Heartworm
Hello, again.
I hate to say it,
But I think I’ve missed you.
I’ve missed the talks,
the walks,
All the nonsense
with the Jenga blocks,
The quests for pizza
and the messes with pools and dogs,
(Sorry, again)
And I think I resent you for that.
I mean,
I’ve got all these memories,
Floating aimlessly about my head,
And I can’t think of a single instance
in which I’d use them, but at the same time,
I just can’t forget.
I can’t forget how Little You
convinced a kid that you could fly,
Or how inanimate objects can become
wandering cats in your (stunning) eyes,
Or even the way I could say something weird,
And your eyes would still crinkle as you smiled,
And I think I resent you for that.
But more than that,
I think I resent myself for it all.
I mean,
I’d go to bed dreaming
of setting the world on fire for you,
But I’d wake up afraid to even light a match
because it might be a flame you were ready to douse.
And I’d think,
and over-think,
and over-think some more,
Until I think I thought
I’d thought it all out,
But I still couldn’t let you know,
And I think I resent myself for that.
I mean,
I still can’t write about you,
Without resorting to poetry or parentheses,
I can’t say you’re (wonderful), (weird), or (stunning)
Without comparing you to the stars, the sky,
or the cliché’d seas,
And even if it might sound cliché’d,
I think I resent myself for that.
And even though I hate to say it,
I think I’ve missed you.
Bitter Words of a Lonely Cynic
They do it with such effortless ease,
Those circling vultures that haunt parties.
With a wink of their eye
and a straightened tie,
They swoop down from the sky.
Why, it baffles the mind,
To consider what floats from their smiles,
Into the gently-brushed,
Slightly-flushed,
Ear of a lady.
Are they poets, I wonder?
Armed with words that could tear asunder,
The barriers that grow over the years,
That cage a girl’s heart
in a lattice of her own fears.
“Hello, my dear!
Isn’t it a bit loud in here?
Why don’t we go somewhere
a little more quiet,
And let the music of our delight
fill the silent night’s ears?”
There may be seven words
to make a woman fall in love,
Some men take what they can get with three.
But in a poet’s mind,
Three will never suffice,
When her smile is like the sun, and her eyes like the sea.
So what kind of a poet am I
If I can find no words to describe,
The way my heart aches for the thrill of you?
My eyes carry no charm,
My tie lies undone,
And all my smile has is a shoddy couplet or two.
So if there are no words I can find,
A sonnet of silence is what I’ll write,
And across this crowded room, I’ll recite it to you.
And against all hope, I’ll hope
That my seven silent words hit home,
And that, even though around you the vultures do swarm,
You’ll still come running into my arms.
And against all hope, I’ll hope
That even a lonely cynic like me,
Can have a happily-ever-after.
The Parade of Ozymandias
It is said that,
In death, we forget.
Oh, how easily the body does forget!
It forgets our story,
It forgets our glory,
It forgets all delusions of the sacred and holy -
And before you know it
The bladder’s flowing,
The eyes glaze over and
A chill starts crawling!
Do not deceive yourself:
In death, there is no glory.
No, you do not want to die,
But what choice do you have?
Our heartbeats are numbered,
And the heart does beat so very fast.
So we build these fragile monoliths;
Some sculpt them from words,
Some weave them from brushstrokes & harmonics.
And in the hope that they withstand
The ravages of time,
On them, the following words
Are what we inscribed:
“Remember me,
For I was glorious!
Remember me,
For I shall forget.”
Clockwork III
“God is dead.”
A man on his tenth drink once slovenly said,
“And surprisingly,
The quote often stops there.”
He picks his glass up and turns to me in his chair.
I sip my drink,
He downs his.
I nod silently as number eleven speaks,
“God is dead. God remains dead.
And it is we who have killed him!
And is not the greatness of this deed
Too great for us?
Must we ourselves not become gods
Simply to appear worthy of it?”
I gulp my drink,
He downs his,
As a man down the bar
Swings the first fist.
“Duncan is slain,
And Macbeth is King.
We have slain the puppeteer,
For the promise of toying with his strings.
Ah, but Icarus has taught us nothing,
And now the wax drips from our melting wings -
And so, Man lives with the indolence of the immortals,
And dies like the daffodils come the end of Spring.”
Down the bar,
Two men with bloodied knuckles
Get kicked out onto the road,
As we down our drinks
And order up two more.
“Now, you may think,
Like many others I’ve spoken to,
That my words lack colour;
That I speak from a pessimistic point of view.”
And here, he laughed,
“But I’m not a pessimist,
I’m just telling you a joke, you see!
Man stands on his miniscule bit of rock
And shouts, ‘I matter! Fear me!’
And the skies rumble with laughter,
And the stars twinkle with amusement,
And the universe doesn’t even bat an eye.”
We down our drinks and a few minutes pass,
Before the man glances at his watch,
And leaves the bar in a rush.
And with time on my hands
And no watch beneath my cuff,
I think about the joke,
And I laugh.
