Last Day

"Last night, I threw a bucketful of the Pacific at you and
The water froze in the vacuum between us in the image of diminutive glass birds in flight.
You are God
Of Ice.

You weighed the fragile birds in your wise right palm all night long and then let them fall in the dust.
The morning Sun followed your instructions and burnt them to death.
There's a puddle in my breast and you float in it, confused.

...

You went to look at the happy sweet peas hanging in bronze in the balcony.
Morning found them dead.
Frost, she told me.
Cruel, love.

...

The baby-pink cashmere that you draped me in had a glacier on its inside.
It melted all night long.
All night long, I was cold. So cold."

- Hayat

...

You are poetry.
And since when was I so generous and inarticulate.

Romance

This love*
is selfish.
It's self-serving;
it cares only
for its own fulfilment.

It does not care
for you or me.

...

My blood flows
hot and thick and most of all,
painfully, but
it flows.

butterfly

I capture

a flutter of your eyelashes 

on my left cheek, and save it

in a bell-jar

...

for a snowy day.

Desire

I ask.

What you did, what did you do,
that I am become a brooding madman? All
happiness expended
on keeping thoughts of you at bay.

What you did, what did you do,
that I fight phantoms in my head? That
cloud my vision and taste
for that which is real.

What you did, what did you do,
that this frenzied lust
(for that but which exists in the spaces in-between
my synapses)
haunts insidiously every fibre of every starving muscle,
like slipping poison.

What you did, what did you do,
that you are become the locus of Beauty
in my half-awake brain.

...

I would wish for
Freedom,
from this suffocating desire. But I fear
that to lobotomise this love would be to silence the taste-buds of aestheticism. No,
I accept this, but
A little more control is all

I ask.