The alternate life of a dead woman

I dreamt
but it wasn’t my dream.
There was a spirit knocking on the window of my soul
and as I awoke the knocking continued
and when I closed my eyes again,
I unintentionally opened the window to my soul
The spirit told me I mustn’t feel disappointed.
There never was anything to conquer
and the stranger softly breathing next to me
had all the answers all along.
So I’ll just keep my eyes closed
and there’d be no judgment
we’ll just be,
with spirits floating by the window,
and we both know how that’ll end…
Oh did I offend you?
Does it make you sad? Did I make you mad?
Frankly, I don’t respect you.
I had just hoped, for your sake, that you have a more,
genuine,
reason to run.
No. It’s just that you’re a coward.

I guess we all want to be read or heard;
I understand.

But crossing the line between maturity and death,
like the apple that falls when it ripens,
is no temptation.

I don’t respect those who run like I don’t respect those who self-destruct,
sometimes I don’t respect myself.

I used to want to glue you back together but I never understood you.
and honestly
It no longer appeals to me to care for some lost kid who doesn’t wanna be found.
There’s only so much you can do
walking on eggshells all day long,

tip-toeing the fine line between insanity and passion
mapping the borders of infancy to demise
and never really maturing.

The parts I miss, were the elusive pieces of your mind
you somehow managed to erase.

I’m tired. I'm sorry I’m all used up.

It does feel good to get up and leave while no one cares,
but sometimes in my cruel moments of self-destruction
it feels even better to stick around
just long enough to make you care;
Just enough to make you twinge when I walk away…
as if unaffected I smile and cross,
from passion to insanity once again:

and I become that little girl who still doesn’t know she can stop believing;
who’s in love with a little boy who believes in miracles still
and feels like a hero with the red tablecloth over his shoulders.

The truth is,
there’s no one reality and what I perceive and project is the reality you’ll never feel
and I will never know what it means to be a whole.

It’s just that life,
has a big, wide gap in it,
and I seem to not know how to bridge it, or fill it.

The truth is,

I’ve outgrown my pot
and my mother,
with her green thumb
needs to tweak the twigs,
dig me a big hole six feet deep and let me grow elsewhere.

You’ve become too small for me…

and when I will grow,
I may even be able to unwind that body of torment
secreted under the dark bridge of a memory,
to not have to forgive the life she was never meant to have.

My soul knocks on the door of your dream…
Spirit stuck in the pipes of purgatory,
and there’s no crossing over the crossed fingers wishing the dream away.

I don’t want it.
the dream of an alternate reality was never mine to claim.
you take it!
I was raised to believe in a truth that dies away in comparison to the convoluted lie that you are.
I chose not to respect your deities
and I became a tortured soul
floating behind the window you forgot to close tonight.
April 30, 2012

A Letter to the Unborn

There will come a time
when the captivating lady of the moon
will hold you in her voluptuous bosom
and make you ache for every connection you missed
and there will be many
cause you have never been truly touched after all...

But you must learn,
sometime before you are a century old,
that you should submerge yourself in an awareness of a you
that exists on your fingertips,
is stuck under your finger nails,
flows on that thin river on the palm of your hand;
the life line that ends too abruptly.
Your reality resides in the humming of the silence in your skull...
The little droning buzzing sound that your brain can’t interpret;
that exasperating quiver you feel when you feel something
for someone
who doesn't feel the same for you...

But you won’t know you,
and until you do,
nobody will...

That fine line where your reality meets your senses,
that’s where you need to settle.

But until you do,
you should wake up inside every morning
and dive into the deep end of your subconscious with a big rock tied to your feet...
and it will be terrifying cause I never taught you how to swim.
But don’t wait;
don’t wait for that radiant divine hand to grab you
don’t wait for the whirlpool to calm;
your life won’t be a sheltered pool with a lifeguard nearby to save you,
it won’t be a quiet little pond,
in which you’re the big fish...

