Elegy for the Unsalvageable

I love night,
the way its talons
tickle me with the cold;
an echo of you:
something like love runs down my thighs
and joins a puddle on the floor,
glistening sardonically. 

I step in delusion every morning, 
leaving unconscious trails of reverie
wherever I go.
Drawing their shapes,
my hallucinations on dull, blank walls.

I cannot help myself—
it is how I learned to cushion the continuous fall,
the plight of expectation;
it is how I’ve managed to stay awake
since you forbade me from loving you.

But always,
wedged neatly between my shoulders,
the blade of you.
Bleeding only on special occasions:
across cityscapes,
draining the blue from an innocent night…

I polish the wound with my good memory.
I make sure it stays clear
and deep. 

A eulogy—
it’s the least I can do:
plant my knees in the soil of desire,
stale, but like I don’t notice,
I keep chafing my hands in prayer
before this impression of you.

The Complicated Darkness

I stand knocking behind this door,
nails wedged into one breathless demand:
that the pitiless wood keep me idle no more
and release me from time’s still hand. 

… The silence should bleed me like a knife
but nothing spares my unspent heart.
I cannot get into my life.
Instead, I make restlessness an art.

The cold taught me all I know,
paralyzing my pleading limbs.
Uncomplicated darkness was my home,
‘til one day I woke to light trickling in. 

Since tasting the heat of truth,
I’ve been chasing the sun for a real burn.  
I crave worlds untouched by this roof.
I want out of this cave, I want to learn:

about hell, about heaven,
about whatever is in between.
I’ve fostered a spiritual tension
where ignorance keeps me keen.   

I’ve pupils for eyes, but they’re shrinking,
choosing illusion over sight. 
I scrub at the curse of knowing,
wishing back the purity of night. 

When in one panel, hope blooms
where insistence forged its way,
I end up clawing around the wound
to avoid meeting day.  
 
The ache has become an addiction.
I struggle with keeping down the key.
Towards my lips, inches liberation
yet I recoil from its melody.

Now I’m taunted by indecision,
although the path is clear:
I could cower in the corner of submission,
or face the bitter tongue of fear.

With this becoming sharpness,
I cut my self out of a trance.
For the fetters forbidding catharsis
have always been my own two hands.

Crucifixion of Time

There are chills inside
my heart, where I am vulnerable
to the hooks of remembering.
I don’t want the cutting weight
of words preserved to come back
and take me under again,
to fill my lungs with longing. 

I am indifferent towards the absent
truths of my fantasies,
now, it is the ghosts people leave behind
that leaves me cold;
it is the incomplete sentence, the lines unread,
and the face I did not have time to recognize.

From the winter growing inside of me,
I do not become catatonic.
I am frantic—
running through the forest of time
gathering logs, damp with rot
from black daydreams and idle want.  

I find myself hunting dead things
but sparing my favourite corpses,
colouring their pale cheeks with self-sacrifice.
In them, I keep my hubris alive.
I, the martyr of my own schism,
waging wars against myself
like the little soldier who loads bullets into his fingers
and points his gun to the mirror.

Give Me Someday

Born beneath storms that smell like the present,
I miss the illusion of infinity.

I feel it now—
from the song of passing cars
and the snuff of their taillights,
flames expounded by distance, by time. 

I see it now—
in the city lights and their oath:
for destruction,
for a fire that will burn the hour,
that will leave those cars driving forever. 

I am trying to catch up with the rain,
running against this nocturnal current,
letting fantasy ring in my ears
like a one-time harp. 

I cling to nightfall
with the cold sweat of my palms.
I can’t watch the sky blacken and sour again,
for it to turn colourless and desperate. 

I don’t want to abandon this feeling  
that something is right,
that someday it will be,
that somewhere, something
is right
even if I am not. 

I tug at these promises,
for something, someday, somewhere,
like sleeves,
and the night grows a scent,
a texture, a figure, and if I close my eyes,
it bears a face
and becomes
someone.

Divine Repulsion

The misty eyes of God
covet a night
shrouded in darkness,
one starved of artificial glow:
from the lips of sin,
the breath of destruction dives
into the lungs of humanity.

Here comes life and its lies,
its plea of delusion. 

The flame,
blossoming from a stinging
we search for underneath carpets,
and cribs
and luxury buildings… 
inside papercuts and ash. 

I, swearing by my stagnance,
and by the fervour creaking in my bones,
cast God’s eyes away from me.
Away
from my conceit,
my destroyer,
my veins
undone. 

For He cannot bear such a pretty sight.