Walks Along the Seine

She smoked cigarettes like minutes,

And we spent the summer

Being chased by days

That lengthened like shadows.

She smoked cigarettes,

And the ever-thickening smoke

Dissolved lovingly into the fabric

Of the Original Distance between us.

She smoked

Violently, and we burned in the frenzied heat and

In the lush green fertility of Novelty; until one day

She smoked herself away.

She left behind

a solitary cup of thickhotsweet chai,

Infused with ginger;

And soon the memories of her

Hazel eyes and bouncing humour and

the delicate warmth of her tooslender wrists and

Her armour and her monsters and

Her affected joy, all

Shall fade into a beige nothingness:

Like a lover

Or a dream.

Honey

Goodbye, Cristina.

... 

You gatecrashed into
Our monochromatic days, and
Added strokes of lemonyellow laughter
That shall belly-dance through the summer-lit streets
Of our magically realistic memories,
And recollections of your diamond tongue
Shall tint our evenings to come
With a crimson, sombrero-wearing passion.

My only regret
Are the unborn conversations
That lie still in the pregnant space between us.

Nicotine

Last night,
You spoke of cigarettes.

And I fell in love
With your ingenuous self-destruction;

The fifteen-year-old you that now exists
In tar-stained words

Spray-painted provocatively onto a sleep-deprived corner of
The walls of my brain - your words are graffiti;

...

Their beauty makes me restless.

Glass

She is
A broken shard of glass
Sharpened on the dusking sun.

She is
A cloud of foam
On the hypothalmus of my morning coffee.

She is
A leaf stolen from a tree
Of memories, that I am envious for.

She is
A sentence whispered by velvet lovers
In a veiled language I shall never understand.

She is
A dancer; alas, that
My honesty is awkward.

She is
A stone of abstraction, and I desire the
Idea of her. Abstractedly.

...

She is
Beautiful, and I hate her for it. I wish
She were discarnate. 

Immortal

We dip ourselves in the ink
Of our thoughts and words and
Emotions and deeds
And inscribe in tiny lettering
Tiny stories on our tiny corner
Of the tapestry of this infinite universe.

And minuscule though we are,
We are heroes and heroines of
Our tiny stories, and
Our accomplishments and achievements
And poetry and love affairs
Shall be sung in paeans
By every tendril of summer wind that
Blows through the dusty streets of our
Hometowns,
(The dust ground out of the slow
Grinding of the gears of Time)
And our tiny stories shall live on
In the hearts and minds of the tiny people
We love. And theirs'
Shall live on as well, in some one else's;

And thus we are immortal -
We cheat death through
These doubly linked-lists
Of love.

...

(I am Tolstoy, and

I want to be Chekhov. I am

The Self-Taught Man, and I want to be Antoine Roquentin.

I am Betsy, and I want to be Esther Greenwood.

I am milk.)

Casual

It’s not hard to forget.
All you need to do
Is to remove their agency.

Cast them into an Object.

Take their swirling, twirling complexity -
The way they crinkle their nose
When they catch an errant thought.
The way Her gazelle eyes capture
Stray sun flakes, and the way
You try to follow her down one of her
Rabbithole thought-chains and you resurface
Hours later, a little less sane,
But swaying softly to purple music.
Her unpredictability, her randomness,
Her labyrinth-like emotions and Her passion and her cool familiarity –

And put them into a delineated brace.
Tear down the edifices of them you’ve erected
In the recesses of your mind.

Take away their humanity.
Define them.

And poof! No more.

You cannot be too deeply in love
With an Object.

…

Surrender
To the liquid nitrogen anger that
Smolders in your veins;
Let it wash away these cobwebs of complexity
And stale poems that breed quietly
In your mind,
When you’re not looking.

Youth

Youth is

An overflowing heart and

A trembling-with-ache brain.

Maturity is calmly wistful.

Maturity is a burden

Squeezing down my rebellious throat,

Gagging me.

The cross that grants me stability

And structure;

Youth is a poem that reveals too much,

A song that feels too much,

Half-smiles that say too much.