A Hundred Years

I cannot stay.

With you is life and never presume I want that.

I wish. 

Death spurns us because we are not wise.

It swishes past with it's cloak of scorn

and looks down it's nose at our mortality.

I breathe with you and feel judged.  

Somehow the closer you are,

the hollower it is, 

until

the void (not made of hunger) increases and pushes you beyond.

I hope.

Of course I will weep. 

Despair does define us.

Silver Screen

There's no one like you in this whole wide world...

It's true. I kid you not.

I mean I swear.


This is why bollywood is stupid..

Ghosts

They hung upside down from the tree and seemed to be forever crying. It wasn't silent weeping either. It was the kind that wouldn't let you sleep at night. None of us had slept in years.

We had them on our conscience and they had our sleep on theirs. It wasn't that we hadn't tried. To move. Them first and us later. We only got as far as the garden gate. They began howling so we turned back, our gritty resolve ripped through with those pitiful howls. We had no choice. I made them turn back...because where we were going there was no one we would hate as much.

A lamp burns near the window to attract passing travellers. Some of the brave ones stop sometimes for food and a story about the tree in our garden (in my young days I was quite the story teller). My favourite part is where I lean close, let them breathe me in and point myself out to them, my lifeless body hanging upside down from the lowest branch of the old tree.

Poltroon

By the end of it you're a coward. You arm yourself with guns and swords and whatever else may protect you and you stand, feet apart, waiting.

Upon hearing the numerous war cries and horns you charge headlong into confusion. Everyone makes a mess and all the colours get mixed up. You get hit or stabbed or shot and dizzyingly fall to the side like an archer's broken arrow. You see your own blood staining your shirt and decide to give up. You wait patiently for death while lying on the sidelines, when you can perfectly well remain in combat and get finished off sooner without the wait.

At the first sign of pain you forget that that's the one reason you're standing in that damp muddy field with sweat and blood pouring out of you. It wasn't that they didn't warn you. You aren't to be blamed either. Effulgent fantasies cry a gloriously brave, victorious death.

Odi et Amo

I loved and I hate. She flies with her own wings.

I want to colour the dots. Big, gaping holes, in their anonimity they'd be happy. Therefore I take a felt tip pen and make diamonds and flowers with holes as the centre and at the edges and all around. Myopia is a pre-requisite to appreciate my wet ink art. From far away I see a hazy figure- Monet could have painted him... the grey and the black and other black blue dots making sense from a distance in a drizzle of white.

I figured out a pattern yesterday, or the day before or a year ago (I forget when). It went something like Henry VIII's wives : Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

Sometimes, when it's dark, I practice waiting. When it's light it becomes like Penelope's burial shroud for Laertes, a little bit of which is unravelled every day but without suitors to prompt. I have given it the dawn of a certain day and the dusk of others and the sky is black all the time for all those who didn't know.