Your past

is the blinking neon sign outside the bedroom window
that helplessly trickles in through the blinds
to come to rest
on your skin's restless cadence.

It is
the sublime tenderness that colours my everything.

Sleepy SMS

[For P.S.]
Someday, the "I" shall disappear, from bedside confessionals and tableside squabbles, from doodled margins in notebooks and pickled thoughts in solitude, as it shuts its tired wings and nestles into the eager embrace of the second person singular, you.

Drowse.

Sleepy. At the desk.

Think. Stir awake.
Think, think, think.

Question.
When was the last time you dozed off in a controlled environment?

The classroom, of course, where else?
As she unravels macroeconomics, framed in a long horizontal window with snow flakes on the sill. What else? Drippy coats on shiny metal next to the door. Her lopsided handwriting on transparent plastic, those amusing fumbles with the overhead projector. More? The day's edition of wall street journal splayed open, my scribbles all over. Her sepia ballet flats. That's all?  Another breakfast-less morning. Her voice. The way she says "Modigliani". Her eyes.

Oh.
How can I not dream?

Tinsel

Cannae.
Panipat. Leningrad. Nanking.
Verdun. Lepanto. Gettysburg.
Leipzig. Tenochtitlan. Iwo Jima.
Salamis.

And to think
we once cried because
mom didn't give us enough chocolate.

Satisfaction

is the wife's name you can't remember at the table.
It'll come to you, eventually,
but by then the damage is already done.

Note to Pessoa

"I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice."

-- Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet)

If it were indeed so, my dear friend, it would be the greatest act of cowardice I've ever known in my life.

Augury

Verona. Venezia. Roma.
With Homer, Calvino and the Bard in tow.

When my gods come for me, let it be said
that somewhere in the slithery gravel of my past,
when the moon shed its ivory on waltzing tides
and silences fractured into vermillion streets
as time fell, like voile, like rain,

I was nowhere to be found,
forgotten to the amniotic lure of Mnemosyne's song.

Zeitgeist

Life happens
this very moment, in lightless living rooms
under dewy birches, curled paws and unassuming honesties
over ashen hills, dusty alleyways and postmen's desks
through desolate sandcastles

It never pauses

unlike
lines in poems
or daylight on windows, or witches in fables
or calendars on festivals, or things in the fridge
or fire on matchsticks, or reason around religion
or boredom at schoolbells

or me, or you
or this malaise we so passionately endure,
the unfailing burden of being young.