Dear Beloved

An open letter to everyone I’ve ever convinced myself I loved.

I.

I am still sorry.

I fear that you were just the

first in a long line

of men I will be

all too willing to bury

my loneliness in.

II.

 Now that I’ve figured

that you wronged me, I am not

ready to forgive.

III.

I loved you more than

you knew, but you were still right:

it was not enough.

IV.

I have learned what the

infinite tastes like but

I still haven’t learned

that people can’t be

 fixed because they aren’t broken,

or that I deserve

better.

psychosomatic

-->

i’ve grown accustomed

to the pain. in your absence

everything else aches.

Gossip

for D.

With the righteousness of youth

I convinced myself

That sharing whispers

-of your weight

-of your diets

was made nobler by the secrets

(my secrets)

you’d spilled like ink.

Indelible,

Unforgettable,

Unforgivable.

But ink fades.

Salt

I dreamt of salt

and woke with my mouth watering.

I dreamt of salt

and awoke in a blanket of sweat

and the scent of the sea

clogging my nostrils.

I dreamt of salt

and woke up bitter.

Going With The Tides

Going With The Tides

A Haiku Pair

  

 Loneliness sometimes

lingers like cold in your bones

and damp in your soul,

even when the tides

that washed it up have long since

moved to other shores.

The Inaccuracies of Poetry

The Inaccuracies of Poetry

(a Haiku)

It wasn’t the whole

truth, but half-lies can be more

honest anyway.

Letting The Sunshine In

Their makeshift curtains are visible from the path

And my windows are stark in comparison

Too high to show into my soul

Where my bare windows make more sense:

That heat pooling in at 4 in the afternoon

Falls directly on my sorrows

And is the only thing that reminds me of home.

On the Distribution of One's Heart

On the Distribution of One's Heart

(A Haiku Quintet)

I had given my

heart to someone who didn’t

know how to hold it.

Instead, they cradled

it like an adolescent

with a stranger’s child:

awkward and uneasy,

with a fear of falling

head first and snapping.

I gave my heart to

someone who didn’t quite want

it and was surprised

when they gave it back.

They said to keep it safe, but

their fingers left bruises.

Chennette

I was born like a chennette:

My green mother-

sliced open down the middle,

And me- squeezed out.

 Pink, sticky, sour.

Drowning

Drowning
(A Haiku Pair)

I am drowning. You

have oversaturated

me, but I need it.

You overwhelm me.

I gasp for air but choking

never felt so good.

Going The Distance

Have you ever gone through your personal poetry archives and stumbled upon an old piece that, at the time of writing, you were convinced was absolutely awful, but now that you've given it some space, it turns out it wasn't too bad after all? This piece is one of them. It's almost a year old and no longer personally relevant, but I hope you like it.

Distance pulls heartstrings taut

While memory taunts

Sighs go unanswered

Empty promises fill

Where your touch should be.

Silence breeds disquiet:

I quietly wonder

If it’ll be worth it in the end.

The Sea

The waves sang the same siren song that had lulled me to sleep as a child

and I swore that this time I fathomed them

I tasted the subtle warmth of the salt in the air

And I let the openness of the water trick me into thinking I could grasp her

But as the grey of dusk fell away into night

the dark of the sea stopped revealing the secrets of her depths

It was then that I learned the truth

We never stop fearing the unknown

Anthology

I would write you everyday.

Poems and scribbles and notes,

Until you learned

The unevenness of my hand

The habits of my penmanship

The chaos of my scrawl.

In a world of dying paper and ink

They would save every scrap

Torn from the back of notebooks

Jotted down on well-folded receipts

They would compile anthologies of my sweet nothings

Until children who had long forgotten pens and lined paper

Would press their fingers into the ink and indentations

And know this is what devotion feels like.

For The Moth That Lived and Died In My Bathroom

And his wings, folded

shut in death, concealed that he

had been beautiful

Coming Out

I read that we never get

to stop coming out.

Well I came out to myself the other day,

Stepped out of my glass closet for a moment,

Well, not so much a class closet than one of those

Cabinets old people use to store their china
I am transparent, the way I hoard your gifts,

Your presents, your presence.

I never tell the ones who need to hear it the most.

Instead I let it rest on my lips the way I wish yours would

And flitter round my tongue the way I want yours to,

But I can’t.

Because I only tell you in sighs I hope you read

Or maybe see it in my gazes that linger too long

Or notice how I touch you too often, sit too close,

Smile too much.
I am transparent in my cabinet as I watch your hands

Dance across tabletops.

But I would never come out to you.

I much rather confess to strangers on the internet,

Or in ambiguously phrased verse,

That I dream about you at night

And I think of you all day

And while I may joke about others,

Everything I say I love about them,

Just reminds me of you.

