A Bag of Thoughts

  inflection point  infect me with your biggest shortcoming  in fact, my nose is clear even in this weather whether you can tell my vices from my wisest lies is a story  full of love but empty anyway, i clear my throat  because i still love the people i know i wish i did not  impish impulses imply ammunition – come,  expedite the decay of this hole ignore my stupid heart trying to heal everything kneel into the loveless elbow of the river – do you even know the word for the warm skin between your chin and your throat in your own language? your funny bone? for the little piece of the bone in your foot you’ve broken ever since a child? cradle me like a napkin: i’m weak to sandwiches named after girls groove like this is our bedroom: the vibe is that we don’t talk about it shakily whisper beside me: i have bags & bags of clarity now  a wish, a little like the name of the parents of everyone i know, scribbled into my notepad fo...

  heirloom  when you first learnt that you said  vine like wine you didn’t know what to do with yourself. or rather with your tongue and your lips / your mouth  doesn’t naturally kiss your w’s       neither does it bite into v’s / viciousness like a vine, dormantly violent / lonely as a doormat waiting to wrap around something warm / a white woman on youtube  taught you the difference eventually / weirdly accurate, she sounded more  like you than you do on a normal day / her wery wery’s doused in the  playfulness of a schoolboy / but you sound wary when you repeat after  her, not even liminal echoes could educate you on your accent  that woman, she knew how greedy capsicums are in their grinning sheen / could name every vegetable in a hot dish by its right  name / she might even call the elevator a lift, like you, but better               ...

perform for me don’t look away now, clenched fist is for me sharp nail to skin – cry infront of these people and i’ll never perform with you again sand blows into my eye sad little particles with no particular reason, unknown balloon lies flat in my laundry it's only fate after the fact, to be a pimple: inconvenient and peckish. funny word: peckish, the image of birdies sliding around covered in hydrochloric acid, knock- knocking for some food please knocking — a threat shaking my bones as the doorknob rattles with mystery, and its unknown voices the corridor is drunk tonight i can tell i stay unmoving, lest i should trip and find myself in the library drinking in as much tearwater as i drink coffee, something candid in the air of an underground room full of dead- -lines, and stresslines, it is thick like the beads on my wrist stabbing cold like its history, lips fall off in the corners, dried and out of date, they taste good on nothing, all that’s ...

a hurricane of obsessions at its center me a headache of loneliness an inexplicable nausea in my soul hands never clean enough, incompetence and dust always coating them tier lists of trauma   only hindered by my indecisiveness a sea of lessons to be learnt; moments that went not so swimmingly   a nagging within my dreams, like leftovers haunting a fridge emotions undealt with, return in the depth of night the lamplight shivers, something falls footsteps echo, not a spirit in sight the same memory on loop, one moonlit night, one breathless question last words rehearsed, real life imitates song a half-hug, unsatisfied a lifetime of almosts like a bowl of unpeeled tangerines the zest in their peel nothing but an eyesore the citrus eye sting,   bright color an undesirable reminder, bygones not just bygones even if we let them be. an immunity to connection in a wistful cabin in the woods the creaks of its planks conceal no secrets, its windows an invitation to view windows of...

  [not a poem title] staggered poet-breaths   stuffed into the folds of my phone stifled soreness, folded into the palms of my hand sudden emptiness or slow invasion still, gradual decomposition constantly dreaming cloudiness instead of contemplation heavy head, heavy heart light head, heavy heart close by but blurry,   warm fingertips on the verge of losing colour cold. tears on standby,   frozen smiles packaged into tolerable emotion, the threat of time felt like the direct burn of the sun the present under it   curling up like a wet painting dried before we’ve finished breathing it this moment so soon a memory, this happiness so quick a risk   and nothing but words to make stories with worse than a godlessness   is the cruelty of god like a human, content with   flickering lives with the flick of wrist flightful lies, floating ties this tea so soon gone cold this page easily lost this uneasiness quick to settle face forgotten.   sadness br...

It’s been happening again, this abrupt undoing of the reality and my sudden lack of understanding of my place in it. Again? I’m not sure if it’s happened before actually but it’s not unfamiliar to feel so distant from my feet in the ground. After last October, I thought I was prepared for all the loss in the world but no, they really never prepare you to lose friends. Friends who leave, friends who are alive still but never seen again, never hugged again, never for you to love again. No, that’s not true, is it? We can love despite distance — or rather, we can’t not love, despite distance.  I never prepared for the breathlessness in my lungs and the escaping of my tears and the way I swung arms away from myself, clutched tightly in my hand the book that I inscribed my many names onto and now, everyone asks me to not cry. But the colours appear in front me, the colours that became ours and the colours that we became. I realize our story can be told in three: dark blue, green, purple....