Inconsequential Little Beings

“Come,” she says,
and we walk together.

Along the cold pavement and under the deep shadows of the city,
inconsequential little beings — us,
we walk together.

It’s strange, how night colours the streets a beautiful shade of melancholy,
a wonderfully depressing landscape of metal and broken glass,
ripe and ready to be conquered.

But we don’t resort to much conquering, we leave that to the shadows.
We wonder, walk, wilt like month-old bouquets,
and we smoke — quite merrily.

Under a canopy of starlight,
we find a bed made of cleaved souls
with a duvet woven of lost dreams,

As she sinks into the sheets,
they swallow her whole —
lungs, head, heart, and grief.

She smiles at the stars.
They glower back at her —
Jealous of her empire — ruled in rust and concrete.

“Come,” they seem to say,
and so, inconsequential little beings — us,
we fade together.

[Featured art by Asfa Sabrin]

Hey

Hey

I know we haven’t seen each other in a while
But it’s not like I miss you

It’s just that I saw the stars tonight
And they whispered to me your secrets

Sticky secrets with flimsy limbs
Grasping at my hair and hands and happiness

Like chewing gum
Smacking against your teeth

Not that I miss you, but I just want to
Climb into your skin

Suckle on your bones
Like a starving infant

Until they’re dry and cracked to dreadful dust
Leaving your awkward, unworthy flesh behind

I’d gather it up, your flesh
Folded like a linen shirt — skin smoothed to neat pleats

I’d hide it in my trunk
With our forgotten dreams and all the dead things we left behind

I’d keep it
Only for a while

Only for a day
Perhaps for a night

Then I’d toss it out the window
Like a carefree little vixen

Laughing and self-loathing
What a modern woman I’d be

Lonely and occupied and cautious and free
Sometimes melancholy, sometimes a little blue

But, hey
It’s not like I miss you

Womanly

What
Does it mean?

To be
Womanly

Is it merely
To push life out of you

To walk
Barefoot and broken

Abnegate
With a Scarlet letter on your breast

Or is it more
Visceral, intricate, guttural, real

Like perhaps
The iridescent shimmer of broken glass

As it sticks
And gleams prettily on your open wrist

A pink gash
To compensate for the one between your legs

A blue vein
Hastily stitched up, bandaged and recompensed

Is that it then
Are you a woman now?

Carved marble-like
A suffering, persevering, patient creature

From a blade
An ecclesiastical scalpel

That punishes
The sinful, the splintered, the shameless

I think not
For reasons that might seem uncomely

You are
Blood and bone

Conscientious
About your own volatility and insignificance

Your blood
Is crimson, but also violet and cerulean and green

Quite like
The bruises that are meant to discipline, but not display

Tell me
Again what it means

To be
flinted and livid and discordant and hungry

Tell me
I pray, Erudite

What
Is it after all

To be
Womanly

[Featured GIF: giphy.com]

[Featured art: Sarah Modak]

Bath

“Draw me a bath,” I said,
A cold, quiet reprieve,

A faucet spewing shame,
From my breasts right down to my feet,

Draw me a bath, as I draw you a picture,
An awkward sketch of my naked soul,

A portrait of such filth and decadence,
It is but a rotten, solitary monstrosity,

Draw me a bath, pray,
Draw another breath for me —

Another night of blue-veined slumber,
Another moment in purgatory.

[Featured image: Silvia Grav]

Fractured

Something broken,
collapsed,
and swallowed whole

into the earth that birthed my wayward pneuma;
the old thing —
cracked, jagged, and charcoal.

Thought and desire war, squirming under my skin;
weird, voluminous, wrong.
I feel incomplete, un-whole.

And then, she’s there – a sharp, devastating ache.
She’s  a tempest —
a sense of chaos, madness, the curling of toes.

Hot and uncomfortable as noon I lay here,
under this flimsy skin,
fostering hideousness and hope.

Hit by an edge of defiant anathema every now and then;
it rots with me —
shameful, ugly, vacant, and cold.

If her skin crawled up to me,
we’d collide —
hands, lips, hearts, and throats.

With heavy breaths and a quivering consciousness,
our senses fractured and dissovled,
we’d slip under the earth – soil and petrichor.

[Featured Image: Heitor Magno]

Hunger

Hush, now.
I’m trying to listen.

To the rhythm of my thoughts;
The sound they make as they shatter a placebic reality.

I want to swing hard and strike true brilliance,
Release a great grotesqurie of violent epiphanies from my chest.