Shop Boy Crush

Do you have a lunch break, or do you sustain on cuteness and sheepish smiles?

Because if you do, I do too.

And i don’t mean to be ambiguous but I do mean both.

Because if you don’t have a lunch break, I don’t really need

That soup and a sandwich I buy everyday

Just that smile…

See I’m like a plant except instead of sunshine, I flourish on your shine

Because boy do you shine.

See I’m more like a flower than anything else,

You know, like how they lean to the sun and all?

Yeah, that’s my flow and I wouldn’t mind if perhaps we could…

Pollinate?

No I’m just kidding, I meant conversate,

Oh sorry,

Converse, my bad.

Your brightness makes me a little dizzy

So forgive me if I get a little bit mixed up,

You make my head light with your light.

And if you do break for lunch?

Perhaps you can take a break by the juice bar

Because bar none, you are sweet

And it would be nice to see your other half

And perhaps another side of you

Other than” thank you and please come again,”

though at this point I’m sure even though you say that to all the girls

and all the boys

and whoever else may patronize this fine establishment,

that you specifically mean me…

so if you have a lunch break, or sustain on cuteness and sheepish smiles

remember I do too.

Hands

I have become enamored with your hands.

The way slender fingers join knuckles,

Soft palms taper to fine wrists.

I cannot look away.

Cupping your face,

Clasped around knee,

Rest belies their strength.

Your hands could craft the world if they wanted to.

Sea Shanty

I wrote this on the offhanded request of a friend. She said that her OTP (One True Pairing), was sand and salt water. And I take inspiration where ever I can get it.

Sea Shanty

You are the salt of my earth,

Said the tide to the shore.

Leaving sweet nothings

In pools filled with stars

As the moon’s siren song

Pulled them further apart.

Palm trees with their heads

buried in the clouds

promised he’d return,

You could hear it

in the crashes of the waves.

But every time you leave,

You wear me away,

The shore whispered back.

An Education

I want to learn the language your body speaks,

Whispered by your hips as you move,

Decode the ciphers between your sighs.

I have learned the angle of your slouch,

The spread of your fingers

And the coil of your curls.

There is a science to you I have not yet learned.

I have learned the contours of your face

The locations of your moles

The longitude and latitude of your dimples

The length and breadth of your smile

Better than I ever learned geography.

Maybe I’d map those contours of your face

(Which I’ve already committed to memory)

but I can’t.

To recreate the brownness of your skin
is more motivation than three years of art

Ever were.

Writing commits you to memory.

Flash Fiction Friday #42: Shaman

 first fff in a while! And now i have to know: how many times can i write about obeah before i actually need to research it?

flash fiction friday #42 (inclusion)trigger: religion, superstition, tradition, vision, collision.

                         Shaman

He didn’t like to talk about it, but given the nature of gossip, everyone knew and did the talking for him.

Big time evangelist preacher, but I hear his brother is a obeah man! Yes! I hear it too! An’ it wasn’t jus’ he, his granny in it too! My tanty was tellin’ me so de other day…

Not to say it wasn’t true. For Raymond, growing up was as steeped in Granny’s special prayers as it was in entire Sundays spent in church and revival tents. It had gone on for so long that by the time he was old enough to think anything of it, he couldn’t imagine anything different.

Raymond didn’t hear much about Randy these days other than the whispers of the congregation. The last he heard was that he was up in some shack in San Souci, honing his arts, to paraphrase his grandmother. Randy had embraced it from the start. Raymond had to have a brush with death before he did anything about it. It was ten years ago and he and his best friend Marlon were coming home from a Carnival fete, (the congregation absolutely loved that part), when a driver drunker than he was sped through an intersection and ran into their car, passenger-side first. The driver of the other car had been killed instantly and, as he would find out later, so had Marlon. Yet, when Raymond awoke in the ICU, Marlon was there with him. And he stuck around for a while after that, (and would visit whenever he got bored with whatever otherworldly business he conducted when he wasn’t busy haunting Raymond).

 It was Marlon who helped him figure out the whole healing touch, and Marlon who suggested the whole church business. His granny knew of course, and would tut righteously whenever Raymond mentioned Marlon.
“Spirits not supposed to linger so long,” she would chide, sucking her teeth and shaking her head, to which Raymond would respond with a halfhearted shrug. He knew about as much about ghosts now as he did ten years ago. His forte now lay in balancing the people’s beliefs in the divine and the extent of his ability.

