The last sips of mulled wine
splinter into darkness down my throat
/I choke as I always do/
The oppression of January
and its unpalatably sweet promise
hack away at my torso
/a heavy lump when limboed in plank mode/
My worn-out body digs into the cold
in obeisance to the gravity of linoleum
as I unresolve every partial poem
of its knowing where the road leads
I am every dreamer
who grows hope like an untended garden
when so much of what we reap is perishable
I have never had the cocoon of a waiting room
There’s no riot of colour waiting to explode
I am a silkworm, not a butterfly
and the future is a patchy tapestry
I needle with dim eyes
I have the sky
but I’m rooted to dark leaves
and when years dangle like hung numbers
I ask myself
Will I be the worth of broken promises to self
/Yesterday, today and tomorrow/? …

A noon kettle sings
through my seafoam ears
all the way across the ridges of heavy eyes
How this hour, this pitch
resounds in hissing spectres
of a piping-hot prayer
concocted in collusion
with the still-burning ash of a cigarette
tossed into a bright chimney
too dark and dank on the inside
for Santa to have crawled in
Birds of viridian plume
have vanished from my window sill
into forever commas trailing
across a hardbound monochrome sky
The days stretch so much and so little
before we’ve learned to kiss good-bye
to the last poems that we’ve culled
from a heaving history of nothings
holding on tight
to every version
of what we are and will be
— the same
yet every bit the change
we don’t want to see. …

A sylvan frost gently nips my ear lobes
Fluttering ghosts caressing soft and gray
Sunlight dazzles my eyes in fraying strobes
skidding, spiralling through tree-fringed walkways

My chafed lips draw a draft of mildewed air
With damp embers of kisses they do gleam
Hands tucked in the raining feel of cashmere
A matronly warmth sewn between its seams

Twilight sings purple jazz to horizons
Robins retreating with reluctant sighs
Puddles beneath ice chime in oblivion
their sinuous-flowing braid brittled dry

And when I sleep, I fade as the cold earth below me
Lofty promises tucked beneath a soft pillow crease.

Author Notes: I have lived in either tropical or equatorial climates so obviously, I romanticize white winters. …

Dilly dilly dandelion wishes
Beaming, blooming in the blanks of my throat
Meandering through my mind in well-meaning meshes
Flickering on my lips in flimsy froths

The clamor of these covetings colliding
as they dizzy-dance in delirious pirouettes
To the mere motive of idle-time biding
I wallow in whispers of stealthy silhouettes.

I gather their wisps in calloused coins
to freeze them in the brink of wishing fountains
I fold them in stiff foliage of palms in prayer joined
When to be free of them, lovers and pilgrims move mountains.

But leave them desolate, they coil around me snarling
Heedless of a heady venom breathed, I squander
my love in silvers atop a debris, where darling
you grew me a garden of blue lavenders.

Thank you for reading! If you liked reading this, you may also enjoy:

Do you ever wonder where wafts of steam travel
or second-guess how many minutes have passed
since you sat blowing into a hot cup of tea
and when you carry its tepid surface
to take a seventh revolution around a neon sun
do you check if the clock’s hands accidentally fell
into the speed of light
like the wintry morning
when you snoozed your alarm to silence
pushed a moment or two
to tailgate the three dots to slumber
Here’s the thing about time —
she stands ephemerally split between your eyes
her empty and full curves undulating
across the tidal shift from sun to moon
until a weary eyelash blinks back
the tip-tip of hourglass sand
And when you stare into the distance
hot with the moral compass
of a fabric tearing between seams
You think that no matter how close you watch her
time will slip
between holes you’ve forgotten to patch
farther and farther away
flickering lost to another universe
beneath a drapery of stars
No matter how much you want her to move
she will loiter in the gloating arms of the past
for what is time
if not the warped wormhole of an old postcard
eddying asunder notes to a forgotten song
And what is time
if not the pin and needles
of a seconds-hand dragging
within and out of earshot
the fumbling keys
to an out-of-sync rhyme. …

Traffic lights
blinding, slow-blinking
A melody drawn from palpable city beats
sweetened
through the bitterness of idling engines
as this space between us
keeps churning into whirlwinds
our twined neural pathways
urgent, divergent
halted to a screeching nowhere
and we fall
deep, abysmal into a void
free-floating by a spool of string
our welted lips quivered
forever in a divide
holding abandoned eons of time
And I wait
for this cosmic reel to rewind
for stray stars to collide
for meteors to river down our eyes
when from across this bright, busy street
you walk toward me
in reverse motion.

Thank you for reading! A happy, forward-looking 2021 to all.

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Do you hear me?
Splashing in moonlight
Waxed, waned, slivered sleight
A departing tide’s opaline rue
filigreed eyes with un-holied hues
of volatile stars vaporing burnt
implosions vast a throat’s darkling lump
my dreg of words moleculared from null
fleeing flesh-smoothed into a porcelain world

Do you see me?
Crystal ghosts refueled with a gleam
sobbing ecstasies into a woken dream
as though a faithless thrush of a flung stone
could roil blue heaven’s cold aplomb
before it vanishes into a soul’s ascension
Stumbling and swooning into fifth dimension.

Do you feel me…

Author’s Notes: I started writing poetry seriously only last year. Opened an instagram page for my works and was fortunate enough to get profuse encouragement and meet some fantastic writers/beautiful souls on the platform. Unfortunately, there came a point when I felt overwhelmed and thought to myself, “Why am I sending poems into a vacuum where they just seem to vanish?” It wasn’t just about how much engagement they got or where they were featured or who read it on a poetry live…It was about the jitters that I felt before sending a poem or any written piece of me out into the world. And so I deactivated my account. But writing and reading poetry has its pull, and so here I am for as long as it seems fulfilling :). And so, I’ve learned to let go of my poems as they are, finished/unfinished, whatever entity they become, passing their own waiting line to be found, to resonate with someone. And so, after spending my twenties cringing over sappy poetry, here I am — a poet in progress. …

Hymned voices in the dark settling sore
brimmed in starlight-speckled shimmers
Hope's latent lustre steeps into a blanket of snow
In deep-buried playlists, we find a dance spell closing stiff
like a need for wafts of hot cocoa
on winter-grazed nose tips
Children whirl in cherry-brandied jubiliance
their cackles blinging bare, bleak branches
of ferns stealing a moment from sojourns
Life — at its prime
of seeming alive.

Notes: Happy holidays, dear readers! These are tough times and I’m sure a lot of us have had to forego time with family this season. (Personally, the Zoom calls just don’t do it for me.) Nevertheless, I hope you feel loved and appreciated this Xmas and all other days. Here’s a happy christmas portrait in a poem for you.