Neon

The colour of the generation, it
Pronounces loudly all it touches,
And wailing, it tightly clutches
To the electric plastic of bright bar signs,
In jarring, jaded white-hot lines,
Glaring into the deep-set eyes of
Travellers in the lonely night
And illumines with artificial light
The empty pavements of a one-way street.

Necessity

"This above all - ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?" 

- Rainer Maria Rilke

so i stretch inwards into myself, where,

   buried beyond understanding,

lies my heart 

    - but it gives no reply. i wonder:

has it grown mute from neglect
or fallen asleep in the broad daylight,

into a peaceful rest? should i wait idly
by for future pain to awaken it rudely, to
stir up passion that rises up like a swelling
wave at the high tide of the evening, against
the background of a dying sun, a protest against
the oncoming darkness? 

is now the time for searching, 

to store up, to be still -   

the pale period of hibernation before 

the creature emerges out of its cave 

into a bright new world that blinds 

and dazzles it with complexities

painfully wound around every experience,

inspiring the intensity that presses the pen
into paper and impresses meaning onto material -
before life?

but no, there is always a need -

for who knows when wonder will dry up and
leave the soil of the heart barren with indifference
and the gentle light by which infant eyes 

see the world is torn away by time, in its great envy
of youth, and they begin to adapt to the darkness?

In The City

Rain falls soft in the graphite night it
runs down the world and all
seems to melt:
traffic lights into pavement;
people into umbrellas;
cars into headlights;
even the body I call my
own assimilates into
the view is no
longer mine to have and
hold, my surroundings
slip right through me (with
rain as a lubricant) into
a scene.

Wanderers

We are wanderers in a world where
wonder lies waste, splayed thin across
digital screens and cheap paper like a
slight dab of butter across stale bread, where
all expression has been etched into the few
lines of the face with little left to form
a gasp, or even a sigh, but we wander in
search of an apt reply to the echo-cry encoded
within the vacant streaks of a dying light
silent remains of a star in space long exploded.

Words dissipate

words dissipate, wait

to watch them vapourize

before your eyes and know

there must be somewhere

that they go, where meaning

finds a place to thrive

where people speak 

to stay alive

Caught in the rain

As I walk down the pavement rain seeps into my skin I wonder if it will dissolve me if I let it - if only I could take it and dissolve it into myself - because in the cold biting wind I feel the edges of the world - suddenly sharp - at my fingertips my face (the parts of me I feel the most with) and I find myself absorbing soaking in the moment as much as I can before everything is dry again before reality before I find myself standing alone by the side of the road heavy with the weight of compounded tears - the burden the clouds release onto the earth.

A confession

i used to believe in a redemptive quality about honesty
as if the truth itself was true enough to be considered pure
the uncovering of ourselves akin to surrender -

i thought i could save myself if i tried -

so i extended my arms upwards, tensing
the joints in my fingers to achieve the right posture -
but i didn't know where to face my palms,

clueless as the murderer who surrenders
the red stains on his hands
to coarse water from a rusty tap

and trails down the sides of the sink,
down pipes and drains, and finally,
into the sea, where sin is diluted

to a subtler shade by the collective
sympathy of the others who decided to baptise
themselves in the same salt water

(i saw some of them go down, once,
but when they emerged, they were wet
and nothing more).

face value

Criticise my imperfect state of mind, and unwind
the woven world of ideals bound, so tightly, around
my naked naivete; view reality through the painfully
transparent lens of skepticism, discount it with realism -

but don't taint my words -

don't smooth over their rough edges with slippery varnish
so they slide in and out of the mind as seamlessly as a
mantra, or the hauntingly beautiful anthem of the new age;
they are as whole as I am incomplete, closer to me
than the ground beneath my feet.

Close Your Eyes

Close your eyes and wonder:
Where am I in this darkness?

When nothing else exists, do I?

The people with their eyelids taped open
have snake-eyes that tunnel into the ground
and no relief from the blinding walls of their
neon-fluorescent enclosure and suffer sleep 
without anesthetic dreams to dull the silence. 

They have no rest, they do not blink -
there is a singular sadness in their look
that I once mistook for longing.
But for what would they search,
if nothing escaped them, if
everything they knew of
was right before
their very
eyes?

When I want to write

It sometimes starts with a single word, like 'vacuum', or two, like 'give me' -
not so much a key to a locked door, through which my heart gives and takes,
as a single stone displaced from the wall of a dam by a sudden jolt of current.
But the water does not leak like it would from a tap carelessly left open,
but rushes out impatiently, with the rage that is gathered from invisibility.

Fragile

The feeling of fragility

is the most useless feeling; 

it drifts and wanders like a 

wayward echo in a hollow heart 

beating against the world.

It collapses like a candle,

folding into itself in the same way
a starving man would eat himself alive
and nothing would be accomplished.

Look Around

Absorb the world with your eyes -

the vast display of life and nonlife,
the grand exhibition.

Look around, and see the history

overflowing

from the cold contained marbled museums

into the streets; see it in the

whitewashed walls of the limestone buildings

and the layers of time painted over;

see it in nature -

in the wrinkles in the faces of the trees,

in the wind's ethereal energies,

in the rain that has been since the birth

of the sky, the waters and the earth; see it
in people, moving statues carved into time itself;
designed, then sculpted inside out from soul to skin
every bone ligament vessel positioned so their
hearts could beat as continuously as the world
ebbed and flowed around them;
diffusing through their eyes
like mist through a sieve.

On a cold night

The night is cold in a nearly ethereal way.
My eyes are lost in the depths of the indigo-grey night sky
and my body unravels around me.
The feeling is inexplicable - it is an ephemeral desire
that draws me towards the stars - celestial orbs that radiate and allure -
as fleeting as a passing breeze that barely touches the earth.
It feels as if the vastness within us descended from the sky,
from the light-years between this galaxy and the next -
maybe we belong with the stars
and we are merely adopted into this world
where a consuming darkness
dimmed our light.

To tell you the truth

To tell you the truth, I'm afraid of honesty -

of it's sharp, defined edges that cut like ice,

the way it outlines a person's face instead of his shadow;

how absolute it is, whole, intolerant of halves,

it's ability to probe into the seabed depths of a soul,

but mostly because of this:

how close it hits home, because home is where the heart is

and where we build our strongest defense.

What is time

What is time well spent

if barely a dent in the

surface of history, spread

thinly across the face of the earth?

The seconds are fleeting, and

minutes are eating into hours.

I sit still because the world is

moving and my heart moves

within my chest.

The Need To Be

Can I speak

(without technique)

without critique

of the words I use

(that I never had

the freedom to choose)?

The silences sting

more than anything

(as piercing as

a pointed stare or

the point of a finger,

and as deep as a wound

could be and still

remain unseen)

because they ring

(as echoes do)

of an emptiness,

a lack of -

a nothingness

(like the deceiving

vastness of a vacuum

stretching as wide as open arms)

in which it is impossible

to be.

As of now

We were never children,
but there were children who were once us,
with a wonder of the world
that outgrew us before we realised
it was gone.

But we grew anyway and
suddenly everything around us moved -
except they no longer moved around us,
the planets orbited the sun
and we felt smaller than we used to.

Now we are what we've never been before -
the people standing on the mountaintop
overlooking time,
trying to find their place in history, their
piece of puzzle in the 'big picture',
while everything is still growing,
still in fluid and motion,
before everything is still,
and still less than they
had hoped for.