How long can I stay, in the grey autumn lights, shifting through fallen leaves

While birds take their long flight home, casting no shadow on the ground

In harmonious joy, in bleak twilight, they soar, little black dots.

How long can I wait, while the last train winds its way around the bent tracks

Faces pass me by, sad, painted, beautiful, unfocused, all indifferent, all erased

By the slow cold draft encircling the fast deserting stage

How long can I linger, when you hold the pain gently within the steady gaze

That looks beyond me, to open fields where crops trace sinuous patterns in the air

and desert me in my dreams, till you are no longer there.

Sweetest downfall.

It was a folk lore that the bride went away with the strange dark man from the mountains to see the sun step down and stretched infinitely till it died a pitch dark death. The bride stood, braving the wind, secretly guarding the simple happiness of being with the man with piercing eyes and rustic ways. They stood, her back rested against his arm, carefully casual, watching the landscapes in their hurried retreat. The sun set, the path was lost, the roads now newly learnt led them back to where they had begun. Now that it was time to say good night, he looked as indifferent as he could and she overtly happy to find other company.

I wake up, deepest night, curled senseless, listless

Fragmented in parts, lying here, tossed there

In halves, between fingers, I gaze, i see, I sense

the rupture of time, across the ramifications of fate

on my palms.

Just another dream congealed into wasteful prudence

Blink, I pray blink, turn me inside out

Paint me pretty, leave me to dry

Just another dream, crying me to sleep...

The leaves twirl as they fall, falling down in a slow sad dance

Turning its face away from the sky, dying midair, lost, out of reach

And the boughs shiver suturing heaven and earth in a cup of moonlight

And I think of how I am falling, flayed by the winds, and each

Thought bent out of shape and dragged back to the state of unity

Falling, with no prayer for release , till I become one with the night.

I have reinvented you, bit by bit, taken care to erase the notes

scribbled most carelessly on folded corners, taken time to

remove the binding, to invert our shared memory into a lifeless still.

All our summer evenings spent in reading strange new literature
smoked fashionably

taking time, between long deliberate drags to notice

the rise and fall of the nocturnes, as we progressively forget

our conversations, the noise of our words killing all thought.

Poetry dries like blood

Between pages, across miles

Pressed between your lips

Like a waif, like a tear lost between

Fingers curled infinitely into a fist.

"All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up;

that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke.

I curl myself in a box, pinstriped

Odd bits of old confetti 

toes crushed against folded photographs, the first ballerina shoe

Shiny pebbles, a movie script and chocolate wrappers

Christmas bells and torn pages of a diary.

I close my eyes to make a 

time capsule, to be buried for years till

Present thoughts become a confused smile, a memory. 

I bury me under the Rowan tree, covered by berries and speckled red flowers 

The earth growing warmer, I hear

muffled laughs of lovers or maybe little children dappled by sun and shade

I sleep.

Seasons change, the rain mixed with songs of the wind seeps through

I wish to turn, restless in my sleep

I dream of thunderstorms, barbed wires of electricity in the sky

My bones ache for green fields, damp green fields

I wish to turn

Within the closed space of the eye

I see the rain dripping through my twisted fingers

Dissolving me to absolution.

Doused by a thousand tears of a dead god. 

I feel not the weight of the berries, the red petals, troubled dreams.

Seasons change, the summer awakens me

Blind, blind fury of a midday sun

I rise, I merge, lost to the elements

Fevered by the heat, I turn

into a rain cloud

I fall

I turn

parched lands into fields of green

My blood in the earth

Fertile. 

You sit, the end of summer by your side
Filling your hands as they fall and rise
Holding my hands in harmony
To rise again for a last reprise...
Go disappear softly up the stairs
Hide behind those shadows long
Bring a souvenir from the hiding place
Or rise with mine for one last song.