Unrecoverable

Starlight

If I met you now

I’d fall in love with you all over

though you are much changed

as I am

we have gone through the fall of leaves

seen ourselves turn from green to brown and then to silver

with each tread something is lost, something is found

the people we were at first

are gone as the flowers in that vase will be soon be dry and thrown

to return to earth and become something similar and altered

when I look back I cannot remember exactly who I was

though you are always clear in my mind like

a pure magnification

I see your unwrinkled brow and the folly of your youth

bandy-legged and laughing, your chin thrown back

I smell the moments that touched us then

and became unrecognizable bed fellows with

a bitter taste

perhaps you can only stay so long

dancing to the same song

before you need to move away, into the dusk

feeling for familiar, among unfamiliar

there all over, I would choose your hand

there all over, we’d move in tangent and harmony

your fingers touching that temple within me

that bows to your breath

my eyes bright in the darkness searching for your lips

if there were universes we could travel

and you and I were living light years apart

I believe we’d meet over and over

as we are born from and go back to time and again

the

starlight

that made us

 

Paris is for lovers

There are many kinds of travelers

one who promotes the art of transience

with ejubulent smiling photos atop picturesque vitas, repleat with apeing friends

sleeps undisturbed by change, in the marvel of perpetual motion

one who never travels

but hastens to add, everyone must

and enjoy it they should

for all they cannot understand, they bundle

in wistfulness and naivity

like a child imagining adulthood

the last traveler is uneasy

feeling a sorrow in changing places

the witness of other lives and roads

since earliest memory the yoke of

vacation was not to be appreciated but mourned

their comfort found in staying still

than the kalidoscope of others spin

demanding constancy and things, unable to be bequeathed

where disturbance comes, in the form of expectation

sorrow of coach stations and midway stops

grief striken as graves and road trips without gasoline

you are said to be fortunate, if you can travel often

the grateful traveler may forget

the gritty loneliness of their highway bed

never admitting they wished to return, even before they set off

belonging is a feeling, some will never attain

their search in crowds of strangers, leaves further lost than claimed

Yet no one

No one at all

Will ever admit

To being loathe to travel

Than any human hands

Many will say

Love cures all

Those without it

Suppose

Once possessed

No grief and loneliness

I would tell them

Even with love

The hole in the world can be felt

And standing in your life

You may still feel as alone

As when you were single

There is no magic pill

Only the kind of sadness

That is not situational

But sits on the perch of the happiest days

Like a drab trailing cloud

Raining when you should be smiling

And the cult of happiness

Declares you a failure

And the cult of love says

Why wasn’t I enough?

And the insistence of mindfulness and karma and gratefulness and other totems

Banish your bad self

To the hinterlands

Where supposed beasts lurk

In the rolling gloom

And you are there talking to your therapist

Minding your manners and saying nothing

Of the deep scratch underneath your skin

Or how you came to be

A changeling

Who unwaged by the ambelical

Left the desolate nest

And found more succor in the sad glass eyes of a stuffed toy

Than any human hands

Many will say

Love cures all

And you saw the old lady in her wheelchair

Recognize you as herself

Fifty years hence

Though you would not wish

To inherit her absences

Growing like an orange

Without sun

Will therefore capture

No taste

One

Out of the smallness that is me

Not you

I don’t know how you stumble through this world

Or glide, shine, explode, trip

Out of the smallness that is me

Is the only point of reference

I’m no empath

Can’t speak for you, choose colors for walls or swatch of fabric

You may stand beside me all our lives

Rubbing shoulders, sharing scraps thrown

By the hedgemony

Still I am me and you are you

You born in a family of four

Eight, three, six

Me, born in zero

A concept that is Indian

As my concept is reduced

Shrunken, made to fit a narrow lens

Just me

Till this world strokes her end

On my wick

And kissing me bon nuit

Extinguishes the tick tock tick

Out of the smallness that is me

To some an ordinary, downright boring set of genes

We are not that much more to each other than code

The man who seaks a mate types;

