Prends ma main, ma chère,
quand tu es heureuse, quand pas.
Je le t’ai donné.
Nous sommes toujours en poussant,
et en mourant peu à peu…

My rhymes no longer come so easily.
And even if my pen does move, it speaks
in prose, now, far more frequently than leaks
the verses once so simply come to me.
This metered line, that served me readily,
is now too rusted with disuse it seeks
more to be buried in the solemn fix
of better times and bygone memory.
Regardless, let these stunted rhythms sing.
How close to death they be, yet hold their strength
in mourning of an age long fell apart.
And yet they tell me still, that such a thing
could bloom first into song, and then at length
a poetry grown forever in my heart.

Non, ne reproche pas.
Tu es libré, que tu veuilles
ou non. Et encore
le soleil rayonnera.
Le vent efface des amours.

after it rains the world is clear and calm,
a bottled fragrance, mystery everywhere,
these people walking while they stop and stare,
birds crashing into sounds that they become;
thin tyre tracks across a path do show
where some have gone before, and how the bare
light struggles past the clouds, how waters dare
to drench this earth and make its warmth be cold;
the sky and earth do touch yet, far apart,
they send soft messages through wind and grove
where elements embrace, as lovers do,
and hiding in the shadows of this cove
is youth and daring, even if the heart
keeps hesitating like a prayer – or a fool

My stuffed toys all imprisoned in a box:
childhood – discarded, yet not thrown away,
their motley colours faded as they lay
within this glass enclosure. Patchwork fox
and beanbag rabbit lie dead side by side
with no more verve to fight or run astray.
These sheep now sleep in fluffy lumps through day
and what strange peace these puppets can abide.

Needing no air, they get none in this case
where clocks have stopped for them, but as for I,
who looked on them so suddenly tonight,
my time still runs, with no longer a space
for these that brought me joy in years long by –
and kept me company in sleeping tight.

for J.

The instruments left hanging in the hall,
untouched for years, were once given to see
a flame within a shivering heart: but see
also the dust that sheathes all in this hall,

and know that such a story, never told,
must needs be true, and if these songs were sung
in ages long gone by they too were sung
to try to melt a heart love never told:

thus since that heart was never caused to dance,
so have those memories of moments gone,
and in recalling one old waltz they dance
a mist that long has cleared and gone.

If time were slow to leave they could have stayed –
but from this nothing they could not have strayed.

like i have never closed my eyes to sleep
the years are slyly hunting in my touch.
a better place to love. less lies to leap.
the hurting time so passing over much.

the years are slyly hunting in my touch
old trinkets of when history was still now.
the hurting time so passing over much
my tracing in the sands of you a vow.

old trinkets of when history was still now
are hanging in the middle of the night.
my tracing in the sands of you a vow
raw as the way these remnants of suicide

are hanging in the middle of the night.
the hurting time so passing overmuch
raw as the way these remnants of suicide
the years are slyly hunting in my touch.

the hurting time so passing overmuch
to leap a better place to loveless lies.
the years are slyly hunting in my touch
to sleep like i have never closed my eyes.

I. WHY HANDS HAVE WRINKLES

He was always struck by her kind of beauty, unconventional but glowing and sure as the morning is sure of dew. He would age, in love with her, as she seemed to bloom ever stranger by the years. They were years apart: time had passed through him, but passed by her. In the nights he would take her in his arms and she would come to another kind of life, and after, as their breathing slowed, he would touch her face and then his own, feeling how each minute drew deeper lines on his body, and only his.
          For she was still young, and he was smooth of hand and light of heart when they met. It was the easy meeting of seed and soil, and they nurtured themselves in the comfort of each other. And as things go, one day he realised they were far apart, distant as they were never before, and if he was never beautiful to begin with, he was even less fair now, even if in his eyes she flowered an eternal spring. With a might unrivalled in the world he willed Time to retract its drawings upon his body, but Time would not; and their compromise was to put the wrinkles on his hands instead of his face – and so they were worried hands, sad hands, as sad as his visage was beautiful.
          (Days passed, and she never noticed, and his hands grew deeper into his melancholy; his hands became his melancholy.)

