April 25: When you bathe

When you bathe,
remember
to wash it all off:
the hurt that gathers
under grimy fingernails,
the anger you folded
and tucked behind your ear,
the unsmiled smiles
hid beneath your fingers.

Let the water
burn your skin
raw, peel back
every lie you told
today, and every
sigh you didn't let
escape your mouth.

Don't be so gentle
with yourself. You
have survived worse.
Scrub every face
you put on
today. Every simile
you wrote and placed
into your hollows,
every word you used
to call yourself.

Remember
to tie the scent
of water
around your wrists,
and name it
home.

April 24: Sunset and Thoughts

Evening settles down
in the warm lawns and
corridors, darkness has
not invaded just yet;
bruises of light
still blossom
in the steadily purpling sky.

What if the only kind
of magic that exists
is what you choose
to imbue the world with?

I shudder, but smile,
making space for a sliver
of silver moon, placed gently
in the clear bowlful of sky;
watch remnants of golden sun
tremble into darkness.

April 23: Heroes

The thing with heroes
is that they're always
lying,
and seeing through the
screens is the worst part
of growing up. By far.

The thing with heroes
is that they only know
as much as you.
They're just as strong,
as brave, as kind, as
true. And when you
have bad days, they
can too. The thing
with heroes,
is that one always
expects too much,
hopes for magic
in the form of a
mother or a poet,
an elder brother,
a brilliant teacher.

Magic comes,
but it's everywhere,
and it's always fragile,
that's the thing. Magic
isn't something concrete
or solid - it's more firewater
or thundersmell, more like a
sliver of silver moon in a bowl
of sky. Don't you wish heaven
was a place in the map you could
plan to go? It isn't though, paradise
is as alive as you or I, but you can
never sit in paradise. You find it in
the middle of motion, in a moving
river, in a journey that whips back
your hair and stings your eyes. You
can't stop. You must keep moving.

There's no perfection
in a slice of time.

April 22: Circles, ad infinitum

Life as an endless
abandonment:
learning to love
only to lose,
settling down knee-deep
and then dusting yourself off;
learning and unlearning
like the endless motions
of the oceans - the tides
falling and breaking
falling and breaking.

Life as the infinite
regress:
moving in this
brightly lit circle,
round and round
a single-corridor maze,
the blossoming of flowers
leading only to their death.

Ideas that you hold
close your chest as if
they were precious - you can
only ever truly love knowledge

if you're willing to let
everything you learn

burn

again, and again. There will be no water
in this flickering flame. There will be no
sand. Only the anger that swells in you
like a flooding, only your eyes closed tight
that realize what it means to live in time.
Marking circles on the ground with your feet,
again, and again.

April 21: Tuesday Morning Blues

1:13 pm
(late morning or early afternoon?)
dusty sheets in disarray, beginnings
of sunshine lacing the room with light,
Radiohead and Nietzsche starting the day;

amidst the bloom of debris and disaster,
a pair of lonesome legs
locating memory and desire
in an unrelenting maze

1:21 pm
(quiet pangs of hunger)
prayer flags hanging still
in various colours of vanishing,
the tremble and burn of losing a city;

in the wreckage of fear and forgetting,
the bags under my eyes, heavy as light,
searching for the gentle ache of sleep
in this particular
pulsating
circular
dream

April 20: An Ode to Writing

Stringing together words

with thread of silk; there comes

a time when dreams stain reality

and the metaphors build cities

in your belly, unwilling to leave;

you, as a series of similes, as a

continent of darkness in oceans of

light, listening to deep underwater,
watching the shatterglass surface
as if from afar, the gentle bloom

of words rising like a trance
in music and memory;

embracing the depth and form of
water, you let yourself rejoice:
here, where light burns the murmur
of your skin, you declare yourself
a new-born god surrounded only by
the countries of void, the stories of
loss, the coastlines jagged by regret.

You need nothing else. You are
immense
in your kingdom of words.

Emerging from this tidal paradise
is madness, is impossible sanity.
Your heartbeat thunders the song
of the waves. The clocks float past,
impatient, leaving pulsating numbers
in their wake. Your shadow calls your
forgotten name. Searching in the dark
mysteries of your mirror, all you want
is wholesome countries of yourself, the
simple comfort of identity holding you
to your singular self. Your shadow calls
your forgotten name. Your shadow calls.

