Hay and fear

Rending rendezvous with time
Meandering down dark alleys
Bumping into walls and tripping
Over myself in cul-de-sacs
Blurred images eclipse focus
Washed out branches (leaves)
Quiet smells of hay and fear

Do I need clarity to unknot if
I know I don’t have to be good?

Feel

Fragments of fonts
Circle around my heart
My fishing rod head is working
To catch and string
Them into a coherent whole
Yet slippery they
Wriggle out and plop
Back into the morass
And I have to plunge in
To make any sense out of this
Existence

She disliked paradoxes

Having three names seemed natural to her — first one from her family, second for writing, and last to be exhaled by lovers into her ear during those intoxicating hours when she could hold them in thrall in the palm of her hand. Like the name of God, her third name was exclaimed in darkness, staccato, almost incoherent, and upon first daylight forgotten. It was as if they were speaking in tongues, and in each lover this invariably produced a brief moment of confusion followed by slight embarrassment with eventual acceptance. They would shrug it off with the last vestiges of her touch as they got out of her bed and transformed themselves into power-suited stiletto-brandishing emblems of industrial achievement.

She would watch them semi-recumbent covered with her white Egyptian cotton 1000-thread-count sheet, head cocked to one side, a brown curl with occasional grey falling on her face, brown eyes squinted in myopic effort, and wonder at their breathing contradictions. Like Bertrand Russell, she disliked paradoxes, but in her effort to live more harmoniously, had to accept them, albeit reluctantly. She understood that what seemed a paradox today might lose its contours tomorrow and disappear altogether in not too distant future. She was, after all, an observer of life, a cataloguer and a curator of the human condition, undeniably her own, her third name a testament.

Gravitational asymmetries

Gravitational asymmetries create
Fatal fractures in the workings
Of my cinched sensibilities
How then can I hope to hold on to
The essence of this creation?
Idly I watch it evaporate
And dissolve into the paradoxical void
So filled with untold possibilities

Interstitial happiness

Deep in the interstices of my youth
Happiness has an accompaniment
Chopin, Brahms, a body memory
That lands me here and gathers
The long distances of myself
Into a manageable geography
Though one not without
Peaks and valleys
And parched
Earth