II. WHY LOVERS BLINK

Love, rooted as she is in the wee hours past high moon, delights in shading her face with cloud: for then the lovers in the forest become as dark as night. Listen closely; she is sowing a row of kisses on the back of his neck, and he opens his mouth to speak pleasure, but no sound comes out. Lost in the world of him she closes and opens her eyes with his heaving breaths, and suddenly there is no light – the moon giggles to herself.
          He opens his eyes and sees nothing but the sparks behind his eyelids as their bodies entwine. If in one such moment one makes a sudden movement, shudders will linger in the spine for years, and blinking in bright light is the symbol of a memory: to recapture those moments of awkward ecstasy and suffuse the day with the lingering shiver of a past love.

III. WHY WORDS HURT

In the elder ages it was never as easy to hurt others: one had to possess brute physical strength and a certain cunning, but as pictures evolved into words everyone’s bodies became transparent to those sounds, some of which were brighter than others. Even in the poor ether of air words could warm somebody far away, or chill a nearby one to the bone.
          At first all was exploration – tongues tripped over each other to try sounds, being as sparkles of light in a world dark with silence, and some of the intimacies of lovemaking became mixed into the language: how moans and various gasps could mean something else when strung together. Right from the start, then, people confused pain with pleasure, silence with meaning, and thus the light shone differently into the shimmering seas of people. It illuminated some but others found that light too bright and refused, preferring the quietude of an older habit.

for you are too much in my fingers now
that everything i touch tells me of you;
and all these scattered letters pierce me through
that mine own home becomes a minefield's row;

even the wind, which never said a thing,
is now a shadow of your smile; and rain,
which fell so quietly along the lane,
now mocks me with your laughter’s echoing ring:

so this is it: that promises cannot
be made to mean a life, and there are tales
that do not end so happily, like nails
once bright but now are doomed to violent lot;

my memory will keep you fair, as years
go by and mould grows on my stupid heart –
yet now the angry crashing bitter art
of loss has spared me far too many tears

to stare across a void the size of love
(to think the world curves downwards far above)
is giving living hearts a chance to die
sweet tongues the opportunity to lie
(where once was earth there now is naught)
anguish has learnt what gods have never taught
and redly feasts on lives where lover’s tracks
were never meant to be quite so complex
when it has finished it will end again
(yet thus no end will let escape the pain)
our hearts now broken throw them far away
invite this stupor coldly in to stay
(and if there once was good to once be had)
just close your eyes and think hard of the bad

Love, thou hast come to lacerate my heart.
And thou, who would yet pass from me again,
Hast learnt my soul to be its only bane.
I am laid open, all for thee to thwart,
That no man’s knife could before do death’s part.
So curs’d be thou, when time, or longing’s pain
Call thee into these sweet eyes, who have slain
Me. Tarry not, do to me what thou art.
When all is over I shall not forget
This kind of bittersweet, which I have met,
That only she could give in her depart;
The quiet moments in her bed, as fair
As years; and all these years moments compare;
And brutal Love, who daily ruts my heart.

We improvise from day to day, and know
not why our lives are lived within a cage:
and if our fearful breathing keeps us close
it is perhaps our choice. What can one draw
upon these walls, which let the world come in
but keeps one still within its icy grasp?

Outside, the autumn slowly closes its grasp.
And soon these leaves, though plentiful, will know
death. Draw the curtains. Keep the darkness in.
If feelings run too far amok, then cage
them; know them well. The sun is setting. Draw
me near, the night is cold. Please hold me close.

For even this will end. My eyes will close
one day upon the light, and then my grasp
will loosen and my heart stop. Let me draw
another breath. Yet also let me know
how lucky some may be to break this cage,
and what new world they go on to live in.

…If this keeps going on, it cages you in.
But when you leave, as well you will, do close
the door behind you. Remaining in this cage
the clocks still run down. Tear from in my grasp
your self, and keep your absence in. I know
these lands are much too far apart to draw

imaginations close, and so I draw
smiles on my face to keep sanity in.
When you are gone, what is there left to know?
Turn off the lights. I’ll slowly learn to close
my eyes and not see you, and only grasp
at things within my reach, within this cage.