Pale skin need not apply

I like coffee and cream not plain vanilla

Whilst to another I am a warrior, a fighter, a courageous soul

I could have fangs and scales and they’d love me still whole

Their eyes pierce the superficial wrapping of the world and locate my root

Still

I wake from salt, I die in sod

Alone

An only child, no lessons in

Understanding concepts of siblings

I hold your hands in imaginary play

You take the razor away and hide it behind teddy

We swim underwater to the same heartbeat

Imagination has a secret back door

You stay behind whilst I am forced

Out into a single stage for ill-prepared audition

Can’t tap dance your way to inclusion

The audience are sets of Siamese twins

One yawns, the other powders her nose

He tweeks his moustache, she fidgits on the balls of her toes

A dancer without freedom

As I am given too loose a rein

Tell the child to hush and stay out of sight

You may find her gone before she’s finished

Learning her lessons from the good book

And sun comes ashen and discolored through poorly wiped glass

Yesterday’s merriment hangs like a wreath in stale air

Adults drop their heads as if pinched with regret

Just yesterday we didn’t think on it

The hiss of spectator and judge dualing on parapet

Still I am me and you are you

Longing to transcribe the distance

Tap tap of moorse code

Flash flash the lantern extinguished by high wave

No translation

I sit

At a table for one

And watch the elbows jostle and spar

Closer than twice removed and strangers can understand

A plea we have no words for

In the long sum of day

Yawning at our door

Warm and content like a cat

Who has lapped spilt milk

Before it turned sour

Out of the smallness that is me

Seven billion voices and one

Stubborn in her persistent belief

We all

Count

Through the looking glass

Through the rain, the sound of ending

Despite this, I am closer now, to remembering

Every sharpened affection, how it took every bit

Left nothing in its place

I am closer through the looking glass

Sounds of a hundred regrets

Of each time and then

Of you taking me by the neck

Laying down in our abyss

This

I am still closer now to this

Though it has been figurative years

Lifetimes and burials

Lost in the neglect that comes

When you have always seen in the other’s eyes

Such a deep thing of enduring

As if it were swept out by a big brush now it is gone

It was a error to believe that look was love

Wanting to fit a jigsaw piece but you did not

Once they knew that, the need for you

Snuffed out

And the ship carrying your heart

Saw no lighthouse and floundered on rocks

And you with less than you ever had

Sunk like a exhaled regret

Like an exile without tether

Down into the drowning of your grief

As thick and peerless as anybody could be

Without air and succor

No hand reaching through water

No one there, perhaps they never were

Now it is definite, it is legal, it is provable

Gone, as if not once was any of it true

And the lies you told yourself

And the hope you carried

Sinks with you

Where you have no more words

Where nothing is nothing

Without that sustaining strength

And the rain is inside you, not exterior

You are the girl crying in public places

You are the woman watching emptiness drive away

You are years down the road alone

You are forgotten and yes .. you wanted something whole

It broke into pieces too smashed to remold

So long ago you don’t know where you put the parts

Perhaps they stab you now like thorns in weeping dark

But you’ll never trust again, not one word, not one action

You’ve walled yourself off, in an ocean of your own

Set on repeat to drown, every time you wake up

Every morning it comes around

The pain

Excruciating and long

Eternity and punishment

For ever believing

For ever letting yourself believe

What they felt was the same

Because it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been

They still inhabit the land of the living

And really you should have known that

A very very long time ago

When you were both younger and smooth of melancholy

A sense the promise was too sweetly said

Fast in utterance, not enough breadth

Like puffing up your cheeks and letting go your breath

Is no more than rushing air, warm from your mouth

And your eyes, I should have examined closer

They did not blink and I thought this meant truth

When a lie can wear

The very same outfit

I don’t like you

A little girl

With golden hair reaching her tan

Told me, tongue to one side, half-licked lips

I don’t like you.

Afterward I asked

A disinterested person

Who was paid to iron my dad’s shirts and begrudgingly

Watch me until he returned

Why would someone not like me?

I hadn’t said this with some inflated belief that I deserved universal liking

But rather, an innocent question

That first time

Branding with the word knife

The girl with flax hair

Didn’t include me in hopscotch or skip rope

Ring a ring a roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tissue, a-tissue, they all fall down

She was the most popular and they chose her for Mary in the school play

Whilst I played a donkey, braying when gift bearing wise men arrived

The local woman who ironed my dad’s shirts

Begrudged making me a canned supper

I was a nuisance, playing in her dour house until 6pm every day

Throwing dirt on drab paving stones, pretending to be invisible

I don’t know why

She crossly replied

Her forehead wrinkled with steam

Curly hair rising, sleeves rolled up, sweat stains coloring

Maybe you’re a nasty little girl.

The next day when my father dropped me off on his bike

At the school gates

I walked the other way

I have been ever since

Learning to salvage myself

From unexpected spite.

If I met the peach-kneed Danish girl today

She’d likely have track-marks and bruised eyes

Turned out she was beaten beneath her starched frocks

Turning the wickedness back into the world

Isn’t that what hurt children do?

Perhaps it’s not wise to always listen to your elders

I’d warn the five-year old me

Playing with empty hands on the stoop of someone else’s street.

As an adult, when someone doesn’t like me

Which happens like storms and rain in May

Their voice reminds me of that first loneliness.

Children who stop believing in a kind world

Feeling sharp thorned scorn

Grow into adults who keep themselves sheltered

From the humans in wolf skin, prowling outside

Like castaway cries of surprise

When we think we are safe and

Still, we trip and fall.