It would be wild waters
where you may end up in the bottom of the food chain;
where there will be heaviness in your chest pulling you down;
where you will raise a dais with an naive conviction
and stand to claim your existence
and in a flash the ground beneath you will vanish
and the rings of dark Delphian water will grow tighter around your body
until they close over your head...

And unless by then,
you know how to contain your light
and breath within yourself,
you will not survive.

I pray to the universe to give you the choice...
to give you the chance,
to choose to jump.
But if not, if you’re not that fortunate
you will fall or you may even be pushed...
and you will find yourself struggling
and sinking
and you may lose the will to try
but please don’t give up...
not yet...
And if someone offered a hand,
Take it!

I got so used to fighting this alone
that if I found someone fighting on my side
I would end up fighting against them.

But trust me,
You will learn to want to live if you persevere.
You’ll stay alive even with no air...
Yes, your lungs will shut down,
and your heart will shut down
and your five senses will freeze
and you will be left in the deep dark end of this void
with nothing but an infinitesimal intuition,
a nauseating will to survive
and you will...

though you’ll hate every minute of it,
something in you grasps that last dying flicker.
It’s only then that you will realize you never had to be taught...
you’ll reach deep down inside and you’ll find you...

you may have abandoned fervour, familiarity and faith
but right then a flower will blossom
and your light will shoot a beam of light up all the way to the heavens that forsook you...
and your mutiny will give voice to all the mutes
that are too mortified to mean what they dream.
Baby you will rise above.
You will rise above...

Jan 20, 2012

Untying the Knot

Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot, 
seek the path that demands your whole being. 
Leave that which is not, but appears to be, 
seek that which is, but is not apparent. ~Rumi




I am too much of an accident to make any sense at all...
Every special, accidental moment has a scent,
and every time I smell a familiar one,
I know exactly what will happen next...

There are cuts on his face...
“why did you shave? You look so young!”
“I am young!”

But can I please transform you?
Can I make you fit in this tiny frame
that I’ve carved out of broken logic and mistaken suppositions?
Just stand still and look like you belong
but don’t smile
cause I can't make you happy...

“Hold on to me! No! Let me go...”

You never listen and I like that!


Exodus …
This life was never mine...
I cheated on you…
I made love to the thought of losing you.

I became that man you knew
who slept with the women of his imagination.
Vivid dreams,
that you can touch and smell...

it smells like a wedding,
and I throw up on the bathroom floor,
where I made love to the Russian girl,
who smelled like bitter almonds...
lethally lonely...
She made no sense either...

I wake up from her and walk down the aisle…

I walk past perfect little pink princesses with perfect little lives,
past call girls with big hearts,
past the frustrated intellectual who was in love with the woman I never grew up to be…
and I raise my eyes to the alter
where you feed me lies before you make a sacrifice of my serenity.

There’s nothing sacred about your thirst to serve a false prophet.
You are too young for my soul…
so I scratch your face with the nails of my denial,
to make you look like you know what I’ve made you do!

The ominous scent of a moment of trust fills the air
and I,
accidentally say “I do”…

Jan, 05, 2012

Stripped

I was damaged...
She bought me muffins.
I was conditioned...

...till all the muffins tasted like dust.
She took my little hands and helped me up the broken stairs.
I sat there next to her,
beside a broken headstone.
The poem in which he predicted the day of his own death,
had barely survived...
like his memory...
almost completely scratched away by sharp nails of time...
I looked at her as she whispered with heart wrenching disappointment in her eyes
With parents who left her too soon...

A knock on the grave to wake the dead up.
She still believed that the nothing under piles of dirt can hear her pain.

I played and pranced and giggled around the godforsaken graveyard.

I was damaged...
He bought me candies.
I was conditioned...

...till all the candies tasted bitter.

No I can't feel safe,
but do you really blame me?
I'm the little girl who was never really held.
I grew up learning to hold and not be held.
But I,
grew up.

