This is a eulogy for the love we once had, and the love we'll hopefully have again.
HOW I FELL FOR HIM
We met, one wintry night, on
the corner of a street full of walking corpses.
He looked at me, eyes black as death, fathomless and deep as
the hollow in his chest, and
all of a sudden I was
falling
falling
falling.
I never thought this day would come, but
childhood fritters away with the twinkle of stars
and all of a sudden –
I'm not that little girl anymore, and there's a boy – with
eyes like death – who starts fires in my soul and
leaves me gasping, gasping, gasping with
a multitude of I-don't-knows because
they never taught us this in school.
His fingers explored
the ridges of my body – of spines,
shoulderblades, ribs and fingertips, caressed
the curves of my heart – of lips,
hips and arched backs, and all of a sudden I was
falling
falling
falling into
those lips – the taste of ash and the colour
Death, fathomless and deep as
the hollow in his chest.
The headboard knocked against the walls
of my heart, my fingers buried themselves in the crevice beneath
his wingtip shoulderblades, and our teeth mashed together in
a cacophony of emotions;
our mouths opened in wordless screams and his soul
touched mine – that wintry night, in a room on
the corner of a street full of walking corpses – and
all of a sudden
he was that hollow in my chest, and I was
falling
falling
falling
~
INTIMACIES
This pen is as
foreign to me as your hands
upon my skin. Yet –
familiarity flutters.
You dredge up forgotten
memories, suppressed
fantasies – the
carnal romanticist
wrist-bound, eye-clothed
and skin-flared, now
set free in pursuit of
her dominating desires.
This is what it feels like
to revisit an old friend – dead
now – or to tread in the forgotten
footprints of lovers before.
My fingers grasp the pen
awkwardly, with the hesitance of
a wide-eyed white-clothed girl
just coming into the world.
It feels good though;
scratches seep in – stained
red with passion and
black with sin.
~
WRECK
His arms wrap around me
and I am a tree wracked with
the impact of screaming metal in
a run-on sentence that just ended.
The car explodes – into starry
fantasies, flaming desires,
unfulfilled like missing fullstops
and hesitant beginnings
The fire licks upwards, and
I am a burning stake wracked
with the impact of his touch –
a semicolon after an abrupt end.
~
OUR LOVE
Our love
was broken cigarettes,
used and discarded on concrete
floors, downtrodden,
overlooked,
expired;
our love
never aspired to be roseate
flowers woven in leafy goldenvines,
strands of diamond dewdrops
florid with promise,
sunshiny,
whole;
no,
our love
was shadowed kisses
searing through intertwined tongues,
interlocked veins, bloodless
hearts and hands like
little deaths;
our love:
dead.
~
It started in 1994 –
a North Korean famine – the news reported
people were dying. That was the day we
fell in love.
Desperation scented the air:
desiccating corpses, bodies shriveling without
sustenance, yellowed skies like
vomit-stained ceilings.
We barely noticed,
locked in a world of our own,
ensnared in our love:
food for the soul.
You were my banquet table
you taste enveloped my mouth,
salty tangs of sweat seasoning the feast;
you planted a seed in the pit of my stomach
and brought it higher higher, until it
came, trembling, to fruition.
Our passion was unrestrained,
it broke out of our world like a wild animal,
culminated in an explosion of heat –
a wave of death and melting hearts
that was 2003, Europe.
Sparks flew,
fires ignited, and the trees
disappeared beneath sunset flames, licking
at the flat expanse of brown sky,
the plains of my navel.
Around us, sweat poured like
rain, diseases threw a party and danced
on the tabletops of crumpled heaps
of bodies.
We were too swept up in each other, giddy
with the amber afterglow of infatuation,
spinning and spinning and spinning and
spinning into
a whirlwind romance, a hurricane
of imminent disaster –
Katrina entered the scene.
She was powerful and destructive and
she let forth the power of the waters,
she quenched your thirst and
snuffed out our flames.
I suffocated with tragedy,
died with the dead and drowned with the dying.
Two years of candlelight kisses
obscured by the raging waters
of another tryst.
2008, my heart is frozen –
an instinctive response, preservation of
the dead – even Afghanistan couldn't hold a candle
to the icicles of my tears.
Frostbite struck thousands,
arms and legs and bits, white-cold and amput
ated to save the whole.
I ripped out my heart
for you, my soul a ready-made packet of
frozen food (defrost, microwave for 3 minutes,
eat). Flavour slightly off, but
convenient, isn't it?
You came back,
shaking my wold like giant's footsteps
squashing that hear casually lying on the ground;
you tore up the cheap plasters I applied like
trees uprooted from the ground.
Your epicenter could've been as far as
Haiti, 2010, but your tremors still shook me,
lured me back in, and somehow, my hands are
in your hair and your head
in my lap just like
old times.
My screams mirrored those who lost their means,
my moans mirrored those who lost their homes,
but our love was a selfish one and
I didn't give a damn about the
damned, we were forever,
after all.
But when it came to the crunch,
we were never anything more than human – flesh
and bone, and when the drought came, our love
dried up like the great waters of East Africa.
We perished like the rest of them,
but at least when we died we died together,
lips to lips, hips to hips, and hands
like a prayer to the soul.
11:11 '11, to us, the world was fit for two;
RIP to the lovers who left the world in ruins.
(this was fiction but it is real)
(I still love you)
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