A woman, two hands, four kids in tow like a Netflix thriller,
Road after road, déjà vu in the rear-view,
Strong as granite, but damn, she’s still runway-ready,
Waking up to chaos, eyes heavy with sleepless nights,
School’s a monster, deadlines biting at her heels,
But she smiles, because what else can she do?
This isn’t a glass of wine – it’s a marathon,
Wisdom’s path, raw and relentless,
And at night, she laughs,
“That’s life, love the tank top.”
Fridays are like poker chips in this bar where numbers and lives collide. Rich men and
hustlers meet in a slow-burn blues, and I’m scribbling poems between equations and grease
stains. Time stretches, stuck in slow motion, but midnight hits and the place wakes up. I’m
done with it. I’m just another number in a broken equation, another player searching for
meaning in the noise.
There are no guarantees, but that’s the plan.
Every morning, I feel uncertain,
Every step seems to lead me astray,
Every day is a new equation,
A lifetime warranty seems unlikely,
Guarantees disappear like smoke from a late-night cigarette,
And I’m left exposed, like Thursday without croissants.
Tomorrow’s a mystery, today’s a mess,
Life’s a magic trick without the rabbit,
Another Amazon box I didn’t order,
But I’ll open it anyway.
My very first, from Spain:
loyal to no fault of her own.
We wed right away:
bound by duty,
but she could only
bear me a daughter.
So, I punished her
by keeping them apart.
I had to look elsewhere
for another bride,
and found love with
a French beauty.
Changed the law
to be wed with love,
but she betrayed me,
and I had to punish her.
She met her demise.
When the London tower
struck her down.
My third wife
was my one true love
for she gave me
my first and only son,
but she passed
in childbirth.
My boy
followed
soon after.
My fourth wife
was the youngest
of them all.
The sweetest one,
but too young,
and foolish.
She made the same mistakes;
my second wife was accused of.
But this one claimed to love another,
and shared the same fate as my second wife.
My fifth wife,
I refused to bed.
Political advancement
be damned.
And my final wife
was a clever one.
She outsmarted,
and outlived me.
I ruled by her side
more than she ever did mine.
You came from far away with so much sorrow in your smile,
We walked to a park and sat, you told me how and why,
Started remembering your father replacing broken bikes.
Rejoicing in the fact that you were such a happy child,
But then your mother was called to join the stars in the night.
Give your father a month or so he’d lined up an old-new wife,
Sat you down on limestone steps, you’d probably still recognise,
Told you of the possibilities, you could have in a new life,
When you said yes, you remembered his awkward smile.
Then off you went, a ferry taking you five hundred miles.
When you met your new family, you felt part of the whole design,
Maybe retrospectively, your father should’ve seen the signs,
Your life was simply cindered now, Cinderella to the fire,
As you recalled, your green eyes turned amber in the sunrise.
Starvation and degradation are just fragments in your mind.
Your sister beat you with a heel until your skull began to cry,
Your step-mother gave you milk, a shrug, told you that it’s fine.
Then back you went to cleaning up after just a little while.
One day much later, you’d escape that place, with your life,
Your father said he was disappointed, you caused this divide.
Maybe he would have seen the pain you were in, if he had tried,
Maybe you’d still be there if he didn’t let it all fall by the wayside,
But life is a cathedral, where we must set aside all pride.
A father lost a daughter, but the lucky boy still has a wife.
The daughter lost everybody, but she left the worst behind.
Before the paperboy
delivers the news,
Before the sun has broken the horizon,
Before the coffee machine starts
the morning brew–
I sit on the bed,
run the ebony comb
through my matted hair,
and listen to it snap through kinks.
I pull and tug, comb
and coax, pin and fix,
placate my mane
with warm hair grease.
My lover stirs, still exhausted from nighttime tumbles.
If I could, I would rejoin her—
let her fingers get caught in my hair
as I soothe her out of sleep.
But I know I will wait till evening,
after we draw the curtains,
and give in to the secrets
our mothers don’t know.
I just can’t tell you exactly how much
I love looking at your sexy body,
And how badly I want my hands to touch,
And my lips to kiss – I am so naughty,
Wishing to be with you, and hoping you
Would make my wild desires come true.
I write a lot about intimacy. I write about my understanding of it. Using cannibalism and feasting as metaphors for sex. About bruises and teeth as symbols of love. Of fighting and commitment, all things both cruel and kind. But what I don’t write about, is the empty echoes of shuddering starvation that comes from years of neglect. Craving and aching for touch, only able to seek a mere fraction of feeling from family and friends. I am celibacy and disgusting longing made flesh. Love given form and family. I am Agape, made from the sweetness of Aphrodite, blood and foam. Each one, a thing that slips always out of touch, a fragment of memories and fondness. |
I am the voyeur that watches. Hidden in the corner of the house, half covered by wallflowers and wind-faded wishes. Dandelion hands reaching for my own version of the sun and always stopping short. Watching on at scenes of intimacy, constantly grabbing the remote and rewinding before the moment can end. An ever-desperate loop of time and loss. Sun sets and cloud hidden lies. My skin prickling with goosebumps. A rash of allergy and need. I am burning in an empty house, having long lost the keys. |
I am the knowledge and the history of sex, unwilling to begin such a resentful dance again. Things learnt and lost through experience and pages I hate. I hate sex, I hate touch. The longing and anxiety that hangs behind each movement. The atoms that haunt the spaces previously held. And yet, I still crave, with every drop in my human body. Each pull of desire drawn from my breath-strangled chest. I find myself repulsed, even as I creep closer to that
ever-living edge. |
I think of you that last day
Happy–probably drunk,
but I couldn’t tell
(I never could).
