Alexandra

Who are you Alexandra?

What color is your skin

When the morning sun falls on your cheek?

Do you smile with abandon or with grace

When you glide along in a gauzy skirt

Moving your frame and whipping his heart?

Does your hair smell of vanilla, dear Alexandra-

Does it cascade down your back,

Soft to his touch, lucent black?

How did you feel

When he kissed you on your nape not long after

You closed your eyes

And let yourself unwind in the night of his chest?

Did you rub your thumb against the back of his hand

When he held yours in his for the first time,

When your body heats fused

Into wordless warmth?

Who are you?

Alexandra. The shadow in my sighs.

The parting of my lips-

Alexandra.

White Endless

If zero had a color it would be white -
sitting at the heart of the whole numbers spectrum
shedding all color from thereafter.

There is a strange sadness in watching love
dissolve into thinning days
as it abandons the soul
it has known to be home.

Forgetting finds existence in silence
like the pensive gaps in a poem.

It has a weightless feel

like poem endings

like zero

like corollas of red rose delicately nudged
by the wind trailing on a pond.

Forgetting is white -
white endless.

PASSING

It took

five

fingers ruffling his hair

two

faintly moving, watery eyes

two

hearts beating against

two

chests,

one

lip resting on his right shoulder,

one

other lip idle and bare,

one

frail exhale
to voice a powerless soul, and say
-defying the ebbing minutes-
“Stay”

Hope

is not in the waiting, Eliot.
 
No, not in her lot.
Hope is in the swing
waltzing with the wind
and the jolt of a young girl's legs
hanging down loosely;
in that oscillating back and forth
between downright naivety
and comforting joy.
 
She could have wrought Love from silence
and not one graceful No
if she'd believed in you, Eliot,
and sowed Hope in the waiting.

TALK

Our eyes will snatch a moment
amid all that glitzy hussle
of the make-up arrangements,
mishaps of forgettable size
and what-if-I-got-to-pees,
hastened calls to the groom
for paying perfectionism its due;
you trying to hush your mum's
final polish-ups to your manners
by wide opening your eyes
and pressing the lips tight 
while twisting your head to see your face
in the mirror in its entirety,
(familiarly and expectedly beautiful it will be);
and that moment so fleeting and full
where our eyes talk a brief silent talk,
will wet those mascaraed lashes.
But rest assured. Yours will be water-proof
and fleeting moments don't leave a mark.
 

V3

What they did not teach
When they showed us the ways of Go
Was that sixteen years later
That same verb
In a sentence with only one
Adjoining component
Could drill beneath my left breast
Like a corkscrew
Reeling streaks of blood,
Changing costume as it reels
To find the one that fits best.

How I learned this language
Fails to convey that feel.
Reel on, Go.
The missing keys are tell-tale.
Went. Reel on,
Stop at number three:
He's Gone.

Undone

June twenty fifth, eleven pm
Rue St. Florentin
I will grin and close your eyes
the wind sweeping down my back.

On the dim-lit Avenue d'Iéna
save the few whizzing cars
no one but I will recognize
the moving shadow on your neck.

*

Fancies always larger than life
speckless and refined.
Desire, a most unfaithful whim,
is the scavenger in the weakened mind.

I'll keep waltzing with your spectre
you go back to sailing alone.
The real is not the real feat.

Open your eyes, ring the curtain down
deny me the feel of your meat.




November, 2008

Quasi-

You were sitting before me on a table
jolly and bright like always
and telling me what I meant for you
(how relieved I was)
until
something cracked,
you stopped talking and let die
the five seconds old word
in the arms of that uneasy look
you shot into my face
the wrinkles over your eye-brows
your stiff unpursed lips
and it all got bleary and churned
(your magenta lip gloss)
just as I was waking up
to a lightning-beaten morning.

Unburdening

It was the sooty half of one friday
in a room full of Daisy Buchanans
clad in their lavish guise
on a par with those pinup girls
sporting their frilly frocks
and sardonic smiles.
At the dawn of a curious feat,
in the middle of that ego jungle
I could feel the air thick with sequins
and fragrant human meat.

I saw her at the corner of the hall
dancing in her Dionysian ways.
I said:
Succumb to me, unwind your inhibitions,
take me to the dungeons of your soul.
But I cannot see the pores of your face.
Are you hiding yourself in defense?
Is it the makeup you wear
or the star-studded Venetian mask
of piety, chastity or innocence?

Will you keep telling me your candid lies,
shower me with tailored gestures
and whet my appetite for more of your flesh?
Now may I strangle your slender neck, miss?
Or shall I die with your sultry truth
revealed to me on a sooty night like this?

Les touchers oublieux

Les limailles d'or gonflent sur la mer,
et bougent avec la brise qui frôle la surface
en disant une chanson douce-amère.
Le soleil, lui aussi, remplit ton absence:
Sa chaleur frotte ma peau, tient mes bras.

La couleur du silence est cendrée.
Il tue les étincelles de l'âme, débilite mon corps.
Mais maintenant la mer m'accompagne.
Ses vagues frappent le quai, mouillent mes pieds,
et la brise, en me serrant, siffle encore.