Rhinoceros in crystal

-In the dark as eyelids flicker, there’s a scent in the air. This scent is quite familiar, but it feels like a stranger. Disconcerting, it is, this scent. It is the scent of peace, and how troubling it is to contemplate here. There is no peace in the rage of the rhinoceros, there is no peace but only pieces as it unleashes itself in the city of crystal. And this, this is precisely what jitters; what breaks the steady resistance to loss of control; nerves and hands alike lose the accumulated strength and start tapping, even as the scent of […]

June 19, 2006

You, removed

-In my head there’s a photograph, faded with its corners turned back you’ll see it’s worn from its edges I’ve been holding it for so long your smile, it’s never changing in the night it’s been my beacon lay my head on the pillow, close my eyes and there’s the smile I come home to and I dream of the color that I felt when I was with you when I wake I remember the scent in my room has been gone, since you went away sometime I wonder, how I’ve made it here how I can continue through another […]

June 18, 2006

Settling

-The cold quiet hours of emptiness, when you left and I was alone; the house cracked and settled itself, preparing to live a life without you As I sat on the living room floor I could hear the cracking in the darkness and understood, but could not let go. My arms reached out in the dark in front of me; the only thing I found were my knees and I pulled them close. You had just closed the door, but I’d been alone for so long.

June 12, 2006

What’s remembered

-“You look like you’re going to cry,” she says. “Men don’t cry,” he says. “It’s the impression I get,” she says. “Impressions are false,” he says, “We do not see the world as it truly is, but as we ourselves are.” She doesn’t say anything. They part. The phone wakes him. It’s been a long week and even though it’s early, he could not resist the call to slumber. “I’m miles away,” her voice over the phone. “I didn’t expect you to stay near,” he admits into the speaker. “It’s lonely here,” her voice crackles, bad connection. “It’s like that […]

June 4, 2006

Everything else muted

-With the blinds dancing in the night’s breeze, my heavy eyes collapse and I’m off to somewhere else. This place, there is beauty, there is memory, the memories, every moment that I’d wished I’d been able to capture, not so merely in the mind, but on film, in the grains of silver. These images, all of you; they are you, one smile to another; the moments in which I felt your breath in my lungs as I breathed. They come back to me as you twirl, the you I carry with me, through dreams and the many moments through the […]

May 31, 2006

Waiting for moonlight

-Dreams come to us, lit by remnant streaks, left by falling spheres of light, when the sun’s jagged reflection no longer dances on unsettled waves, the unawakened moon leaving incandescence mitigated, there is an iridescent glow, at the edge of our horizon this is perhaps a promise which assures the moon will rise this is when you close your eyes, and hope dreams materialize by moonlight

May 30, 2006

Absent Moon

-There are moments, sometimes days, when the moon goes dark. In between these, within the markers of time, you cannot discern the waxing and waning, the shifting of tides. Sand keeps sifting. You become lost in a permanent midnight, consumed by falling stars, leaving streaks of light across the sky. Your eyes scan, leaping from one to the next, leaving traces of dissolving smiles on your lips. They taste salted, broken like the feeling at your fingertips as they trace the jagged journey of your trajectory, in the absence of the moon. You do not move, you fall, as the […]

May 26, 2006

New Birth

-I want to sit with you as time dissipates, revel in the moment lost, after the moment lost, after the moment. Lost. I want to breathe in deeply, consuming the bit of you that stays with me and wakes me in the dusk, right before the dawn, because I do not want it to be merely a brilliant blissful dream. I want to feel butterflies in the cavity of my body, the crawling of emotion along my spine, stimulating nerve endings, catapulting breath from my lungs, a sensation akin to the breathlessness of proximity, which you bring me. I want […]

May 25, 2006

White Spirals

-She started smoking, shortly after the last time he saw her, shortly after the last time she saw him. She used to tell him, “only you, smoke like they do in the movies,” she’d say this with a laugh. She meant, one drag after another, often, lighting one cigarette with the dying ember of the other. So many years gone by and this is what she remembers. This is part of the reason she started smoking. It wasn’t a cool Joe Camel ad, or the masculine facade of the Marlboro Man. It had nothing to do with a corporate image, […]

May 24, 2006

Layers

– We sit there, her and I, in that small room with off white walls. I sit, legs bent back against the wall, on the aqua marine carpet. She’s at the edge of the bed, facing me. Her tense muscles exposed. The breeze blows in behind the heavy curtain. Her thigh muscle twitches a little. This brings me a smile. She looks at me questioningly and grabs for one of the pillows to cover her bare skin. She holds it against her midsection it covers the thin straps of her bra and most of the black lace just above her […]

May 22, 2006