We improvise a longer time. No cage
can hold us anymore. With great strokes draw
the stories of our shorter years, and grasp
my hand in yours. This is a prayer, not in
the mind, but of the heart. Please keep me close.
There are so many things I dread to know.

If we once knew to draw our dreams we now
have lost it all. So keep the cage within,
with me inside, waiting to close your grasp.

I do not want to remain too intact.
Entropy hides a crueller truth: and in
the confidence of chaos lies no sin.
To dissipate in smoke, or love in fact
so madly that one cries out to protect
those secrets held within what has long been
left rotting in our neatness, and unseen
in even the most intimate tête-à-tête…
So take me in your hands, and break me now;
let all my blood be testament to loss
and betterment, that there is greater cause
in wanting to be born anew – like how
the potter hurls upon the dusty floor
the pot that suffers just one fatal flaw.

I.
The night explodes above me like an egg
one throws high into the air, only for it
to forget to descend; in it the sharp tang
of being only one, to be wrapped over and
over again in the turbulence clouds shred
in deep gashes up high. There is shelter,
but only in the depth of sleep: and even so
aftershocks lie in waiting, for light, for cold.
And I grow into the half-darkness, purple
with the effort of simply being, washing
spirit and soul with the zephyrs inhabiting
this wasteland. Yet there is birth. Winds
disturb trees with youthful aimlessness;
shards glisten in the firmament like stars.

1.
Old stories heard in musty places ring
with plots of opera, coincidence
looking like fate. How in the residence
of so-and-so a dumb man learnt to sing
with ministrations from his lover. Drink
of death but think of life, these incidents
are saying. Even so-called decadence
has stories of its own to tell. To sink
beneath reality, however, to
this truer world, one must first have his tales
to tell, his wares to sell. And in the whale’s
big stomach, those who sin and yet still do
not grieve are happy. Here they tell of those
long lost in time, whose names nobody knows.

II.
There are songs written on the tiny flakes
that bark up towards a tree: songs that
only equally tiny ears can hear and also
the eyes that are so small, taking in the
world a cluster of atoms at a time. Music
too sweet for any larger dose; surely these
vast bodies of ours are too clumsy even to
dance these steps a million years or two.
You can feel it with your hands, though –
how chords can crackle with rain, or soak
up mornings and turn them into melody;
beats like your heart draw life and breath
from and into the hard lungs of this earth.
The shyest branches creak a wooden waltz.

2.
We’ve made mistakes, we fall. And stumble on,
time’s very darkness hiding in the past
we leave behind, just footsteps in the dust.
The world keeps moving, in its careless scorn
not taking one too seriously. Long gone
are times when we could shape the present. Trust
can break, and words will falter, so we must
watch who and where we spend our tears upon.
We make mistakes, but then we too must know
that even winter has its end, and snow
will melt away for spring to take its place.
And if sometimes we trip and fall, it’s fine.
The world will go on turning. Streetlights shine.
The curtains throw their shadows on your face.

III.
We rub shadows into our skins, as if they
were healing ointment that could by magic
cover our scars, or bringers of flame that
perhaps could cauterise our wounds. Time
mocks us, though, each second a laughing
slash of those blunted knives we learn to
ignore year by year, as our silhouettes in
the ground shrink and grow, shrink and
grow. Together we break asunder, flying
into pieces, shards, eye-glances toward a
sky that never stops vacillating between
two certainties; and so powdered, become
lost in this atmosphere whose currents will
take our consciousness across these lands.

3.
Define me. By your absence I am bound.
No sentence is enough to call you here.
Less so a phrase. And left alone a mere
word must be nothing. I want to be found.
Refine me. You are more than treasure. Sound
me in your darkest depths. For if you were
a jewel my heart would harden. Seek me near.
I have too often fallen in the ground.
Sometimes it is difficult to breathe.
You grasp me tight even when you are far.
Time flows like beads. Perhaps you are those beads.
I lie in wait for someone to unsheathe.
Your voice has filled my head. I sleep. Afar,
a boiling cloud from which loneliness bleeds.