What helped me survive has become my poison.
There’s nothing glorious about surviving.
Reminds me of them,
resuscitating a man who was dead for years.
Broken ribs
and punctured lung
and the magic of life slipping through godly hands of doctors.

It's funny how they try to bring that pulse back
in spite of how better off you are not having it.

I never asked for a crippled emotion and a DOA soul.

Is it worth it?
Don't you ever wonder what, who, how you could be?
If you didn't have to spend all these days trying to see,
to feel,
to be,
this apparition that haunts your dreams?
I still keep seeing you sickly resting your fragile bones on an uncomfortable death bed.

It’s always there
as if it’s tattooed on my soul.

Like I remember the smell of your cologne on the last shirt you wore,
as I pressed it against my chest trying to absorb it into my heart...

and you still thought you'd survive.

I admire that lying, cheating, unbelievably brave heart of yours.

I really, REALLY do.

I learned that you should just pick a goddamn side
and stay on it.

But you didn’t.

You kept flying back and forth
Until I found out how it feels like
to be the ‘constant’,
only in the family pictures.

No one mourned me because no one noticed I was gone...

I woke up with a heavy heart today,
resuscitated,
again.

Looked out the window and was reminded of you;
bare trees show off their scrawny shoulders and make way with their skeletal fingers
for a pale blue sky.
Holding it high,
higher than I can reach for.

The pallid moon,
smells like winter.

It loosens up my senses,
as I inhale my submissive, meek soul back into my body

Seriously, I’m okay!
How dare you question my sincerity?
My muscles twitch,
and I open myself and a huge chunk of confusion swishes in.

The window fades into my skin,
and you flicker like a candle.
I bask in the wavering glow of your heart one last time,
 and I fall into two halves.

A half where it’s morning
but the little soldiers in my veins can’t get out of bed!

And the other half of me falls into the shadows.

I feel like how God must be feeling;
Existing unnoticeably.

Like an evaporated presence,
in a summer noon,
running in an undercurrent in the city’s veins.

And life goes on,
with or without me...
or Him.

There’s no real amends you can make for ignoring me…us.
Your lack of faith in me must be anguishing enough for you.

I lack sophistication.
The clumsiness my body drags with it...
so heavy.

Weightless,
dark and cool.

I want to be much like a shadow.
How much more graceful our shadows are...

I will just sit under my tall, refined shadow
behind a dream
and try to trace
the last erased marks of the father that was written in my book of life.

Written with a sharp pencil,
so forcefully
that the marks have made permanent prints on the feeble pages of my fable.

Look!
There’s a dim yellow light,
fire in the fire place
and a man wearing a gray sweater vest…
reading a book.

It smells like winter in the house…
familiar...
and my shadow breaks.

It all seems so unbelievably pointless.

I was damaged.

I wish I had waited for the door to be opened instead of breaking through it.

Now there is no way for me to keep the ghosts away.

Dec 16, 2011

Don't sleep!

For Bruce -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are boundaries,
there are red lines,
there are places you shouldn’t be,
there are things that shouldn’t exist,
there are feelings that shouldn’t be defined,
and there are words better left unsaid...

The borders,
throw us off balance,
and we get lost in a simple inexplicable non-fact.

Then I’ll let my hair down
and the moon shine will flow down the waterfall of all the unmanageable truth I’ve weaved among my curls...
Sitting under the willow of your voice
and letting my thoughts sway
in the breeze of a recognition,

could I be so bold to ask you to catch a dream or two with me?
Can I ask us to please step on that rocking stage and not perform,
instead just dive into the oblivion together?

Let’s not write poetry
let’s not be phony
let’s not pretend that we can
that we know
that we must
that we are
anything...

I run right up to the edge
and I drag people with me,
every time.

There’s that beautiful something
that grabs you and pulls you in;
The edge is so eternally
and compellingly alluring
and I feel too weak to look away.

I don’t ever jump but people,
let go.
They fall
for the thrill
and I stare impassively at the possibilities
at the potentials
and concede

there is a moment
when a non-love
was turned into a non-heartbreak...

