Words

your days
slip into words

you weave them
wind them
spread them
arrange them
like books on a shelf
(in the order of reading)

you invoke them
smudge them
crush them
dissolve them
(until the water runs gray)
to equivocate the past

at least one,
i wish
you'd unconsciously pick
for me

insomnia

how nice to have the excuse of insomnia, when all you want to do is to stay up and read people's blogs and wonder why we all need this space for our thoughts. as though an infinitely wondering-wandering mind wasn't enough!
yes, so insomnia becomes an excuse to stay up, so that you can read people from across the continents, maybe bump into them online and talk to them about a thousand and one things that have been on your mind.
insomnia is my excuse to stand you against the stillness of the night and workout a hundred and one ways to capture your silhouette inside my head.

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

(by Kay Ryan)

not enough

not enough to hurt too many times. you bend, twist, turn, fragment and heal to become whole. it is never enough to say this is the last straw. because it never gets over. it's only like a miller's wheel that spirals. hurt is never enough to shape us. it only helps us grow.

Burn

there are blue fumes
from what burned
this afternoon
under the heat
of humiliation

they turn blue
against eyes
that hide themselves
behind drawn-up
windscreen
of a taxi-cab

there are signs
of defeat
in the rubble
of what was burnt down this afternoon.

crush

pull, drag, push, trample, destroy. it's so easy to crush the human spirit. we do it to eachother as vengeance.

words

why am i so wordy? i once asked Chris. because you're a wordsmith, he said.

every day, i am conjuring words from my memory to tell stories.

words. words. how much i need them every second i press the keys on my little computer, to strike just right so that you know what is in my mind does make sense and that i haven't quite lost balance after all the times i tried to think of just the right things to say and they were not making sense to you.

i'm still trying. i have moved to stories about other people though.