IV.
Loneliness enters me, forbidden, mighty;
washing over me the worst waves of light
marbled through the depths of its water.
Stronger as the sun is strong to a candle.
Air comes but weakly, wavering, always
trying so hard to escape like I am forever
wanting to escape. Everything slips away
far too easily. Night devours, replaces day.
An endless desire to flee, then, just as
one might run from bursting dams of flood;
each cresting wave encompassing each
and every thing with tenderness, without
the slightest mercy. Each embrace an
absolute suffocation. The vortex never lies.

4.
In time there will be winners for this game.
Right now there are but losses, and they cost
far too much faith – and yet those who have lost
will come again to try their luck, with same
results. There’s always just one lucky dame,
some lucky chap whose cards fall right – almost:
for where their money goes to cold compost,
their bodies will be touched by each other’s flame;
as all do know from then their time is up;
they watch each other over their wine-filled cup,
stake out each other’s mind in search of that
attraction each believes the other has.
So what if found? So what if had? Unless
they play on, they don’t know what they will get.

V.
One can feel the ripples in the night air, as
if there were breezes shifting their soft weight
slowly about, searching for something they
have lost; or a tingle in the spine hinting at
things that cannot be seen blooming quietly
in the vast distances pushing one and one
apart. Spirits, then, if only to be more polite;
they creep over the land, twisting flights
into bent mirrors reflecting the tiniest shivers
speeding through one's body, making fruits
taste like shadow and trees wither into claws.
Sometimes the very rays of light waver and
even so all is a choking mist, strangling out
the littlest sanity of an ever-thirsting mind.

5.
If the night effaces me it is because
you are not here and darkness chips away
at all I am; caught helpless naught I say
will stop this tearing from insistent claws.
If I were wholly made of stars my loss
would mean an eye gone blind, no hands to lay
on you, no ears to hear you laugh at play;
and I would diminish still without pause.
If sometimes I am torn by loss it is
because I cannot tell my heart to lie
that you are flown from me, a homely nest
I cannot force myself to flee, and I miss
you near – while I dissolve into this sky
whose blank despair is fraught with loneliness.

VI.
Nothing is easier than forgetting, and those
tiny moments I mark with dates are the most
reluctant to stay in my mind. They may easily
have occurred any time, and so I pin them
down with my stingy hands, not wanting that
they wander away into oblivion. It's strange:
how your voice disappears only after weeks,
but the scent that wafts around you only a day.
The trail of your fingers on my arm fades even
more quickly. Do you remember as little as
I do? As soon as I turn my back on you all
starts dissolving and frantically I tack them to
myself. I am a calendar. Here's the first kiss;
here the wonderful day of our final fatal fall.

6.
She dances with her snakes, yet dances so
seductively that all from far have come
to challenge death and try to do the harm
she cannot counter – steal her heart, yet know
that in their fears and selfishness they go
and never will return. They wrap her arms
in sinuous hisses. green, white, black alarms
enshrouding all she leaves unclothed. And though
she thinks her love too out of reach, one day
a lonely fire-eater comes to play,
and dressing her in flames – to her as one
with him as her own snakes – devours her soul,
and even if her body were left whole,
waltzes away the lover who has won.

VII.
And so we file our days into memories, the
way summer finds lost pine cones beneath trees,
waiting to be trodden upon. Patience: other things
must die before we can. Yet we still seek our little
deaths, count them, numerous until we forget. It
is never night but already it is cold, and my fingers
are stiff. If I take hold of any thought it would
die. We are hungry now whence we had too much.
Age crumbles memory into imagination, photograph
into painting. Sunlight shatters seeds all wanting to
fall far from the tree. And the moon, eternal witness
to the wastefulness of light, reminds us: she has seen
everything that can be seen, even hidden in shadow;
sends in her gaze her own stories of reminiscence.

7.
Now White to play: and you are as the queen
who storms across the board like lightning, I
the treacherous king who, having lost his mind,
will give his kingdom for a kiss. My wall
is felled, my troops in disarray, my all
and everything forbidden to remind
me of betrayal. Yet you press on. Why?
Over black and white a waiting blooms, unseen…
I may be king, but I am old; and turn
by turn I watch, bereaved, and count the
days toward surrender. Woman come from far,
when you devour my heart, how will you burn
your way in? Stab me, never seeing my face;
or in a blaze of glory, rulers on par?

