The Elusive Sound Of Love

Listen
Out there
The black headed gull
Twirlng and twizzling
In the winter night
His wings flapping
Like a sailboat
Over Vltava

Listen
There goes
The cold river
Simpering and sleepwalking
Casting spells
On the tourists
That look like flowers
Under the city lights

Listen
If you may
And you could hear
Her soft watery burble
From two blocks away
They have a name for it
Susurrus
A quite word
Like murmur, like limerence
The kind of pretty words
You adore

Listen
To Zulejka’s paws
Kneading on your blanket
Squishing all the evils
Of the world
Into soft little lint balls
She is about to
Turn herself
Into a warm loaf
And go
Mrrrp mrrrp mrrrp
Her polite cue for bedtime

Listen
Tonight
Before you wade into
The maze
Of your pillow thoughts
Before the night chills
Spread dreams
Across the walls
Pout your lips and
Read this poem aloud
Utter these words
In soft breathy whispers
Then listen.

You just might hear
The elusive sound
Of love.

(For Prague, and for that fuzzy haired fairy I call Poppet. Happy Valentine’s Day 💖).
Featured Artwork: LEAVING THE BED by Nick Alm

A Stray Feather

If on a lazy summer morning
a sudden gush of wind brings a stray feather to your desk
would you spare a moment to think,
how beautiful life can be?
It’s easy to forget how transient we are,
dancing like tentacles of waterweeds in the green depth of time.
Tell me in this abysmal push-pull
don’t you ever get tired of being left alone?

At times when I read your stories,
I go like… right, right, a-ha, absolutely!
It’s like a false sense of clarity, as if I can almost read your mind.
Makes me wonder though –
if I was to ever play a role in one of ’em stories,
would it have a different ending?
Say, as unlikely as it maybe,
if you were brave enough to hand me the keys to the darkest alleys of yourself,
would I be brave enough to step inside and look around?

Anyhoo,
the universe has no centre.
Makes it all the more easy for me to say it is you.
Every light, every darkness, every sun peaking through
every celestial cloud, every tree in every world,
every breeze and every blossom, every face and every heart,
every kiss and every longing spins around you.

I know, I know, it’s stupid.
Look I’m just saying…
OK, stop it now, I can hear you laugh, alright?
Listen, I’m just saying love is stupid, but it is also real, no?
As real as the dissonant key on your piano,
the quiet sighs of your cat and
that rogue itch that keeps you up all night long.

Honestly,
if on a cold, crusty night
you catch me rolling over the true limits of human emotion,
crossing the final frontier that no one ever will,
won’t you raise a glass for me?

A Beam Of Light

The past that I’ve been storing
In the corners of my bedroom
Have become so dense, so viscous
That it now accumulates me instead
Gathering, collecting little pieces of me in between the stacks
Neatly dated and marked with sticky notes and scribbles
That no longer make sense
And all I do is sit and mope and pick on the pieces
Try to fix them back together

When you say I am monumental, I am immense,
I brush it aside with cold humour
But a distant hope of a clean break
Seizes me with a burning desire
It’s all touch and go
For you are a coward
Swaying like a dumb festoon in your wistful winds

Why don’t you get it together and man up, man?
It takes grit to run off on bare feet, y’know?
Why don’t you tell me to believe and leap,
To burn bridges and scorch the earth,
To free my body and let it grow twigs and warts and thorns of lust?
Before you turn into a pathetic, hairless slob
Why don’t you take me on a night drive
In your beat up car with a blind headlight?
Why don’t you tell me everything’s gonna change,
That if we have each other
Even a single beam of light could lead us ahead?

Featured oil painting is by Annie Remich based on a photograph by Leo Berne.

The Peculiar Sadness Of Dead Flowers

Today
When you wake up
Grind your coffee, brew it strong
Drink a nice cuppa and consider this
There will be no earth shattering love today

Today
As you walk down the stairs with a cigarette in your hand
A spiral of towel barely clinging on your skin
Spare a thought for a moment
No Taj Mahal will be build today

Today
When you shelter yourself from mourning
The peculiar sadness of dead flowers
Picture the whole sky unfurl under your ceiling
The wings you wrote about are all too real

In the funnel of time
You are unborn, alive and dead all at once
Recurrence, recursion, repercussion
Nothing mattered, nothing will
You will be mined as fossil fuel by future beings

So today, break your precious glass slippers
Feel a flutter in your aging heart
And drift like a red balloon while you still can
In this life we are briefly beautiful
The rest is all stillness

Featured artwork: Two Italians, 1921 by PEDER MORK MONSTED

On The Other Side

On the other side of the night
The lighter side
When the barn owls have gone hiding
Your name burrows in me
Digging subway tunnels of delirious melancholia
Under the skin

On the other side of the night
A yearning blurs the receding moon
It reminds me of your moans of pleasure
Like everlong aches of a derelict homestead
A warning sign of bio-hazard
A cautionary tale

On the other side of the night
Somewhere in an unfolding future
We are basking in the sun
At a roadside picnic
My fingers on your flawless neckline
Your fingers in a chocolate mousse cake

