To Breathe

Look – I skip around words
And thought, like a fish slipping
Through the fingers of the fishmonger
Back into the wet, wet water.
Do you like that? – I choke
In bubbles – Dipping your hands
Into buckets? I always forget
How much I love the air.
My tongue tastes it, delicious,
Crisp sound sliding till
I lose myself once again,
Once more. I forget
Skies are not meant for swimmers,
That you are not a dreamer.
Yet again and again I call
You close, to look afar
At the clouds that are mine,
The birds I float on.

You stood on the coast for a while,
Listening while I sang,
Then fled
Not daring to drown, or dream.

Nightingales

It is night. For too long the sun has reigned…
The petite birds cry out, scorched
By their own joy. Beaks give voice
To light, those darting ornaments
Real only for one flight- and gone.
If recklessness could sing, she would soar
Then fall. Heavy.
Air holds only clouds, which fall: not one thing lasts.
Here water comes to lie over everything, still,
Over the nightingales buried with their sweet voices.

Vignette

Put yourself in the shoes of the character,
Says the English teacher.
Tell the examiner what the girl may be feeling.
Even if the old men’s backs are facing you,
You can still imagine their emotions.
They must be so happy to have visitors
For once,
I hear myself say to each of my classes this week,
Over and over.
What is it like to describe a picture of grief?
By looking at eyes and describing the pinch of
Hands in iced water? And later,
That burning feeling when you take them out,
When room temperature feels like the heat of
Home in the midst of an argument?
So far removed from the scene,
I cannot say I understand. I try,
Of course. Even without a picture
I dream, sometimes.
My mind transports itself to a life like yours.
In the middle of this dream there are two people
Walking into the distance. Their backs face us.
His hands are tired with deep lines of longing.
They hold hands but those lines don’t dissolve.
They are happy but never complete.
There it is cold too, even with another.
Yet they are moving towards the bright altar,
Leaving behind the precious night of the self.

Incomprehension

12:09 in a foreign bed alone
For a moment with Bon Iver
Playing in the background. Hear
How the music pulls one close
And away again, the same way
I miss you, not always.
Sometimes I’m not sure
What throbs, whether
My dreams are telling me that
I want you. But I do,
The way one walks forward for feeling
A strong fish-line underfoot
Yet knowing, for the same
Reason, how precarious
It all is. I miss like presque vu,
The way we feel drunk
Just hearing stories about drunkenness-
The things people do, beyond themselves.

How much of a need is intimacy,
The way it grips a heart?
Funny how we sympathise
With homeless children but scorn
Ourselves for loneliness.

You open the door and return
To my side. It is 12:16,
I am still. Bon Iver
Sings on in the background,
My mind’s in a foreign bed.
I am, alone.

Presentiment, or Déjà Vu

See how the rain mists,
Pulling a grey blanket over
The landscape of wakefulness.

Being awake means so many things.
Fear means waking when your heart
Opens its valves to construct
Your being.
Vicariousness means waking
While in dreams:
While lying, an unfamiliar sun
Jolts you and forces your eyes open
To a foreign scene.

(Later, your eyes will stay open,
Prop-less).

In bed I pull my blanket
Over my eyes in a gesture
Of yearning.
I am awake with fear, you
With vicariousness.

Perhaps my students were right
After all, when they wrote
“I broke down into tears”;
Our constituent parts
Made out of so much water
Simply return to essence.

I hear your deep voice over the phone
Watching me breathe
Truths. When you accuse me of lying,
I choke a laugh and walk on.
The past is what lies for us
In the future, and silence

Is our cloud.

Terrarium

Remember the generous hours and days
Which copiously filled the leaves of us
And our novel life…

Now that time has stolen from us
We are shy once again, Adam and Eve
Forgets how routine this all used to be.
The unfamiliar rhythm seizes us
For one day in each week
To perforate the longing earth,
Ache growing to the edges…

These are the green days where letters speak
For our dancing fingers, where words whistle
And form the hemispheres. Only today:
Platitudes all disappear in the precious jar,
Turn into moisture…

Lick the droplets clean for survival,
Mark this territory in time with your scent.
You with your grass ring, alternate universe,
You in your green suit, eternal forest.

Traffic Lights

“Some day,” thought Sixfinger, “someone else would look from this place down and think about me, not knowing that he is thinking about me. Just as I am now thinking of someone who felt what I am feeling, God knows when. Every day there is a moment connecting it to both the past and the future. Why is this world filled with so much sadness?…”

“And yet there is something in it that justifies even the saddest kind of life,” Hermit said suddenly.

- Hermit and Sixfinger, Victor Pelevin

—–

Traffic Lights
for the Raffles Concert Singers of 22nd December 2009

Even with how the nights now are as long as
The roads stretching out (yawning for
The absence of people) at the cross:
The blink of lights are still green and red as
The little people signal unruffled
Silence to move. And suddenly the turmoil
Of calm settles. It does blow over:
The dark ceases to devour;
The moon persists and sheds
The sun of its clothes. Tonight
All werewolves plead their claws to retire.
All melancholy sighs at itself and then
Dissipates into motes, dancing
Like the ones at the cross in those happy circles.
Lengthen this night longer, slowly now -
The roads are shining amber, slowing down
And in their well-trodden cracks one can hear voices
Almost howling notes of thanksgiving
For their mere existence, perforating the earth.

an aside.

some days the bird would love to throw
itself against the moon, crying ceaselessly
for cool refuge from its nest – that fiery world
a core of beating sound inciting only hunger;
imagining its crescendo of wings as the sound
of laundry piling for days so long, so long;
wishing its wings to be vast enough to embrace
just all the sky, and itself.

Exeunt

Just a gesture.
Off-handedly, with tubas
In the background chanting to solitude.
Only forget
The way light flesh touches
Timidly, the fragile gravitas of one last
Breath. We will fade
The way rain kisses goodbye and
All smell gravitates, fresh again

Every word hiding you in
Its precise dimensions will become mere.
You will not recognise any more writing.
Hands smooth as oboes turn
Rough, deconstructing sketches
Into straight-talking lines.
Continue to exist
And not be lonely, forever.

You will let the next one
Walk up to you assuredly.
I say to you that transience frames beauty
In the yearned scent of pine-cones
And this is the last thing
That will free us from want.

Ghazal for the Length of Days

These days we stumble on circumstances, fall in on stranger spaces.
Play ‘I-Spy’ across dried grass like helicopter lights commanding darkness.

Dropped as newly cut hair is what one ought to do with preciousness.
Such things took time to grow, as they do equally in forgetfulness.

Sense drifting apart like words repeated; refrain from overconsumption.
Stop letting gazes fly regardless upon concrete-floored realisation.

Leave late calls unfazed, expect swallowing across phone lines to fast.
But exchanging presents of utterances, make eloquent the past.

Try not to let new water ruin the effusiveness of rain-written notes;
Now float with the teeming affection of river-kissed origami boats.

Whilst stolen nights momentarily steal back, permit yourself traces of paper.
Starve your fresh face to stay with me as immensely as you remember.

Our steps were perpetually unsure. Now they float as unloosed clouds.
Elephant memories are long. Take my mind once more, denying thrice doubt.