New Addictions and Insomnia

Of staying up nights to pay for earlier procrastinations and a new love for acapella.

Tune

Your hands play out a tune on me, a half- remembered ditty from when I was seven, young, scabby-kneed, bespectacled and unsure of myself. I am that wide-eyed child again, dreaming of bigger tomorrows, and hiding from reality between the words of my books. Even then, I knew I liked to write, my hesitant fingers always surer when holding a pencil to paper, the edges of what I wrote smudging with my sweat- pencils made for such impermanent dreams. My first story was about a boy, and my first poem? It was a tapestry of wishes bound together and set down on paper that I showed my father, trusting that his ‘grown-up’ intellect would hold my dreams better than my own small, callused palms. He marked it in red, and then gently set me, staggering and stumbling, on the path to poetry, to new words, new worlds. Your touch today is like his, almost gentle, guiding; I only miss that smell of soap he always carried with him, his own personal attendant cloud. I turn to you, and you mention a struggle that is as far as it is close, and when I fall apart, trembling with the violence of my thoughts, you hold me while I grow still. Your voice, soft as rushes, brings me back from blinding rage to cold logic, or at least an aspiration for it; you know well enough how very logical I am at the best of times. You correct me softly, and in your fathomless eyes,I see that you have seen the little girl, bewildered by the raging turmoil that surrounds her; you know that girl almost as well as I do. The clock ticks past two and the silence of the night is filled with the smell of the orange we share in the darkness, the juice from the torn quarters spilling onto my white sheets. I know that when I roll over in my sleep tomorrow, you will be there in my dreams, walking into them, carrying the smell of oranges with you.

Lost Chances

I think, given a chance, I could have
fallen in love with you;
with your voice full of crackling innocence,
soft and crumbling, drawing me in intimately,
Sweet, even bittersweet.  I can taste it
on my tongue. In my bland black jeans and the smell of the city on me, I feel
unworthy of you- my lips, you see,
they don’t always drip poetry. With you, my fingers
tremble, and my camera is afraid to
capture you. Your hair and your voice like smoke,
melting into the spaces between my
throat and my words. I cannot speak of you,
and to hear others do so is painful, it
is like jagged shards of ice sticking in my throat.
They cheapen you with their words,
their “she was so good” failing to hint at the
stunning beauty that envelopes you, wraps
around you like the softest of shawls. They don’t see
your hands, your fingers, how they ooze
poetry as much as your mouth does. They feel,
but do not understand the web woven by your voice; it is so full of magic that it makes me
gasp, I can barely remember to breathe when I look at you. I know with a certainty that aches that I am unworthy of you,
you with the beauty of a half-forgotten toy lying
broken in the dust, or of that pen I used to
write a letter to an old lover that I never sent, and
stored away in a jewelled box instead.
I am unworthy,  with my hesitant smile and my words,
borrowed phrases, metaphors and images
that I gather in my arms, trying to encircle you, knowing
full well that I cannot. Your
kohl rubs off on my lips, blackening me until I am
not afraid of the dark anymore. The scent of you hits me like a heady wine, full-bodied
and sensuous,  with a tripe taste of cherry,
Tart on my tongue before it fades away. As you do,
when you retreat behind that curtain that is your home. I think, given a
chance, I could have fallen in love with you.