Guitar strings broken,

tearing into silence without a melody

like water designed to never flow

and my sins can never be forgiven.

Even holy water fades away,

gives way to filth when it falls on me;

and all I want is to be saved, absolved,

hide from the sunlight

flow underground,

In streams or gutters, I can't choose.

Is it too late?

Am I still rejected?

Destined for a hell I didn't ask for?

Falling on my own sword, for no fault of my own?

Holy. Filthy. What is it that falls on me?

Can water be torn, broken, shattered,

like glass, like mirrors,

like shadows in the light

Im here, in front of you, waiting, waiting

In denial

Is there more to this than it seems?

Are these still waters that run deep?

But i know the truth,

The hour's eleven,

and the sun hasnt risen

And you were my sin

Holy. Filthy. What is it that falls on me?

Perverted, shining like a vulgar diamond,

Blinded me to believe in an illusion there wasnt

And I wonder if this ugliness will ever be washed away

Holy.

Filthy.

What is it that falls on me?

#freeverse #prose #poem

These rusted daggers in my back were a weight I'd ceased to notice. Rivulets of blood had dried on cracked skin, unwashed for an eternity. I flinched at your touch, you who were made of light and white heat - in theory the nemesis of the darkness and frost that made me.

The hideousness of those daggers, like the scales of a reptile, were battlescars I wore with pride. If you turned away in disgust, you wouldn't be the first. If you offered to help take them out, I'd classify you as ordinary - a false knight looking for a damsel to rescue. But you touched them, and didn't say a word. You looked at them, and offered no platitudes or cliches; you paid them no meaningless compliments. And I knew then you weren't ordinary.

For who but one made of fire could touch me and awaken the ashes long gone cold of bones long charred, flesh pecked at and finished by vultures? For who but one made of light could turn my darkness into a fever? For who but you could point at my dying stars and set them ablaze again?

Do you have a name, or are these things one must not ask? Can you truly tell fortunes by looking at the stars, as the myth goes? Are your eyes always searching for things that I hide in plain sight or do they already have all the answers? For answers are what I don't have, and for once in my life my curiosity is piqued not because I don't have them, but because I don't want them. There are other things I want from you - that light within you, and the color of your soul. And every last word and every last thought and every crooked secret.

Because I believe, in the winter of my days, when my heart is frozen with all the pain it's seen, you will warm me up and keep me sane. Maybe tonight I'm intoxicated with the honey in your blood, but I'll place this trust blindly on your shoulders for the rest of my days. They say it's a disaster, this match. But why do we still live, lie entwined, if not to prove them wrong?

#streamofconsciousness #fiction #freeverse #prose #poetry #fire

Do you think the earth feels pain when it's shot with dynamite to make more caves? Or do you think it's relieved, that it finds there's more space to breathe?

Do you think the earth cries out when it shakes and shatters, or do you think it's a frisson of pleasure that passes through its veins?

Because if the earth felt what I did when you found your way in to the darkest corners of my mind, then I think I know the answers.

I want you to recognize yourself in the verses I write. I want you to see your name in places where I don't carve it. I want you to notice the way I omit you from stories I make up about you, from anecdotes whose plots I change while I narrate them. I want you to feel the way I thirst for you, the way the earth does for rain, howling out - like a wolf at the moon; I want you to hear that silence. And I want you to tell me that you do.

The ground we walk on carries the echoes of piano notes. Bookstores dissolve under the weight of this love. We stand in the middle of heaven and hell - on a green and blue plate that divides them both.

You are that explosion both outside me and within me. I wonder how I can be right by your side, pretend to be so still, when there are earthquakes inside of me, and caverns opening up.

Not even my lip trembles.

Because I'm still waiting for you to tell me you hear that silence.

#fiction #streamofconsciousness #poetry #prose #love #earth #lust #prosepoem

It determines the shape of clouds and of sand dunes. It decides how the windmills turn, where the blades of grass point. It disappears into open portals, finds its way to the other side. A thief that misplaces things, a mischief-maker that hides in ostensibly empty spaces.

The chill on your skin, the bounce in your hair. The path of a tumbleweed, and the music in bamboo shoots.

