Poetry
Issue #1
For Another
Paper planed with friction and a steady arm,
The feathered ringlets slip the air – Fall through
Like dust in a still window light.
I – with my father – making books for another
Surrounded by an uneasy calm.
The winter’s sun screams in, turning
Everything white. Yellow – white,
The day’s harsh sighing light
As you hold your father’s scissors
In your hands and
Cut with a clack, clack, clack,
Of mouths miming words written
For another.
Our language? Like sorry scribbles on
A blank page, the silent words of the pen
Uninterrupted but for the hum of some melody,
A tune, some jarring chord artfully
Broken, filling the gaps left unspoken.
When I gave you the book you looked at me strangely:
‘No, you have to write in it,’ I said.
Untitled
You viewed the world wide-eyed,
Eloquent in your tongue-tied
Bowled over, hyperbolic sight –
Talking in words that did not quite exist,
Like childish squeals of excitement
As language fails to your body’s tongue.
A verbal dance of feral movements
That describe the world anew.
You drew me in:
Like children in our own creation,
The nothingness that you said came before
And everything else thereafter,
Whatever we say is:is –
And I wanted to find it
Absorbed in your eyes.
The dark flames of your
Two black suns pulsating
White light. And deep down
They were animal bright.
In between your eyelid blinks,
Everything was new.
Impressionism
I kept you mostly to myself
For as long as I could,
A treasure chest of doubt and possibility
That you kindly buried beneath yourself
And would dig up whenever I asked.
Always an eleven digit number away
And our ever coded language,
Half-real, half-dictated
Like being overheard was to be expected.
Conversations with you ran like poorly scripted soap opera,
And I took my part
As you peered over the
Top of your tea cup,
A thick bar of black
Underscoring your unremarkable eyes.
What was it that you were thinking?
Sipping on the fashionable far-eastern brew
Placing me, perhaps, in a neat little box -
The same one in which I placed you?
I liked you more when you played me your music,
Shamelessly flaunting your rock star aspirations,
The posters hanging on the wall
Framed like art in a gallery:
‘Yeah, I think this one shows…’
You would try and explain,
When it was already painfully clear.
And so we faced each other:
Two characters opposed to each other
Under the glare of the thousands of eyes
We imagined were there.
‘Yeah I think this one shows…’
We would try and explain
When it was already painfully clear.