I want to witness my desolation,
Mourn the monotony.

I’m only rotting flesh and decaying marrow,
My want morbid, yet monolithic and real.

Hunger makes me tremble;
It pierces the dead ache in my chest.

Hunger makes me reckless;
It makes me bleed.

Come, now. Look here;
At this bleeding, aching creature made of hunger, hedonism, and esoteric beliefs.

Take her, if you will.
Mould her into art — a spectacular tragedy.

[Featured image via: Silvia Grav]

A Ruminating Mind

There was a moment,
an unobtrusive speck in time,
when I created.

Weaving words from fleeting thoughts,
imagery from violent emotions,
and stories from careless whispers.

I spoke of a poignancy I never knew,
with a sense of cohesion I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
And still, I created.

A great countercurrent of fragmentary notions and quivering epiphanies,
wrenched from my heart and through my mouth by the simple want of a ruminating mind.
Simple, but essential.

No,
not essential.
Absolutely intrinsic.

A great drag of breath from the wooden gears of a clockwork mind.

It’s a sad affair, truly,
the disintegration of this kind.

via Giphy

[Featured image: Silvia Grav]

To Conor Oberst – At the Bottom of Everything

While my mother waters plants,
My father loads his guns.
He says, "Death will give us back to God,
Just like the setting sun, returns to the lonesome ocean."

- "At the Bottom of Everything" by Bright Eyes

Dear Conor,

I read this somewhere, I remember now. They said your music was for girls with choppy neon hair that sat in bars reading Kerouac and smoking clove cigarettes. The kind of girls you’d read about in a Murakami novel. Quirky girls.

Alas, to my fourteen year old self’s dismay, I was abysmally ordinary. Bored and impressionable, but perspicacious in the way that most unassuming adolescents are. And yet, I found Fevers and Mirrors, an auricular anthology documenting your undiluted anguish. I was thrilled to the bone. Addicted to your pain.

The songs weren’t pretty. They didn’t have gratifying nuances or prolific filigree. But they reached the cold vacuum in my chest nonetheless, possessing me.

And so began the affair – un-romantic, but not loveless. Naked, fierce, and easy.

Through hate and humiliation and poetry, you taught me that there was beauty in insignificance, in pain, in desperacy. An intrinsic sense of understanding settled in my belly, consuming lyrics, metaphors, and melodies.

Sometimes, if I paused for too long,
breathing and bathing in your craft mid-song,
it devastated me.

Dear Conor,
at the very bottom of everything,

I don’t know if I love your music anymore, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Either way,
it’s a part of my being.

Love,
No One

Disappear

“What if I disappear?”
She asks,
Her voice a deteriorating whisper.

“I’ll come find you,”
I say easily,
Expecting a flippant laugh or a snort or even kisses sweet.

But she says nothing.

We lay there,
Vacant and immobile.

We don’t speak;
We unravel silently,
Decomposing, un-being.

White sheets cradle our bones,
As her white hands cradle my heart.

The truth is,
I fear.

She was a shadow of a person.
I filled her with love and life and grand ideas of the future,
But the cavity in her mind was a pitless abyss.

She could disappear now,
This very second,
And I would remain,
With not a single ort of her existence,
To ease my way.

So we lay there,
Still as corpses or trees.

Barefoot and cold,
In an unspoken reverie.

[Featured image: Silvia Grav]

Synaesthetic Release

With salt in her hair and sun in her pores,
she looks at me.

A cigarette rots on her lips —
clove or cardimom or something equally chichi.

It doesn’t matter either way,
her breath smells like defeat.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she says,
shifting in the car seat.

Yes, it’s a beautiful day,
but it’s an ugly city.

“Try not to kill us before we get there,”
smoke drifts into my lungs, greeting the tenebrosity.

I picture her insides splattered on the asphalt;
it both calms and distracts me.

I pull into the garage and we stumble out,
synchronized in movement, if not in thought, at least.

We enter a house that’s not quite yet a home,
and she sheds her clothes as I pluck and assemble my insecurities.

Within heartbeats,
we’re ready.

The room reeks of sweat and smoke and heat,
as I cram my grotesque past down her throat incessantly.

She suffers; I ache.
We both bleed.

We move in congruence —
like a well-oiled machine.

I bend her until she breaks,
oil leaking out of her eyes, nails, and being.

As our sweat turns stale and our brains to putty,
we lie there breathing, in a pool of our own debris.

[Featured image via: Silvia Grav]