Breeze. Wind. Air.

#streamofconsciousness #prose #amwriting

Am I too old for this, I wonder, simultaneously apprehensive and excited. It is my first time on a carousel, and I'm perhaps the only adult on the plastic pony going up and down, round and round. A smile is plastered to my face, that I can't wipe away - my lips remained stretched with a mind of their own. Smiling to ourselves like a lunatic must be the price we pay for unbridled joy, but who's to tell my lips that?

Was it the slight prickle I felt at the back of my neck, or the warmth on my cheek that made my smile falter? My pony keeps moving forward, like the seconds ticking by, but I turned around anyway, to find you. Were you a sketch artist, or were you scribbling away? I would've wanted to find out, had I not lost the ability to think. Perhaps, I'd regain it in a moment?

Someone beside you is smoking and for the briefest of seconds, your face is obscured by the smoke. A glimpse of the way your pencil moves confirms you're not scribbling. You look up, but our eyes don't meet, for you're looking at another part of the carousel. Look at me, my eyes plead. Yes, I'm too old to be on this plastic pony.

I've done a full loop, and I search for you again. You smirk; you've noticed. The sky seems to have descended to put this distance between us, that I'd give anything to cross. But wait! Do I imagine it, or does your ankle twitch, pulling you away, warning you I'm bad news? The girl from whom they tell you to stay away? Is that why those black eyes quickly turn away?

I may be bad news, but you're not naive. Could I, tell me, reach out like you were my own brass ring? Could I then pull you close? Do you know that I'm thinking if you prefer chains or silk ties. Could I find out soon? Are you drawing me, just as I'm writing about you? Or is that a caricature, of someone pretending to belong where they don't?

We have time yet. Your smirk is back, and I watch you watch me...

...going up and down, up and down...

...round and round.

#fiction

The alarm goes off, piercing through the cold December morning. It is still dark – all the stars seem to have died. A tangible darkness, like a shroud. Like my shroud. I’d felt at peace while asleep; the alarm changed that, allowing the darkness to sit on my chest like an incubus paralyzing me.

It sings a pleasant tune – more a lullaby than an alarm. In its pleasantness, I sense an evil. A smile that holds knives at the ready. A smile that will slit your throat even as you smile back. Yet it won’t stop ringing.

I grope at the darkness and find a drawer whose steel handle is like ice. I’m about to shove the alarm in, when I find the things I’d lost. Things I thought I’d lost. A long time ago. And among them, a mirror with a golden frame shimmers through the darkness, inviting me to look.

I do and I see again the ugliness I’d forgotten, a resignation, a despair, all woven in. I throw the mirror in after the alarm, and a brief flash shows it to me – shows me the spider’s web in the corner.

I collect my resignation, I collect my despair, and I walk towards the web. I bite my thumb to draw blood. I spit out chunks of skin, erasing off the prints of my fingers. My swollen eyelids burst in pain. And I get the spider’s attention.

My knees tremble for I know it’s the end. Yet I keep walking, one foot after another, on a single silken thread. I see it rise from slumber, its drool spilling, my ugliness mirrored in its ugly eyes. It smiles and reminds me of my alarm clock, the clock that started this mess. I feel no desire to turn back. I walk, I surrender, I’m consumed whole. Then there is nothing but darkness. All the stars seem to have died.

#surrealism #streamofconsciousness #prosepoetry #prose #poetry #fiction

A blank white page, like sand under your feet from an exotic land far away.

A blank white page, like a cold desert lit by moonlight.

A blank white page, like a spot of the ocean lit by a lighthouse, miles away, on the shore.

That is all I have, a blank white page, as I try to decipher the machinery inside your mind.

I try to decode the thoughts you have, for all I want is for you and I to be standing here, two hours past midnight, right beneath this towering structure, next to the skull of this prehistoric animal, maybe sit on it like it was a bench, and talk, while it lights up the ocean, spot by spot.