Let’s not say yes!
Let’s not go where everyone else has.
Let’s not believe that it matters.
Let’s just be
distant
unreal
and indefinable.

It’s okay!
Nine years from now
there’ll be enough reasons to forget
and we will be forgiven.

Let me tell you what I think,
or maybe not...
let me just listen
and be...

Because we
are a
big
huge
gigantic
enormous
gargantuan
NOTHING
and what a relief it is.

Then I’ll let go
and you mean something other than what I mean
and I won’t be as mean to you.

But I’m too easily distracted...
the sun ray hits the green apples on the table,
and the borders fade
I reach for it ... you ...
and I lose my border.

Nov 02, 2011

Apocalypse

Bodies fall from the sky;
they fade like fireworks
and a thin thread of light remains

I shudder…
It is not easy being human anymore,
we shift...

Hold it,
keep it,
trap it in your hands,
and don’t let it slip away,
or it will wind up like that possum
flat on the road
with its guts hanging out…
Or it will grow out,
like that tree,
ripping the walls of your heart
with it's strong, crooked branches
and will drill holes
in your walls of solitude
to hang the pictures of a happy day
when you were swallowed in someone’s perception of you:

a little baby,
lost in a big shopping mall looking for familiar feet…
teary eyes,
racing heart.

It blocks your brain’s view and convinces you,
that Agamemnon will rise
and devour all your enigmatic issues
and you will age backwards
until you are 6 again
and you don’t like dirt anymore,
then the candies will taste bitter again
because of the taste of his fingers
and it will fall upon you
like a plague
that his addiction to bitterness
is contagious.

Feisty,
vulnerable,
easily offended...

but I feel like a damn turtle!
only with a hard shell all the way through
and I know that I will not win the race.

I bleed it out right in front of you
with no shame
and the moon rises
and we turn into ourselves
howling…

You hold me
trap me,
but I slip away…
I ascend
and make my mother proud!

Be happy mama
your little girl has turned into one of the wolves
who ripped your heart out
and left you bleeding.

I ran with the pack long enough...
and now I will rise to your heavens
and rip all the phony angels limb from limp…

Fireworks!

Bodies fall from the sky,
and I celebrate becoming
the answer to my mother’s prayers.

August 13, 2011

Hera

Your presence
Brushed upon my skin
like a wave of heat,
over the immediacy of my need
to be someone
any one
but me...
and like the story you read to me
when the umbilical noose was being cut
from around my neck,

the stone of wisdom fell from the sky
to hit me over the head
but it dug a hole
and fell out from under my chin...

Now what do I give out
that makes people think I am who I am?
Is it a scent?
A vibe?
What is the language of my body
that seems so foreign to me
and yet everyone else around me seems to speak it?

I will not rise to that bait..
did you not say in your sacred book of contradictions
that you need not be loved?
am i not but a shard of you?

Last night as I took my skin off
and slipped under the warm cover of your existence
a believer
more naked than when i was born
I knew what to expect...

I have told you a million times
We are the same you and I:
Our tongues bolted to the same bitter lie,
with our feet chained to the same family tree...
born from a barren woman
We know how to conceal our bewilderment...
we are secret screw ups!

You see,
I know that my love for your hands
is incestuous and taboo
but I can’t help but be stunned
dazed,
every time you handle me:
like that crystal ball rolling on the palm of your hand
weightless
like “liquid passion”
over the pebbles of a faded memory
and I’m always the sole audience of the magic pull of your eyes
drawn to your hands
drowned in your eyes...

we both have a passion for broken things...
can’t you fix me this one time?
can a deus ex machina take my skin off the hanger
and make it a better fit
for all the “me”
that I have flowing,
growing
seeping through the cracks and holes
your wisdom left in my skull?

at least teach me the language it speaks...
you said we need not be loved
and I rose to the bait...

August 3, 2011