All you own
is fragments of faces,
the wreckage of memory and desire
hidden under the darkness of alphabets;

the words pile higher,
smelling of lies and water,
debris and disaster;

language blossoms in your eyelids

your fingers 

your curled toes

in your chest rising and falling

with the beat of music: hiraeth 

April 19: Song of Smoke

burning eyes and guilt

(even though everything is okay,

everything is okay tonight)

thankfully nobody can read

your fingers laced with smoke

today the sun was the lightest hue

a singular clear orb set against

a sky made only of clouds 

grey and smoke

everything is okay.

it isn't hopeless anymore.

fragments of a moving life

follow you like stains

sometimes when you hold

the cigarette between two

hesitant 

fingers, you forget that it's

you;

your eyes follow me in the dark

my days are sandcastles 

next to your seas.

April 18: It Matters

I know it's hard that
everything matters.
I know it burns you
that I nitpick, catch on to
'inconsequential' things that
you say. It burns when I bang
my fists on the table and tell you
it matters what you eat what you
drink what you smoke what you
wear, what you put on your face
what you put on your hair. It matters
what you write what you cite what you
choose not to fight. Goddamn it, it does.

It's hard for me too.
It's hard because none of us
will ever be able to make the
kind of difference we want,
never be able to truly find
the right blend of meaning
and reason, never be lauded
for all the things we secretly
want to be lauded for. It's hard,

because the world is the strangest
carnival I ever did see, by far the
most neurotic psychosocial fantasy,
the worst kind of nightmare that you
don't know how to flee. It matters,
despite comfort. It matters, despite
the fact that yolo. Because this world,
this beautiful magical fucking scary
world, it does not live one life.
This world lives a hundred stories
every second, a hundred heartbreaks
and a hundred secret tears of joy, this
world is larger than you will ever be,
and yet it's only, only as large as you
choose to let yourself see. Only as kind
as you will let yourself be. Only as wise.

April 17: Ode to Angie

"Dull Gret: We come to hell through a big mouth... I'd had enough, I was mad, I hate the bastards. I come out of my front door that morning and shout till my neighbors come out and I said, "Come on, we're going where the evil come from and pay the bastards out"... You just keep running and fighting, you didn't stop for nothing. Oh, we give them devils such a beating. " - Caryl Churchill, Top Girls

O Angie,

you big baby.
you sick child.
you image of
everything that went wrong here,
in this particular hell, this apartment,
this schizophrenic society where
ambition
forgets to be kind
and change forgets
what it needs
to change.
You are woman and
forgotten, woman and
fallen, woman and
fighter.

You scare me.
You are the big mouth of hell
and you are the devil's desire,
you scare me because you are
larger than life, and yet
so
small.

The spectres that haunt you
give me hope. You are the
big mouth of hell
through which the women
can walk through and fight,
finally too angry to stand
another night, you are the
devil's desire
that will carry us through
past tonight, do you know?
You are the world
in an angry child.
You have so much
to fight. Not just
the men and not
just the devils.
Women too,
mothers,
angels.
every
day.

Demand
more for
yourself.
Demand
more for
us all.

April 16: Loving, & how

I'm afraid

that too many people equate

growing up 

with forgetting 

how to love

innocently

shamelessly

bigly. Wisdom is not always

kindness, & well, intelligence

definitely not always wisdom.

I'm afraid

that I too am not able

to love like the ocean.

Not perfectly, contained

in all the right boxes, but

big. wide. liquidly. 

I want my loving to be

the colour of the sky, &

as shamelessly willing 

to cover the world. I can

forgive myself for not loving

the right people the right way

the right amount the right time:

but I will never forgive myself

for not loving strangers enough

not giving enough birthday cards

flowers poems hugs notes & smiles.

I'd hate to be afraid

because people around me are afraid.

I'd like to love fearlessly even if I am

loved fearfully. I'd like to love bigly,

always. innocently & shamelessly,

no matter how old or cynical I get.