VIII.
In time a diamond will sparkle on your finger, but
now, when it is not yet fully grown, a different fruit
grows there: one that tastes of hope and is rooted in
the serendipity of a chance encounter. In my head I
write our shared biographies, wanting them to converge.
There is your song, yes, and also my fruitless imitation
with a different instrument. Our fingers, still unringed,
steal towards each other. A stolen glance sent eye to eye.
Your jewel will grow with the time I think of you.
For now, you are an idea, facets of your turning light this
way and that, not brilliant but still a rainbow. You are no
mirror, but a looking-glass I can reach through, shaping
myself around you, learning your contours, but I fear my
life will be too short to crystallise the little I know.

8.
Away from you am I free: nights are bright
here, and the air is fresh. Some sheep will call
out in the day, when skies are wide, and all
the voices I hear are in my head. The light
that streams through rooms is pure, and clouds in flight
wend high above like colourless birds; no fall
of rain will make them land. The trees are tall,
the forest stretching for beyond one’s sight.
And yet this is not home: this freedom jars.
The spaces here are much too empty, and
my heart is heavy. The world is far too blue.
Your chains are fine, my dear, or else the bars
you lovingly put me behind – so take my hand
and want me back, and I will return to you.

IX.
Under cypresses the morning sways. I wade
through the air of a graveyard, placing
stones upon others erected for lost bodies.
It is desolate. Grasses put their roots deeper
and deeper, finding their own brand of
disinterested joy. A bird calls, very far in
the distance; here it sounds like the hesitant
turning of a page. Only silence will reply:
and so sometimes in moments of delirium
I think this is the same kind of silence
that shrouds me every night lying in bed,
lying to myself, merely waiting to be free,
for my own page to turn in the wind,
for grasses someday to put their roots in me.

9.
Once in a while we have to part, and then
the colours in my world all run to hide.
The reds are gone, the golds with you abide.
Trees wash out, pale. Across this misty fen
some lights grow dim and flicker. In my den
I scribble madly, markers by my side.
No act I do can push back time or tide
nor make more hues appear from in my pen.
…How much this world has changed. Night waits to fall.
The summer comes and goes; the days turn cool.
The clouds succumb and rain on earth’s great pull.
How can I count the days? No one to call
for help, no one to hear me, see me frown.
I wait in grey for clocks to run time down.

X.
Two years ago you watered me and watched
as I put down roots, moving slowly still, and
grow toward you, light of my days, moon of
my night. Ever I stretched out my leaves,
learnt to stand on my own, grew upwards.
If I wavered in the winds sometimes I would
know where to return, waiting for warmth to
hold me, fires in my veins, air in my heart.
But rains come when the sun is away, and it
becomes cold. Under loneliness I drop ballast,
float on the waters, leaves, petals, shoots
flowing away from me. Yet as always you are
there; it is bright again, the world opens,
and once more I turn my face toward you.

Until Our Lips Are Numb
Verses for a Valentine

1. SONNET
I make these letters in my head, that I
may someday learn to pen one out
and dare to send; but as for now I doubt
too much of me to write. I search the sky
for words, and hear instead many a lie,
the cooing dawn and glowing birds about
and up each early morning. For I try
so hard and yet no ink will spill, no stain
will stay on paper far too slippery to
record my mind; and if these poems be true
there will be nothing left of them to drain
off anything from anywhere. When lain
down finally, my hand will sing its due.
I’ll throw my verse into the air like rain.


2. GHAZAL
The dances fade out one by one to dark,
yet we continue twirling in the air.

The songs from far away have gone to rest,
yet we still hear faint singing on the air.

Each time our fingers touch the night will spark,
the space between our selves too much to bear.

Outside, the nightingales have come to nest.
Our breathing shuffles through the silent air.