Andvari
You can’t rush romance,
Or at least, that’s what they say.
‘You can’t chase love
Lest you chase it away.’
But hey, I’m a busy man -
Contrary to popular belief,
I’ve got things to do, places to see,
Faces to know, names to be,
Why, there’s a whole world of possibilities awaiting me!
But as the ticking clock steadily leaks,
As seconds drip, and days seep,
As the months pour off the wall,
And years flow on like gushing waterfalls -
I suppose I could spare a minute
For a second of your time;
I think I’ve got an hour
To spend wandering the depths of your eyes;
And I guess I’ve got the rest of my life
To spend hopelessly hoping for a glimpse,
Of that elusive, evanescent smile.
My dear, all the grains of sand in all the deserts,
Could spill from the hourglass into stormy weather
And sever all the strings holding the universe together -
But it wouldn’t matter.
The stars could fall,
But they’d look good on you.
Counting Waves
I am adrift.
Floating on this infinite ocean,
Little more than debris, scattered and broken,
I am adrift.
If I’m honest,
I find it rather peaceful,
This secluded release from people -
From the smiling and nodding,
The ‘Oh, what a wonderful morning!’s,
The restrained yawning in front of audiences
Who simply aren’t as bored,
Who don’t feel this dull, dull ache!
After all,
Between loneliness in company
And the solitude of floating debris,
Why, I’d pick the latter any day!
And having reached that resolute conclusion,
I continue to drift, scattered and broken,
Bobbing idly beneath the setting sun.
And then You come along!
Fishing my scattered self out of the water,
Sorting my pieces and gluing me together -
Amidst this infinite sea,
You’re the first to see me complete,
And the obsidian world bursts into colour
As our lips hesitantly meet.
But these are just daydreams -
The dreary daydreams of debris,
Delicately drawn by the dull morning rays,
Gracefully glinting off the ocean spray,
And here I float, foolishly dreaming of counting the waves.
(I feel I have been adrift for just as many days)
Yes, clearly I’m better off on my own,
Surely it’s more peaceful on my own,
Why, I’m as free as can be on my own!
But, you see, I’m not, really.
I just feel alone.
Clockwork II
“Death must be an awfully grand adventure.”
A man on his eleventh drink once drunkenly slurred.
“After your death you will be
What you were before your birth -
Schopenhauer could not have said truer words.”
I sip my drink,
He downs his.
I nod silently as number twelve speaks,
“I suppose what I want to know is
Was I happy? Was I comfortable?
Was I ever at peace before life finally called?
Or was I nothing more than an
Empty, faded concept -
Did I … even exist at all?”
I gulp my drink,
He downs his,
As a giggling couple in a secluded booth,
Lean into one another to share a lingering kiss.
“If anything, I was certainly alone.
But then again, I’ve always been alone -
An empty home, a silent phone,
And, just you wait for it,
A blank, obsidian tombstone.”
A few hushed whispers,
And the couple scurry
Hand-in-hand out the door,
As we down our drinks
And order up two more.
“The only given, really,
Is that I was ‘to-be-born’.
A comfort if you foolishly cling to life,
A curse if you’d rather be gone.”
We down our drinks,
As the clock on the wall ticks madly on.
I stare emptily at the glass before me
As I quietly mumble, “I’d rather be gone.”
Clockwork I
“It’s all bloody clockwork, isn’t it?”
A man on his twelfth drink once mumbled to me.
“The moon, the stars,
Spinning like the lonely hours,
In painfully-perpetual, symmetrical synchronicity.”
I sip my drink,
He downs his.
I nod silently as number thirteen speaks,
“And it’s all bloody meaningless!
We think we see patterns
In the interplay of our orbits,
And then we draw connections
That somehow seem to fit -
It’s the only bloody comfort we can bloody affor-”
And he drowned the sentence in his glass.
I gulp my drink,
He downs his,
As I reflect on the cruel kiss,
Fate hath planted on this poor gentleman’s lips.
In drink,
Man sacrifices eloquence
For his peace of mind.
But in drink,
This man is bereft of solace
And is doomed to whisper Veritas’ rhymes.
With this pitying realization,
I down my drink,
And he downs his,
And then he stumbles away,
Through the sombre midnight mist.
A young man enters,
And fills the recently-emptied seat.
The bartender nods to him,
But it is a laden glass he greets.
He sips his drink,
I down mine,
As I turn to him and say,
“It’s all bloody clockwork, isn’t it?”
Numbers
There are approximately 1080 atoms in the universe.
Of those, approximately 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (2 octillion) are us. That means that, for every 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 sexdecillion) atoms in the universe, 14 of them are of our bodies.
And to know that your 1027 atoms should have found my 1027 atoms amongst the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 quinvigintillion) atoms in the infinite storm of the cosmos is the greatest thought my mind can conceive.
Dystopia
I awoke with a start one morning,
Only to sit up and find,
That all of the morning sun’s brilliance
Had disappeared and left a short note behind.
Curious, I opened it,
And on it were hastily scribbled letters,
“I apologize for the previous inconveniences caused,
I hadn’t meant to shine!”
