The Only Way

I must open those boxes

for that which doesn't exist

in text anymore,

has been blotted

in there,

that fucking repository

called memory.

I must carry searchlights

to look for reasons

in that muddle of

overlapping passions,

for keeping my distances.

Does this increase your

list of assholes?

Yes, I don’t like many people,

generally, and you've become

nothing but another

number.

I must do all that and write,

for it is the only way

I could, eventually,
end these periodical asides 

while reading my Burgess

and having my tea.

I rub off the dandruff

from my hair,

and think that this is

the closest I’ll ever get to

watching a snowfall.

If only,

a semblance of.

She Who Was Called The Myth

(For Emily Dickinson)

There seem to be a lot

of I’s,

which may be one

of the things we share,

I’d like to think.

Writing about ourselves,

to ourselves,

and why not?

‘tis our closest subject,

and why write poetry,

if one is to make shit up?

Even though when you

write of dawn

I see the night,

somehow,

we may be closely mapped

on the coordinates of time

and space, I imagine.

Did they call you a

bourgeois bitch

when you shut yourself in,

hoping that the walls

of your room will not let you

shut up in prose?

Did you, at last,

feel freer with wood, paper

or ink around you,

than you did with people,

out there?

And in death,

did you, after all, realise

that your verse will remain

alive for me and others

to feed on?

I can never know, for certain,

what was inside your head,

only knowing what is inside

mine. 

Untitled

We are all lazy asses here.

Waiting with our daily cups of chai

and a stipulated number of

cigarettes,

served in makeshift routines

having more late than early in it,

to drag on to make

something of our lives. 

We are all so bored here,

waiting for something to look forward to,

after having walked the same roads

and looked at the same faces

and heard the same music,

that we raise our eyes

 in unison,

to look at the hurried woman hurl

out of the almost hugging doors

of the Metro.

We have all grown thick-skinned here,

waiting, even while

leafing away to degeneration

like an autumnal tree,

incapable of accepting

that there will be no spring,

ahead.  

Long Stares

There were only silences,

latent ones,

like those in Cohen’s songs

Of which words make

poetry of their own.

I stared into space

conscious of the silences,

somehow not complaining.

Then he wrote.

Empty spaces filled with words.

Lonely words turned

to conversations.

And I stared into them.

Words written to me, for me,

had a rhythm of their own

But that wasn’t enough.

So I stared further, longer

for it to turn into music

for he, like me,  was enslaved

by it, the weight of words

turning too heavy, without.

And like any other conversation,

this too, ends.

Back to silences.

You don’t listen to Cohen’s

music particularly, do you?

He has the words,

all I have are long stares.