What do you hide behind those jet black eyes, crinkled on the sides, weathered with all the shipwrecks it's seen? What secrets do you guard, for I can see there's something you hold back every time the light falls on us? What tragedies might have occurred for your eyes to be closed even when they're wide open? Won't you tell me, under this lighthouse, next to this skull, two hours past midnight?

Won't you stop being this blank white page?

#freewrite #prose #freeverse #fiction #streamofconsciousness

This must have been a dream because I can’t remember how it began, the details of the ending are hazy, but I remember everything in between. What followed waking was rebuilding, reconstructing, retracing, recovering. You and I recanting – all that was said and done before.

I was sewn back, not in a hurry, and yet threads of you embroidered themselves into me. Your dust got caught in the bricks that remade me, your voice trapped in these crooked crevices, reminding me to look for you. And so I do even a world away.

I look at every passing bus, to see if it’s your face in the window reading comics at the back of the paper. And every time somebody orders a steak well done, a smile rises to my lips, the resurfacing of an inside joke that once was – your penchant for rich food, and mine for poor puns. I look under coffee mugs, behind polished oakwood doors, waiting for you to spring at me, for the thrill of a fear anticipated. But I’ve lost the fragment of that sorrow, the piercing I felt when it was new.

When did I become so audacious, rushing to the edges of sharp cliffs? It is you who taught me to fearlessly jump. You became the air around me that scraped my skin as I fell, holding me, cradling me, even as I bled. Through those cuts and bruises, you entered and remained, like fragrance in my hair, revealing itself every time I moved. You permeated the notes of a lullaby. The one with the mockingbird.

The mockingbird…

…mocking me in turn.

#fiction #freewrite #freeverse #abstract #streamofconsciousness

Originally published on my blog.

Somewhere between the corner of your eyes and the corner of your lips, my love for you was gone. Your expression did not change, your smile was still warm, and I knew then you did not know. Was I ready to tell you or was I to leave my deception by the chair for your to discover after I was gone?

Making love must be a little like death, for your face said content; a discarded black dress on the edge of your bed is what I wore to your funeral. But it wasn’t your funeral, even though the ravens in my mind wouldn’t stop cawing. It was still a funeral, and that dress must have been the gallows on which my love hung itself. All in the space of a moment, one snap, like the cracking of a twig under my foot, and it was gone, taking with it the butterflies, the blushes, the clandestine meetings.

With a long drawn sigh of inevitable loss, I picked up the dress, black satin still soft, slippery folds to drape slippery folds. My arms felt heavy as I lifted it up and let it drop to my shoulders. I glanced to see that your smile had not wavered, and I find myself searching, thinking was it possible for yearnings to die like that, like a train that disappeared midway on the tracks? Were my emotions hiding under your white pillow with the green flowers on its case? Were they in the steam rising from the kettle, where tea had been brewing for a while, forgotten because we had other things on our minds? Had they been washed down the drain? Or did they fly out the window?

The window. Near the window you kept mirror, propped up by a crooked nail. It was the size of a photograph taken in old fashioned studios, five inches by seven inches. The mercury was beginning to corrode, brown patches appeared beneath. Golden light was filtering through curtains that matched your pillow case, blocked on one side by a creaking bookshelf. As I brushed my hair, you nuzzled close and I saw a part of your face in that  mirror – the three moles under your right eye, like stars in a sparse constellation. I thought of all the times I’d touched them with the tip of my thumb and I wondered why I pulled away from them now. There was a crack in the corner of the mirror. Did my love escape through it? Or through those brown patches where the mirror forgot to reflect?

I’m leaving, I announced, my voice void of thought and feeling. Bye, you said, your smile unaware that I meant forever. Then I was out your door, the satin strangling a being inside me – a being that once was loud and refused to be silenced, now pliant, willing to die. Fitting that I was wearing black, this satin to be burnt and buried. Buried in the ground as I wondered, where had my love gone. Beyond the door of your home was a graveyard – a surreal kingdom where this burden drowned me while its threads lifted me. The graveyard where I buried this dress that had tainted my skin.

My skin. With the dress. In this graveyard. With my love, those butterflies, those blushes, those clandestine meetings.

#fiction #freewrite #freeverse #streamofconsciousness #prose

Originally published on my blog.