yes, you are right, i should like to hide my head in the sand and pretend all that darkness is nothing but light shining through a filter tinted the colour of night. i should pretend last night never happened, i should pretend i am content here by your side in the leafy undergrowth of life where all i see are roots uprooted, dying in the sun. and would you blame me?
i could not sleep last night, thinking of the shining lights enveloping you, pillow over my head to drown out hurt. i wondered if i ought to watch a film, but that would be defeat. no, i would lay here and count your wrongs, my wrongs, the cracks in the ceiling of our hearts, thoughts, lives.
soon, soon, the artery would rupture and drown out the pain.
soon, soon.
i knew i couldn’t cut myself. what with? a knife? i could almost hear you saying don’t be silly in that tone of yours. and pills, what good would it do? only that i may die without salvation, without the knowledge of how to cling to love by the skin of your fingertips. or maybe i know that already.
and i can’t live with all that poison, not even just for tonight. i would fight but my limbs have gone to sleep and i am faced with a picture of you in the club, music pounding, drinks flowing, girls dancing.
and i realise i can’t say that there is anything missing. there is not.
Posted in chapters of my life
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i won’t wait on you,
but not because i don’t want to:
maybe i would have done on any other day—
that’s not to say that i don’t hate
standing at the train station waving at a departing train.
it’s not me, you understand?
in me there’s always an impulse to chase it.
just water, baby, to chase it.
just water, a silent drizzle of impending rain:
it’ll wash the world off your shirt—
and i will smell crisp cotton again.
Posted in excerpts
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you can have the whole of me in this field:
i pressed my soul into its loins
and beads of sweat still glisten
on the body learning to tango
in the outpour of rain.
i will surrender only here
so take care not to move even a strand of hair
from beneath the tree where i will lay through my whole life,
as if dying prematurely,
for this is home and i forbid you.
a day will come when spring will open me enough
for sun to shine
into the roots of the old cambridge tree
and open up
the rest of me.
—————————————————————-
i’ve been writing this poem for a while now and it feels forever unfinished. maybe that’s just me, always a word out, a syllable in. and then i give up and start something else. at the end of the day, however, i always come back to this. and the oldest tree in cambridge.
Posted in excerpts
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pick up the stone
and throw it
like a bomb.
i’ll see the ripples
on this side of the world
in the snapshot
of the fire
in that pond.
the ducks will bear your witness.
—————————————————-
another “Sunday 100“. maybe i’m becoming predictable with the way i aim the stones. but i doubt it.
Posted in excerpts
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how vain i should be to reread my own posts, but sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, i find myself scrolling through the past on the computer, mouthing the words or simply caressing them with my eyes. because within me there is something i have not yet understood. an undercurrent of a river lost in my old, unpracticed tongue.
rio de la plata maybe. or river of the sun.
even the sun has sunspots, darker on the background of virginal white; and so i have the blind spots: i always find them when i try. no light is enough to banish the spot of darkess on my sleeve: the drop of blood refusing to wash off in hot water. it would wash off in the cold, i know, but it’ll never get the chance.
chances are far and in between, don’t you know?
and i find myself every time, unexpected, like red peonies on a rose bush in may.
находжу себе кожен раз в шматку чорного хліба.
but what is there to find, other than the poems i had learnt by heart in years three and five. and seven. wordsworth’s daffodils.
the yellow vibrancy of life.
Posted in chapters of my life
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glittering soot on her eyelashes 