Yarn

I’m a heavy ball of yarn: unravel me and you’ll find nothing special, just

The potential to make something beautiful out of me.

Storms in sunset

Leaving felt like sending my heart a drunken text: a fuck-it-all that was uncomfortable in the wake, as naked as raindrops trickling along skin when he dropped me and my broken umbrella by the doorstep.

Footprints on the mat, and words so soft they dribbled into socks, and slipped through my soles like echoes.

I heard them resonate: while ripples widen, circling their predecessors, his letters shrank and when I tried to catch each escaped breath, I could only hear my own ears beating red and black: the aftermath of storms in sunset, a beautiful kind of ache.

The ocean is soft

The ocean is soft, I’d never noticed before. The waves crash, the tides claw back, the seagulls shriek, but the ocean is soft

The engine of the last car rumbles into silence, and I’m left with my own footprints, and his next to mines.

The waves are breathing, steady then erratic, a little like the hearts that lean in then apart.

Shadows touch each other, the sun does not die but becomes the moon – round and beaming, a light that is shy, alight

Your fingers cradle, it’s forgotten how to loosen when your fingers lace each other, knit into each other

knuckle on knuckle, the ocean’s soft

the only sounds come from your own chest, and his.

The ocean is breathing

the ocean is breathing

the ocean is breaking.

The dream to sea

i think of embers burnt in ocean’s flame

till it blazed the spent wood back to life;

and the songs, drowned by centuries, crawling

its body back to surface, brought its fingers through

the ships of shore till they broke their

strings of safety and dissipated, as the wind does.

 

i think of hull colliding hull till they grew to

love the other’s broken heart, till the winds that

carried souls breathed a new beginning and

the night that sunk ahead whistled day apart

and dark alight. there’s a melody to the way the

sea of dreams wavers, inhales, lets its fantasies undone

 

and there’s a way he folds, unfolds the waves till

every lapse’s examined, embraced, caught

in the clasp between his arm; till he loves

unrestrained. there’s a slowness in the way

he holds my eyes to silence and my mind to peace, like

there’s nothing to be said but this.

Sometimes

Sorry I haven’t been posting much! But here’s a new poem – my form of procrastination 🙂

***

Sometimes you carry this confidence in your eyes

and you don’t even notice the way

it unravels shadows and opens up the clouds.

 

Sometimes you let slip your clumsy smile

and you don’t even notice the way

it drowns their lungs and brings their hearts to shore.

 

Yet often

you think it’s overconfidence to wear yourself as glasses,

to walk around in skin that feels like yours

because this skin is thin and breakable

 

Often,

you hide yourself in stutters and apologies

that spring from your tongue so often

one mistook it for your breath.

 

Often,

you tell others you know nothing,

and believe it.

 

But never do you whisper

you’re not worth it.

Change in the Wind

you say that nothing has changed, then why do I feel as though everything has? you no longer laugh at the jokes that once made you laugh, you no longer answer questions that you would have once carefully contemplated, you no longer spend the time telling detailed recounts the way you once would have. it is like we are two pieces of driftwood moving towards different horizons, no matter how hard we try to hold onto the other. why does something once so infinite now feel like it has an end?

I like to read stories, and in stories, the ending always signals to a maturity in the characters, a change that stems from the lessons they have learnt throughout the novel. they have a new sense of determination, a new sense of purpose, a new sense of what it means to be themselves. yet I feel more lost than ever. I can’t seem to find my way back. I can’t seem to find my way home. when home didn’t feel like home, you were my home. I never thought the day would come when I wondered: if you didn’t feel like home, then who would?

I don’t have any answers, only questions. and I’m afraid to ask any of the questions because I’m afraid I already know the answers to them. but maybe it is good to be afraid, maybe fear means that I still have something to lose. the battle isn’t lost yet. maybe we are only at the climax of the plot, and maybe by the resolution I will finally be able to admit that winning is not returning to the beginning where everything was familiar, it is arriving at a new beginning where nothing is recognisable yet somehow you still find the courage to move on anyway.

Musing #2

dig your emptiness in
and let the soils of temporary happiness fall

Musing #1

The largest kind of person is most paper thin. You worship their shadows only to realise they are the shadow themselves.

Musings of a night

They say that you are the night, cold and born to die of light, but you’re smiling and there’s a swallow in your cheek and a shadow on your chin, and I realise that they don’t understand. They will never understand how you don’t have to be the warmth to warm me, how you don’t have to be the sun to show me an entire world, how you the starless sky are more beautiful than the taste of fireworks.