You were having such a good
time plotting a prank on an old
friend’s son over a soccer jersey.
You were happy that moment,
a slice between 2 and 2:15 while
we talked. Me, at work far away,
and you, in our house in the pines.
I promised to try
sending a document to the park,
so you could work again that
summer, the one you never saw.
At the light on Eastern Ave
And Eastern Boulevard (yes–
there is such a triangle where
the street cars once turned
around because it was all dirt
roads after–only trees and river),
I got the first call.
At the light made at east and
east, where street cars turned
yet stopped running late in the
fifties, years before we were born
on the same year but a number
of bus stops apart,
I got that first call.
It doesn’t really matter where
you are when life stops. You can
be driving alone when a huge oak
throws itself into your path, like
that man who lives up the road
when we lost power last week.
Bless him for living through it.
That tree toppling from sodden
Anchors lifting after a hundred
years of holding on like I might
have, but no, I left you there.
Was there a short in the wall to
make the house burn that hot?
Bent frame of a sofa bed tossed
out the pictured window that blew
fire into the woods and alerted the
neighbors. How long did you burn?
Or when fate takes the bridge right
out from underneath you like the Key
crumbled and tumbled six souls, like
overripe berries into the cereal bowl
of the harbor–rocks, asphalt, metal,
trucks, and men,
crashing down and snatched by
the current or trapped in metal.
I hope they died quickly–without
knowing, like they tell me you did.
I hope that woman who was abducted
outside the mall where she laughed
with friends moments before, knew nothing
after she was struck in the head and thrown
into the trunk of the car.
I hope it was lights out. Nothing more.
Today at Eastern and Eastern,
I pause and hope the phone fails to ring.
I hold my breath, mumble-whisper
a Hail Mary–pray for us, sinners, now
and at the hour of our death.
(Mary and my hopes know each other well
these days.) The light changes and I drive on,
holding my breath as I pass the restaurant
where I pulled over that night unable to shift
our little car anymore–
all confusion. Trying to ring you and hearing
it go to message. So fast. They say your were
gone then. Smoke and heart, heat and gin–
all bad decisions. We all make them. We all
drive through intersections without knowing
It’s strange, you know?
Carrying around
this kind
of hate.
Because it’s not the
boiling burning bubbling
kind that wakes me up at night.
No.
it’s the quiet kind, the passive
kind. The kind of hatred
that sits in my chest
next to my other heart.
Thumps in my chest
with my other heart.
Only a whisper, but listen…
Can you hear it?
I can. On occasion.
Like when someone mentions
your name, and the hatred, the rage
skips a beat,
stops.
Then begins
palpitating,
pounding,
pumping,
so loud, my ears ring,
so fast, my chest
aches, swells, throbs,
and this rage, this hate,
leaks into my veins, flows
straight to my brain, wraps
around my brain, and tightens
until my frontal lobe is gasping
for air, until my cerebrum is turning
blue, until finally, my thrashing
hippocampus coughs, splutters, then spits
out a single sentence (“I wish
And as this single sentence reverberates
in my head he was
the hatred’s grip will loosen,
my frontal lobe will gulp
down mouthfuls of air,
dead”),
and my cerebrum will regain that rosy hue.
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All because of that single sentence.
“I wish he wa-
I wish you were dead.
I wish you were dead.
Why?
Because if you died,
I wouldn’t have to think about you
ever again.
I wouldn’t have to worry
about you running
your slimy little tongue
across the folds of my brain,
pushing your slimy little tongue
into the folds of my
brain, pushing, rubbing, running
that slimy, wet tongue
into my brain, against
my brain, across
my brain again, and again, and
God, I know I’m a bad person,
but I need you
to die. If you did, maybe
I wouldn’t have to
listen to people
talk about you and what you’re “going
through.”
I wouldn’t have to watch them shake
their heads in disappointment
when I shrug, and state that I don’t give a damn
about your “pain,” your “suffering.”
Because as far as I’m concerned, you could swallow
a handful of pills, and die on your knees
with vomit dribbling down your chin, and your head
slumped forward into the bowl of your toilet,
and it still wouldn’t be enough
(I was a goddam-
It will never be enough
(A goddamned chi-
But it doesn’t have to be.
I’ll take anything at this point.
Anything.
(Christ, I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep).
And so, I’ll keep wishing
for your death
in bed, when the alarm clock
flashes 11:11pm
in bright red.
I’ll keep praying for you to die
at night, hands clasped together
while I howl at an overcrowded
sky.
And I’ll keep hoping
(cross my hearts, hope you die
cross my hearts, hope you die
cross my heart, hope to
You know I could do it myself, right?
If I wanted.
I could blow your brains
out tomorrow.
If I wanted.
But I won’t, because I’m an adult.
I can’t, ‘cause I’m still a kid.
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