Halloween

We make love you say?
What difference does it make
Anyway?

I flap my wings
Naked in my bloodbath
I scream to be heard
A bat

I bump against a tree
Its daylight
Again

I have raped myself.

Those tin drum bones
Each time
They’d rearrange themselves
To form a new face
Skulls without flesh
And as I rushed
To the attic
To find the body
The dream would break.
Each time.

Soot

Your sweat freezes
My brown sheet
Bleeds.

Wrapped in wool
I see
Your feet.

Your fire chastens me.

But my dreams
Lie burnt
In empty earthen stoves.

_ _. _ _. _ _ _ _

You stop for a brief moment.
Yesterday’s urge, petered-out, jaded
Returns.
You’ve done everything—
Showered, smiled, wiped
The newest filament of dust off your reading table.
Your theories are as sound as ever.
They only shudder at the tiniest tremor in your groin.
So you plug in your earphones
You pretend to wish people well
And effortlessly you regress to your perfect world
With a faceless shin, a nameless mouth, a shapeless tongue

Again.

Somnolence

The first time I refused
You should have pressed on.
Maybe I fell asleep then, and woke up
To the sound of blood
Flowing from consciousness
To consciousness.

But guess what?
I have refused again
This time I am wide awake
And there is just
The mirror and me.

B

On a night like this
She came on a holiday
From her land of frozen shoes.
“My little brown B” she called me.
In the far south
Where babies go to sleep in summer
And wake up as men
With toe marks on their chest,
I promised to build her a hive.
......


I knew you were born without a toe mark
The first time I licked your honey skin.
Words froze in the south
The day I stopped making shoes.
Though babies still hibernate here
They do not grow up any more.
I remember your promise
And wish you were born in a hive
I could have saved you then
From dying of a human heart.

Entr’ackte

I cross vistas
Hurriedly... butter anxious to melt.
A waiting tree scares me.
Maybe you waited
Somewhere... and I left.
Yes, maybe I was
An empty saucepan
And you really were tired
Of frozen foods.

Newer yous shag.
Some decrepit, some
Fresh from the oven.
Yes, that’s one gift
You did leave me.

Even if my groins leak
Ill still be running
With my cake
Across new vistas
Remembering you
Each time I see
A waiting tree.