Subtlety

The sunset spilling all over your window was a peach turning orange, with plums and grapes bursting into clouds.

I thought to myself, the landscape had more imagination than I.

Wet on wet I was told of this technique. Watercolors and brushes steeped into too much water ran swiftly across the page, leaving colors to chase one another. Hues falling into different hues, gaining the subtlety of clouds.

Alas, I could never paint clouds.

Points of the Sun

I am scrambling to hold you.
For suddenly, my heart became a flat landscape where lights hold nothing but an empty sky.

I am drowning in the nakedness of this space.
I am acutely more aware that it is only I that decorate this place,
and my breathing the only sound carried off to a short infinity.

How do I move?
How can this stillness bind me immobile?
What sand and stone do I fear will be disturbed once I conquer an inch?

This is the prayer my mind speaks,
let nothing change for I may go this way again,
finding the direction towards where my heart orignally met you.

thread of fear

under what rock
beneath what burrow
do we lie and deny ourselves of being found?

even as open bodies
we are sheltered by the shadows of the sun
soft-bodied crabs treading
under birds of prey

and as we are lifted by our toes
our imaginations retreat to the same doubts
where it emerged
of being lost once more

Nimble

How can your love define me?
Your fingers trace atlases on my body
and suddenly, I rediscover what was once lost.
The lines your fingers draw
contour new frontiers, clear wider spaces, and carve open heaving floodgates
where rivers emerge and babbling brooks find and follow their own trails.

I am breathing through every open pore.

The sun rises in all directions.
And the mist falling on this landscape
drives the green grass to break through
the fiber of my earth
and stand glistening under the light
bending with the wind,
thriving on every terrain
of desert and ice.

A Letter for No One

I don’t want to like you too much, because my mind plays tricks on me. Thinking of you makes me feel less lonesome and lonely at the same time. It’s a double-edged dagger biting into my hand and heart.

So yes, it is odd.

It is odd – the way I wear you in my pocket, on my sleeves, around my neck – because thinking of you makes it okay to ride longer bus rides and stand waiting for trains on platforms on afternoons when the crowd is thick and people mill around with their own worries, while my head is filled with traffics of you. It aches to think how fine your arm hair may look like, how you may smell on mornings, and how my head may rest on your shoulder and feel as though it belongs there, on a solid, concave spot without exactly knowing.

And then it breaks just a little, the lord of the dance stepping on my scattered desires of you, laughing as crackling coals on fires do, with sharp, snapping notes of twigs consumed in flames.

For there are no road signs, and I stand as a delayed passenger with a map but without directions. Your absence and silence speaks a million miles between you and me ever meeting round that bend, while I still hold unto my luggage, not knowing when to drop it.

Tepid

What we fear is not the distance, nor the stretch of hours between the night and the daybreak.
It is the measure of warmth that is etched on our skins when the graze of the hand becomes tepid to the touch and the kiss deadens into a cooler climate. It is when the body loses friction and the edges of our fingers and minds dull. Something else slips in between, muffling words and mellowing embraces, without so much as flicking a spark between you and me and the letters we string up to move us.

In Retreat, I Find You

I think of you when the room fades into the background and the present noises reduce to mumbles – you appear more clearly; the outline of your mouth wrinkling into a smile floats as feathers do on water, and lingers there, on the surface, with its small ripples moving outwards, echoing from my spine, to my knees, and heels; and in those idle seconds, I find you, I capture you, in a most detailed memory my heart can carve out of your face.

Throes

how does taste grow stale in one's mouth?
how does a scent lose its power?
how does one forcefully forget?
for i have memories of you that keep walking all over me
even when i am asleep
even when i am lost in a dizzying disarray
and the stars are no longer in their constellations
i remember you and you on my lips

and i find you, among all things, in streets we walked
but could not remember,
i see you, in strangers who have your eyes, your laugh, or hair,
i feel you in things we saw and imagined,
and i remember you, just by losing sleep, in the dark
that once held us there