The next generation

This isn’t a pity poem

who the hell wants to read one of those?

but if I’m honest

which I’m not very often

preferring to put on a mask and sit mutely smiling on the outside

it’s sometimes harder to pretend and say nothing

than let it out

if I did let it out

what would IT look like?

am I really so bad for having an urge to share?

the empty feeling inside

surely that’s how we hope to fill ourselves

with something other than hot air or quiet despair?

one thing worse than peripheral is rejection, so usually

we stay quiet about how we really feel incase it’s true

nobody really gives a damn once you’re grown

how I got to this juncture is the easy part

a girl is born, her gender is already

a strike against her in a world easier on men

we don’t treat girls very well

maybe there should also be a rule against small families having smaller families

call it what you like, I call it diminishment

I was diminishing before I was born

when there’s nowhere to go, you usually strive to go up

but I was bad at direction, turned into a box turtle and hid in my shell

hoping someone would pry me out

that was my second mistake

generally it’s worth noting, people do little for free

if I could tell myself that I’d have said; Don’t rely on anything but you

you end up staying inside too long by yourself

before you know it, even the language you speak

taints your chances to pretend to be normal

I look

at photographs of other people

they are surrounded by people, fitting in like

well crafted pieces of puzzles I do not fit

I was the kid sent off to eat with other families, never my own

it felt like a kick in the shins then, and everytime since

feeling ackward in a crowd

because I didn’t learn how

to belong

so this isn’t a pity poem

i’m not chafing with self imposed isolation

not the girl who smiles when she’s crying, or maybe I am

or the one who feels more alone when amongst a crowd

everything is so quiet when that’s how you’re born

it takes a fortitude I don’t possess to break the cycle

erase the twenty years forming a tongue without social skill

I hear the sounds of a party rising over the walls

a party I could be at though, I know

i’d be pressed against the wall without a way out

though all I’ve ever wanted is to learn a way in

i whisper

i am irrelevant in this scenario

self worth is tied to others even as we know it comes from ourselves

i didn’t generate any faith

so I don’t believe in God or me

but I do believe in you

if this was a pity poem I’d ask

why you didn’t help me learn how to live?

though I know the answer already

you couldn’t do it yourself, what chance for me?

we’re cut from the same cloth, you and I

that’s why we both hide

like the man in the high tower

did he ever feel as lonely as I do?

why didn’t he need

the things I cannot seem to reach

it’s like I am stretching out for them

but the betrayal of beginnings and everything after and before, is too deep

we betray ourselves most of all

in trying to be what we just aren’t able to

a teacher once told me you can be anything at all

that’s a lie I know it

we each have chances and some of us have fewer props

so we stand ackwardly by the side

trying to be someone we’re not

until the inauthenticty feels like a curse

we revert to type even as we dislike who we are

this was set in motion before we knew

we’re just the next generation of lost

not self pity, no, more like a pain

a mere poem cannot do justice

Aren’t you?

When

The thick trunk of families, surges upward and onward

And the line thins out of impatient elbows

You stand as you always have

Alone

More conscious of their abundant overflow

At an airport without a ticket, watching throngs of souls

Connected and coming together, like migration encourages the swell and surge of birds riding warm air

Somehow knowing, they are part of a greater collective

And you stand there, in your well worn shoes

And your empty pockets ache, for someone to turn and say

Aren’t you with us?

S.O.S.

I wanted to

open my mouth as wide as it will go

no .. even

further

disarticulated and gaping

for maximum sound

a fog horn

and implore you

describing

the itch in my throat

the lump that turns to anchor

pulling me down to ocean floor

no oxygen, just humiliation

It says

Help me

I’ve never asked before

hot-faced and ashamed

I’m all grown up and lost

wandering toward your call

Help me

unpick my mistakes

return to the scattered fold

but every time I begin

something in your tone

heeds a warning

and I go back to

holding in

sore like spring cold

my throat is not meant for singing

it is a lump hardened by knowing

you will not hear.

(After becoming so sick I decided my only option would be to move back to a country with socialized healthcare. I basically said as much to my father, the first time I have ever asked him for help as an adult. I felt so guilty for asking. Some of my pride comes from being independent, not relying upon others. I find it hard to ask. But what was harder was his lack of response. I could blame many things, maybe he was in shock, maybe he didn’t know what to say. But parents are parents for life, if their child at any age needs help, and you know they may not be able to help themselves, I would think most would help them. Now I feel stupid, ashamed and embarrassed for asking. I hadn’t expected too much, just some type of support in moving back, if indeed a way could be found. But he stayed pretty negative, he doesn’t want to make an effort or get involved. I realized then I had long thought family meant we were all in it together, helping each other through this life, but it’s more ‘them’ and ‘me’. If I could, I would help myself. I’ve done it every other time. But being sick means you can’t always help yourself. There is no worse feeling than asking for help after feeling so bad for having to ask for help and then feeling absolutely ridiculous for having asked. I’m not feeling sorry for myself, it’s just challenging because it would be better if I could live in a country with socialized healthcare at this point, being swamped by bills I cannot afford. I suppose like many who do not have that option I will have to find another way. I don’t feel hard done by, I just feel like I don’t have that familial support that I half believed I could have, if I asked for it, that feels very lonely but also I feel stupid, for expecting, or asking anything of anyone, I wish I had the strength by myself but I just don’t).