,
i love when it lands on the piano
and away from the wall with
the collection of books i wrote
filled with staggered lines of
half-hearted hope,
i didn’t need to say anything else.
the passages on my bravest days
are too clear, i was happier than
i should’ve been, i can’t even bear
to breathe the same air
as the person who wrote those words.
and i don’t think
i’ll ever be able to say
what i really wrote those days.

i fell asleep last night
wrapped in my sheets,
my heart wasn’t hanging onto
every word i said that day;
i stopped counting whenever i spoke
a while ago. i can bear
the thought of waking alone again.
sometimes my stomach hurts
when i’m thinking about
what other people must’ve known,
they last saw me broken apart
and barely held together,
sometimes i want to go back
and say “i’m here, i didn’t disappear”
but it never really goes away,
and i don’t need to say anything else.

london

musings on my travels

i will say it,
i say i am brave in my brevity:
i miss the London rain.
spring is creeping up on me,
but across the ocean
it was summer
already shifting into winter.
i know i was running through marketplaces,
walking beside canals
but my soul is still
crawling its way back home;
i left it back in London.

i miss my brothers,
both,
one’s home in London.
i’m not quite sure
where the other stands.
i held his hand
in the library before,
we were aimlessly
wandering the isles
and he was determined to
take me somewhere
at some time
i wouldn’t regret,
and now i don’t care
that the wrong people
were there.
my brother has
my mother’s eyes and smile,
he swears with his tongue
and not through his teeth.
he wears sunglasses inside
and grew his hair long
and then cut it so short
so i couldn’t play with it any longer,
he watched while i swam and
pushed me in the pool
one too many times before,
but he held my hand inside the library
and carried me on his back
when i was too tired to walk anymore.

we were all born
from the same cosmic fold.
my brothers are careless about this,
and i was too,
when i was marching through London.
it is all i can think about now.
how cider loosened my grip on my tongue
and my body jostled and stumbled
between my brothers’ arms,
we were interlocked
in our hearts and we
moved through the city
with only one beat between us,
it bounced behind us
because it couldn’t keep up.

i lost my brother in a castle once.
we were thrown out of a church
and were heckled by a bagpipe player
while crossing a bridge,
i baked some awful cupcakes
and a man in the elevator
grabbed my wrist and tugged,
i cried myself to sleep one night
thinking about
how much i will hurt
when i return home
and i recall where
pieces of our single heart went.
i lost one in a hostel in Frankfurt,
one in the station in Windsor and
one by the river in Stratford,
i lost one to my brother
with his too-short hair and
one to my brother
who doesn’t wear his glasses,
and i gave one away
underneath an aging tree while
i was drenched in London rain.

knowing

an ordeal

to all the loves i’ve lost,
will lose: i turn away from touch
far too much. it’s a traveler’s dilemma,
i know i am scared of being seen
and yet will this mean anything
if no one sees me traipsing through
our passage of time?
the significance is in knowing
you have been known,
it permeates my dreams
and languidly lolls itself,
enlists itself in my waking dread;
it taunts and it claims,
“there is nothing quite so haunting
as nearly being known,
or achingly worse,
to have been known before,
and not anymore.”

the loves i have lost,
will lose, to this voice.
traces of me exist
in the faces of people
flying past, far too fast,
i hope they remember me
as some sort of spark;
i set aflame and engulfed
their heart with my name,
i have known them
like none have before,
with the single time we have danced
with the glances between us.

“resign yourself to your role…
you are condemned to show
that you are simply someone
that someone used to know.”
the loves i have lost,
will lose: take notice
of my flagrant flight,
the impending sight
of something stirring.
i have known none
as knowing as you.