Now confused, I stepped onto the street,
Eerily lit by the flickering lamplight.
A bird caught mid-flight suddenly met my gaze,
And dropped to the ground apologizing for
Having exposed me to that unbecoming sight.
That evening, no stars came out,
A succinct, dimly lit apology
Had been drawn with the clouds,
While the infinite universe slowly faded away.
And so it came to be,
That under a dark and vacant sky,
I began my journey across the earth
To visit you that night.
But when I reached your doorstep,
In your place, a note stood.
Written in your finest handwriting:
An apology for being you.
Making Love
The words fall under your eyes, and you think of one thing instantaneously.
A singular image fills your mind, laced with shades of romance and fervent passion. Let’s not muddle about with this political correctness: You think of sex. You think of the dance of the passions, the eruption of carnal desires, the moaning ode to the moonlit midnight sky.
But that is not making love, it is sex. To bring forth from the depths of our humanity that evanescent-yet-eternal, incomparable-yet-ineffable, godly-yet-so-very-human thing that should bathe us in splendour and have us shine as blazing beacons through the infinite universe; that is making love.
You and I made love even as I enfolded you in my arms; you and I made love even as your lips hesitantly touched mine; you and I made love even as your fingers brushed mine by some curious accident.
And ever since your eyes first met mine and that smile touched your face, the memory of you has made love to my aching heart.
Punctuation
Perhaps,
A modest period.
Quiet, simple, and unassuming -
Quite like the taste of a sleepy morning’s cereal.
Or maybe a comma,
As the teaser trailer of what’s to come,
Should adorn the perpetually penultimate piece of prose,
Stubbornly blaring ‘Verse vivit in aeturnum!’
But then again,
Why not a question mark?
Why not impregnate a sentence
that it may beget one more?
Why not let humanity’s poster child, Curiosity,
Coerce Possibility’s imagination into a magnificent and joyous uproar?
The Chroniclers of Existence,
Grant you a single sentence,
In which you may tell the tale
Of you.
The pen rests indecisively in your hand,
Which ending will you choose?
Infinitesimal
On the scale of worlds, a clock is but a butterfly.
Cascading glaciers are nothing more than spilt water falling across a table, seasons are simply the rotation of a droning fan, mountains rise and fall like the blocks of a temperamental child; and a lifetime?
A lifetime is small. A lifetime is miniscule. A lifetime is infinitesimal. An epic tale of birth, hardship, joy, love, pain, anger, beauty, sadness, dreams and death; a blip.
And yet I can’t help but find myself believing beyond reason that that single, fleeting blip - so evanescent that its very existence in the grand scheme of things is questionable - resounds through every corner of the universe. I can’t help but dream that those first two atoms all those 13.7 billion years ago sat down together before colliding to collaborate on a blueprint: the blueprint of me, of you, of every single one of us in this very moment, existing. I can’t help but hope that the fraction of a syllable that escapes my lips is heard.
The sun will rise, and I will get out of bed and go about my day, constantly feeling I should be somewhere else, watch clocks begging for time to speed up. The sun will set, and I will return home, eat, and cast sidelong glances at the clocks, waiting for time to speed up that I may settle into bed - settle into bed, turn off the lights, and begin to think, “What a long day!”
You see, we forget. The crisp morning breeze against my skin, the gentle laughter of the two birds flying overhead, blissfully distracted by their conversation, the lazy cloud hanging overhead, indecisively morphing from shape to shape; never again will I feel it, hear it, see it!
Need I say it again: we forget! We forget that we are infinitesimal! We forget that we are but a blip!
Ladies and gentlemen, we forget that we are living in slow motion!
Monarch
From his throne at the foot of the oak,
A man once sat and surveyed his kingdom.
He saw the great fields of grass ripple before him,
Driven by the forceful gust of Nature’s potent whisper;
He saw the charging clouds pursue the fleeing horizon,
Rain bleeding from the wounds of the ailing injured;
He saw magnificent bolts of lightning
Illuminate the abounding chaos from heaven to earth,
Leaving behind evanescent bridges of fading crimson.
All of this he saw,
And he silently whispered,
“I am nothing.”
But then he closed his eyes,
And a hearty chuckle emanated from within him,
“But nevertheless, I am!”
And he laughed,
And the winds blew,
And the clouds bled,
And the lightning blazed,
And before long, he was not.
Footnote
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who buried himself in his writing, and I’d heard that words flowed from his fingers like promises from a harlot’s tongue. He lived a simple life: a chair for a throne, a desk for a kingdom, and a rusty, old typewriter his grand-father had left him, which he populated with his hopes, fears, and pensive meditations. A simple, black trashcan lay loyally by his side at all times, eager to nibble on the numerous balls of crumpled prose its master mindlessly chose to feed it.
He often wrote short stories in which the main characters were writers of short stories who were greatly criticized for creating characters that resembled themselves far too much, and he thought himself brilliant for it.
I often find myself wondering what became of him.