And when you bloom into a newer rose,
your fragrance hung upon the midnight air,

I steal to you, a thief, to tear apart
the many veils you drape in flowing air,

delight upon the feast you hold so close;
yet it is you who take this very air

I breathe, to chain me to your trembling heart –
and flee together to a stranger air!


3. PANTOUM
like i have never closed my eyes to sleep
the years are slyly hunting in my touch
a better place to love less lies to leap
the hurting time so passing over much

the years are slyly hunting in my touch
old trinkets of when history was still now
the hurting time so passing over much
my tracing in the sands of you a vow

old trinkets of when history was still now
are hanging in the middle of the night
my tracing in the sands of you a vow
raw as the way these remnants of suicide

are hanging in the middle of the night
the hurting time so passing over much
raw as the way these remnants of suicide
the years are slyly hunting in my touch

the hurting time so passing over much
to leap a better place to loveless lies
the years are slyly hunting in my touch
to sleep like i have never closed my eyes.


4. VILLANELLE
You take my beating heart into your hand,
a pearl as timid as a flightless bird,
and spread within your grasp its troubled land.

Time finds us hid deep in dark corners, spent,
both trembling at new tenderness unfurled.
You take my beating heart into your hand

and drown it in a flood’s unyielding strand,
as do I take my past in mangled word
and spread within your grasp its troubled land.

Thus as we trundle place to place unmanned,
in trains, in buses, hand in hand, unheard,
you take my beating heart into your hand,

and so we kiss, once, twice, the days disband,
until our lips are numb, our minds absurd…
To spread within your grasp a troubled land

the ringing of a bell can scarce withstand
this speed by which no future is demurred:
you take my beating heart into your hand
and spread within your grasp its troubled land.


5. RONDEL
My phone is ringing and it must be you;
the atmosphere’s too thin to keep you out.
I tried to hide, but then you came about,
and hammered on my door. It swings askew,

now. Thinking of the times once past, without
your presence – you were far too overdue.
My phone is ringing and it must be you;
the atmosphere’s too thin to keep you out.

And bit by bit you’re at my side, and true;
no shyness stops me now, no fear, no doubt.
You call me sometimes, and we walk about,
but when we’re far apart our thoughts accrue –
my phone is ringing, and it must be you.

these are lost days: what once was new is cold,
washed far beyond what grasping hands may reach,
through turn and tide of Time’s unstopping bleach,
a faraway the way of which is now too old;
these are lost rays: the suns were once more bold,
less timid than the moons that only leach
the blood from virgins ripening like a peach,
and light once fell on truths now left untold;
that mornings used to mingle with the skies
we now can never know; how in the cries
of curious infants we may never find
the kind of power scent that struck men dumb,
nor in the chilly biting winds to numb
our hearts and learn to see while we are blind

The moonbeam falls upon the leaves
and makes them fruits of stars. The insect sings
within the branches; slowly, this tree lives,
its heart the sound of a million beating wings.
The tired wind may stir its boughs, but gives
its living spirit to the growing rings,
a fingerprint upon the times it thus receives,
and whispering, asks a million secret things.
– The chilly night doth breathe a vein more raw
into these souls, as nothing ever saw;
the moonshine makes their sap more stark
and turns the waters they imbibe into
a sweeter liqueur, with which they undo
the light, and fade into a powdered dark.

My secret overflows out of my eyes
intending to destroy all I hold dear –
choosing to run through all my lovelorn sighs
(how better than to ride upon the means
each voice hides truths!) it bleeds into my lies,
lifting the shoulders upon which it leans;
left all alone it eats my poetry,
each word another way for it to flee…
Though I should try to take a deeper breath,
amour impérissable de mon rêve,
not even you will beat your final death!

What creeps into your bed at night with you
is not the crushing loneliness of loss,
nor can it be the slyly shimmering cause
of light that makes you think that ghosts are true;
by inching closer with a touchless force
it presses up to you as something new,
yet – visible like darkness – coloured through
with too-familiar thoughts of just because…
And it is not the illusion of dreams
nor cruel touch of darker nightmares – it
is Nothing: empty doom, abyss that seems
to swallow midnight in its jaws and eat
at breathing souls or living mind; a myth
which will too soon crush us between its teeth.