Behind The Portraits

The feeling of regained humanity pervades the maple grove,

As branches rustle in the evening light - glinting golden,

their music pleasing dissonance, a swift breeze blows

over the horizon, blotting out lurking shadows.

Knives of love cut wounds that bleed ambrosia,

for what is the taste of ambrosia but the derisive emptiness

of a secret forgotten?

Faded flowers lay waste, that once were wreaths of worship

on altars sacred. At sea one instant, fragmented and lost,

on an isle the waves break unforgiving, and by the shore,

Robed in the receding Mist of dawn, towering and dense stood

The Maple grove, an unremembered grave of forgotten secrets.

there is something so beautiful about hearing people speak in their first language, their mother tongue. it’s as if you’re hearing them truly speak for the first time and suddenly you see rolling fields, cliffs and mountains, wind running through a forest. every day i wish that i could understand every language of the universe so that it can be more than music to my ears.

It’s odd how the only time you are hit with a profound feeling of despair or any kind of hopelessness is when you either have nothing to do or when you are at least not actively engaged in something, I’ve had people tell me that that is why they keep themselves busy all the time, boredom breeds nihilism, etc. But isn’t that also implying - basically acknowledging, however unconscious that might be - that without the presence of an ever hovering distraction, everything is essentially arbitrary ? ( i.e the current state of matters is so terrible that you need a constant diversion to keep from falling into depression) How inattentive do you need to be to not notice that ? Maybe, just maybe, everyone is always in a hurry because of this need for their thoughts to revolve around some external thing ? Societal Indoctrination of behaviour ? Inadvertent familial conditioning ? What is it ?

Nights in Winter Smell Pretty Great

I got a shivering hand and wet

Hugs from the clothes still hung

On the wind-up clothesline.

And it's night under the lamps,

And the moths are beating

Themselves up against the stars.

Three verses and I've run out of smoke.

Three verses and it still ain't been told.

We're tripping over each other,

Waiting for the other all the time

To ask for a light and to dig in.

There's not enough air for crickets

To bite into, so the chill bites into them

And me, always me. Watching

Them live from the window.

Yesterday evening they cut a cake

And someone brought a wreath.

It bled into the white-washed walls

Like my month would for some days,

And the baby was there when

The plates crashed and the sobs broke

After the party curled up to leave.

See, it unrolls like a film or a die

With the edges cut lose from hinges.

Tell me a number, gypsy, and I'll tell you

Why I would still see you snaked into it.

In the crook of seven, in the curve of two,

And a laced soixante neuf printed with

Brilliant blue - the sodium pricks

Like chalk in eyes when you close them

And an ultramarine demon is the halo I have

Beside me when I walk the path that

Is never there at daytime. Even though

Little squirrels have left mud-paw prints,

I doubt they trod the ground alive.

Tell me again, a line this time and I

Will roll it up and give you a light -

The smoke will incense the moon

So eat it up dear, served with the basalt

Hanging over the ravine.

I thought I could go through it like one

Slips to the bottom of a cumulonimbus.

And eventually there will be the earth,

Ready to take your bones and skin

And swallow you whole, as if they'd been

Starved of the seed a lover plants

To carve up another Matryoshka doll.

Empty to the very last case and cold

Where the tired paint flaked off.

Tell me a word and I will make a cloud

In the night with your breath.

- pollosky-in-blue

Salman Rushdie is inside my head and I can’t make him stop talking.

Miles of Rain

The days after school haven't met change

Since times seasons revolved round the sun

You still wait by the corner lane

And I walk up after the bells have rung.

We eat a mouthful of your smoke

And break off bits of corn to make cake

Before we slip into the deep red of the

Bell-cracked wine glass with a rake

On Wednesdays you say, my hair looks nice,

That's for the soap I needed to save till

The next month so we didn't run out of rice.

There is, you know, comfort in unwashed mill

And yet more softness in hands that are soiled

To the nails in lovers' mud and dust.

It is only the shortness of one arm that

Asks to be coupled to twos at first.

Still, your fingers are long enough

To meet both ends and still cup snow

For us to breathe in the iced snuff,

To keep awake among the rafters below

For a few moments more.

We laugh at eachother's smiles

Lie forgetting and run wilder than raccoons

In Philadelphian winters, though miles

Of shadow could never erase these monsoons.

Unless you make it so, these months

Don't hold weddings or coronations

Or those hourly bypasses to coffee haunts,

But as it is, the gaps are fit to ration.

It has always been the dry edge of monsoon

Since times the seasons revolved round the sun.

- pollosky-in-blue

The distance between us and the stars

Stardust, (2007) / Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde / Starry Night Over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh/ War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude/ Great Expectations, Charles Dickens/ Starry Night, Edvard Munch / Stars, Mary Oliver / Never Alone (an Expressionist interpretation of Starry Night), Mas.s 

When Mahmoud Darwish said, "A University degree, four books and hundereds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me 'good morning' and I read it as 'I love you'."

the night is still young. i can do yoga and use my oil pastels. i can cut another fruit. i can write in my journal. i can make a poem. i can invite the figure outside my window in

smokeinsilence / sightofsea / young love by bts / nizar qabbani / abeba birhane / the waves by virginia woolf / franz kafka letters to milena / ratsandlilies.art / the butterflys burden by mahmoud darwish / underneath the stars by mariah carey