 He started out about a year after his accident. Between the seminary and the advice from Granny, Marlon and Randy, Raymond thrived. For the first time in his life he was actually doing well with something: secondary school was lackluster at best and life pre-collision was idle, punctuated by whatever hustle was necessary to fund temporary desires. But the Church made him feel whole. So his congregation grew. Marlon had the makings of a shrewd businessman and he wasn’t going to let go to waste just because he was dead, and donations poured in.

Raymond declined the radio and TV spots and tried to keep the pills and tonics to a bare minimum. He would cringe when he heard other evangelists on the radio with their bizarre Frankenstein-esque Yankee-cum-“foreign” accents rebuking the Devil and lauding their various remedies, (specially shipped and available for a very affordable $700 package deal). He was already mixing “devil ting” with scriptures and his morals wouldn’t let him betray the people further.

Yet Raymond knew that some of the same members of his congregation that would sit and gossip about his brother would drive up to San Souci to see Randy with matters they felt weren’t appropriate to bring to the House of the Lord. Two sides to the same coin; what was obeah to one was religion to another and whatever Spirit had given him this gift was fed by the same belief of the people. Obeah man, witch doctor, pastor… Raymond had figured out a long time ago that it was the same calling, different name. The trance, the healing… It was all steeped in ritual and parlour tricks, with a kernel of truth nestled at the centre of it all. Shaman was shaman.

Ethos

I always stay too late.

I am always the last to leave,

The one left to taste the soured wine

Passed in frantic effort

To regain the spirit,

Get burnt by the embers

Of hysterical bodies

Trying to rekindle the longspent fire.

Last to leave

And first to come off that high

Brought on by either ethers or ethos

First to sniff the stale smiles that linger in the air

Long after the fleeting fancy

That brought them has left.

I always leave too late,

And as I totter home,

I am always emptier in the dying hours

Drained from the effort of trying to live.

Heat

And it felt like all there ever was,

was heat.

32 degrees coupled with too wet air,

hot stickiness of flesh it incites

hot throbbing in the tips of my fingers

and the end of my toes

hot sighs with hot breath

as hot air lays sultry kisses on

blistering necks.

Hot rain hits hot pavement and sizzles

And all there ever was,

was heat.

My paradise is now hell.

Sunkissed

The pallor of my skin mocks me.

I miss the sun’s feverish kisses

On my brow until its touch burns.

The pain means I am loved.

Mania

I go like a clockwork toy wound too tight

Frantic and eager but sporadic and hysterical

And I love and I love

And I give and I give

Until like like a well loved toy

My skin is worn thin

And my entrails spill out from the seams.

And the pounding ratatatat tattoo

of my heart whipped into frenzy

is calmed by the panicked coda

of my hyperventilations.

We all have our lows.

No Rest For the Wicked

Inspiration rides the dregs of a late-night caffeine high,
brain bubbles like a percolator on speed,
firing synapses are the prodding pokers that keep me awake,
inciting me to violent turns of phrases,
penpoint picks at an itch long left unscratched.

They say to hide one's light under the bushel is a sin,
and this must be my punishment.
No rest for the wicked.

Knock Knock Jokes, or Writer's Block Haiku

Knock Knock Jokes

(Writer's Block Haiku)

knock knock- who's there? what

do you call a writer who

never writes? a joke.

Diaspora Dysphoria

Look I write something! I'm actually trying to perform this for the One World show my school has every year. I just auditioned it today, so let's hope for the best <3

Still have to work of some of it, but most of it is here.

Diaspora Dysphoria

I am a child of diaspora.

Last name I have no ties to,

First name my mother heard on Sesame Street,

Names give me no solace.

My mama’s mama was a product of love soured

By a nationwide obsession with race and colour:

A story of a baby too brown

For anyone but her mother to love.

A story that comes back ‘round to me when they say,

‘Psst, t’ick sauce wit’ de nice hair.’

They call me dougla.

By the time I outgrew my obsession with bindis and tikas

And my one true dream to be bollywood dancer,

Classmates told me I was too proper to be black.

They call me dougla.

But ever so often I throw around mulatto

And try and forget the oppression behind it.

Two generations later, I have no ties to coco panyol

Other than passing mention.

The only name I have for this,

The only name I have for me,

Is confused.

At home they say, ‘dougla, what yuh mix wit’?’

But here they say black is black.

‘Are you ashamed?’

Am I ashamed?

Not of the blackness

Or the whiteness

Or the Indian-ness

Or the Syrian-ness

Or the whatever-else-it-have-ness.

Just confused.

Because things like race have always baffled me.

Because race implies someone must win.

Because when I look in the mirror

And I see the roundness of my nose,

The curliness of my hair,

The sharpness of my cheeks

And the brownness of my skin,

I am neither ashamed nor confused;

just euphoric.