Repetition Of A Phrase

The future is no longer what it was
For better or for worse
Familiarize with the newness
Learn to cohabit with life and latex
Organic is superfluous
Anthropomorphic is just as good
Your non human humongous mate
Is a persistent repetition of a phrase

Your non human humongous mate
Waves at me to say hi
Before it disappears in your face
It? Him? Them? I wonder
How does our friend identify gender?
Meanwhile this ménage à trois
Ectoplasma, android, foie gras
Two beating hearts, few bloodless veins

Your non human humongous mate
Parks in your garage
As I complete your bionic ecology
Me and your non human mate
We high five like chums
Rectovulva Septum
In the future after the shockwaves
Sad tadpoles are left to die

Your non human humoungous mate has an advice:
Make love. Fuck.

Featured Artwork: AMERICAN CENTURY by Glen Orbik

Unfolding, Unspooling

Twenty minutes early
Or twenty minutes late
It’s a matter of perspective
You count seconds
And soak in the minute details of the cafe
Awkwardness gathers on the milk skin
Of your hot chocolate
In the aquarium fishes cry
The water is salty from their tears
Hello, she says,
Have you been waiting too long?
You have seen her before
But pictures are notorious liars
No photograph can do justice to a beauty like that
Her face is an elegy
An elfin myth
She gracefully accepts the chair that you offer
Remains of the afternoon just meanders
Like a wafty feather
Weightless, pointless, boundless
You only remember the brief moment
When she holds your hand in the end
Four years? Five maybe
That afternoon is still expanding
Unfolding in memories
Unspooling in dreams

Featured Artwork: CAFE DU MATIN by Olga Beliaeva (watercolor on paper)

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story

Every love story is a ghost story
Something always haunts somebody
The dead haunt the living
The living haunt the lovers
The lovers haunt the dead
Bodies lay on ice
Beds tremble, pillows weep
Red stilettos tiptoe in the kitchen
Still new… only dusty
Stale cookies, dry coffee stains
Little balls of ache inside throats
Gray pictures, grim smiles
Words shatter like glass
Sour kisses…stinging…choking
Hallways bellow
Shadows take shapes
Ghosts mourn the living…
Love stories are ghost stories
Somebody always dies in them

Featured Artwork: STRANGE LOVE by Massimiliano Ligabue

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Trivia: The phrase ‘every love story is a ghost story’ is not mine. It was mentioned by David Foster Wallace in his writings and letters, but he maintained that the phrase was not his. He attributed the phrase to Virginia Woolf, that it was introduced to him by the writer Richard Elman in a lecture. But the phrase does not appear in any of the surviving writings of Woolf. However the phrase appears in a letter of Australian author Christina Stead when she was battling depression, as a possible title of a story, although no story of Stead is titled such. As per Stead’s biographer Hazel Rowley, Stead probably wrote a story under that title then changed the title to ‘Les Amoreux’. Now, Stead happens to be a favorite author of the author Jonathan Franzen who was Dave Wallace’s close friend and contemporary. Whether the phrase was written by Wallace with a made up back story or was it name-dropped in a drinking game by Franzen or Elman, or is it a case where two writers, Stead and Wallace, unconnected with each other, dreamt of the same line in a true Borgesian fashion (Dave Wallace was JL Borges fanboy), nobody will ever know. In the honor of the phrase Dave Wallace’s biographer D.T. Max named his book ‘EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY- A LIFE OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’. This poem is my loving tribute to Dave Wallace.

Aafra

Aafra calls from Hong Kong
She sounds upbeat
But in the following two hours of our video call
I know she is gloomy as the downcast sky
It is afternoon
But the weather masquerades as late evening
You can’t trust anything these days can you?
She asks
I wish I could lie
I wish I was naive enough to shoo away her fears
Instead I rile up some anger in her
It works
Or at least she plays along
We glide through our shared past
Brief yet momentous glories
What we were once
We take comfort in each others insignificance
Lending shoulders from million miles away
The video keeps breaking
Lousy broadband
Aafra cooes at my dog
I wonder at her first world apartment
Half of our lives are gone
We are still waiting to live

Featured Artist: VICTOR RODRIGUEZ (acrylic on canvas)

Orange Is The New Sex

A walk in the moist evening of your town
Presents a few revelations
Say, the temptations of kesar jalebi…
It paints a feverish picture of you
Partly because it mirrors the orange of your hair
Partly because of the orange negligee that hugs your wet skin
Revealing more than it hides
The water droplets on your bare shoulders
Glisten like the shiny syrup
Coagulating a viscous carnal necessity in me

I order for a serving of the jalebi and wait
Slowly melting invisible into the granular darkness
Of the breathing trees to hide my hard on
Awakened by the solemn movements of your body
The jalebis arrive
Each bite foreshadows a pleasure you promised
A secret invitation to let me spread my roots
Deep inside your portals
The spirals of this clementine sweet
Are they guiding me to your labyrinth of indulgence?

Featured Artwork: FEMME FATALE by Glen Orbik