Figure Drawing

It was his turn to trace her.

The microscopic folds of her wrist

Parsing a youthful vernacular,

Seemed to sigh

Under the current of his calloused refraction.

He prayed she could not feel him staring.

He watched her chest rise,

Like a magnet spinning hydrogen

Between two lungs,

Every atom composed 
Strings of electric soliloquies

That rewrote themselves

With every fall.

He could taste the heat

Coming off her;

She was a solar flare of quartz and rain.

His eyes flashed

And his fingers seized the carbon

That was slowly slipping from his grasp.  

His palms were black and smudged

From artless musing.

It was his turn to trace her. 

Desideratum

The necessary escapes

the threads of detail

and loses itself in pattern,

patchwork printing over loves and past loves

of the films we’ve unspooled

in our ribcage projectors.

We proceed in a manner of adaptation,

merging our bodies to slip in between

touch and time

moving through the confines of space –

our minds wandering the infinitum of paradoxes

that paint themselves over

with play and persuasion.   

We become children in a museum.

We crave the novelty of our own imaginations

and race each restless thought

to the edge of its frame.

We tilt the world

to watch one canvas bleed onto the next

and wait for gravity to surrender

so we can call it beautiful.

And of all the perfect absurdities,

we grow up 

to lose their basic necessity. 

Standing Room Only

Saturday nights are filled with standing room only’s and awkward cocktail shuffling. You arrive late to be denied a cushy view of soul jazz serenades and chromosome-shaking harmonies that immediately erase the ego conflict you may just have had with the doorman, who could really care less that your bra size gets you in free at the Roadhouse. 


As your feet find their space amid the black and the ivory of cross-legged luxury, it glides through your fingertips and grips the last breath of your pulse, renewing each blood cell as if its vibrations were your oxygen. Your entire body beats in cadence with the unassuming bass line, once the synchronicity of strings softly withdraws its intoxicating caress. Your lips don’t even feel the vodka as it marries the vermouth and loses itself inside of you. Bridges arch themselves in your somatic fluidity and flick their licks upon your tongue.

Kissing never felt this good.

You let yourself fall in love with your eyes closed, waiting to weaken with every undulation. And in that moment, you realise that Saturday nights are better left to standing room only’s. 

Excerpts (2009-2011)

1. There’s a man who lives           stairs.
                                               p
                                           u


He paints god on the walls
And holds his rosary beads
Until daylight f   a
                              l                   
                         
                         l
                             s
Through the c   ra c    ks of his window pane



2. We read controversy as false delusion,
Sipping saccharine wine to ease reality
And condemning his perception
For the lull(lulled babies)abies we pay to be sung



3.Home is our asylum and our hospital bed,
Our Bell Jar of softer compassion
Where we become our own cellmates;
Soulmates, sleeping in the same sheets
And speaking from the same tongue
                                                                   
                                                                                                         at last.



4. And you still look stunning in the dark



5. in a world that recoils to human touch we look for a cure under the veins of influence a venom that seduces our scruples and fuses our perspectives to match its AB blood type a recipient to every donor weighing down our eyelids as we medicate our hearts because the world looks better on rose-colored pills

6. But in the end, they will all sound like turquoise

And speak like velvet,

Dance with their own silhouette,

While making love to you with their eyes.

7.YOUR NARCISSISM DOESN`T NEED(S) MORE LIPSTICK.



8.We are all impaired in this perfection,
Granted fault instead of reason,

C₆H₁₂O_6(s) + 6O_2(g) → 6CO_2(g) + 6H₂O_(l) 

                                                                                                              

We fumble into vulnerability.

9. et je te donnerais mon cœur s’il arrêterait de fondre à ton toucher 

10. For silence reveals more
Than the mouths who’ve tied up too many tongues,
They presstheirlips against the quiet
And wait for their turn
To kiss complication
Good night.

Kinaesthetics

Every knot wraps its musculature

Around pockets of nitrogen,

Distending insecurities,

Contracting capillaries,

Denying them their freedom

From a bled-to-mend body.

Ligatures recoil with every breath

As needled therapy

Digs into scarlet fibres;

Extracts of memory dissipate

In a current of blue,

Their blank slates wiping clean

Every strand of excess pride.

I’m no superhero,

Wide eyed and wonderful,

But I’ll play the part

Until my body catches me,

Lying to redeem itself,

To make sleepless of itself

To make time for more space

To live outside of itself;

To reassure my ego

That this indulgence

Can extend beyond

The human kinaesthetic.

But I’m sipping sedatives

To a slow twitch,

Waiting for these lungs to catch up

With the marathon in my mind,

Waiting for this heart

To quit beating for every love

That holds me irresponsibly intimate

With eyes and lips

That don’t live here anymore. 

And if I could, I’d separate myself in two

To split this feeling in my chest,

Leave more room for you to fill

And less for me to abuse. 

But I'm no superhero,

Wide eyed and wonderful,

I'm just playing the part

Until my body catches up with me. 

Memory Box

I feel you stroke sunlight 
From under my skin,

Catching nuances with your fingertips

In the curve of my spine,

Kissing small collisions

Of nature’s designs

Slowly, patiently, intimately –

Your words, oscillating

Above bedspread covers,

Loosening algorithms,

White and warm in morning wake;

How they unfurl

As if extensions of our breath,

Ebbing, so slow and bare

From a palate

Grown familiar with your cadence,

With the pauses in your language,

With the way your lips taste

When you smile.

I can feel your thoughts

Trace parallels on my tongue,

Their lines stumbling upon letters

Of another past,

Where dozens of envelopes,

Filled with pages worth a lifetime of ink,

Wait for you to open them.

If our bodies could lie

Forever in this bed,

Rereading stories to each other

By touch,

Tracing light from its refraction,

And feeling nothing

But the comfort of this simplicity,

Our hearts wouldn’t have to break into postcards

Made to fit love

In five justified lines.

But we make memory boxes

Out of our minds,

And move on from moments

Of impressing nostalgia,

Saving our ellipses for another morning

Where the sheets under which we sleep

Can once again feel like they’ve been lived in. 

Abstracts of Existence

Candle light flickers

In the reflection of crystalline eyes–

The glow of meditated musing

Breathes pencil wisps of peculiar insight,

Curling upwards and out of existence,

Only to return to the ethereal light

As if to form an endless train of thought.

Conversations replay in each cerebral node,

Firing words into electric nothingness

To awaken a nocturnal consciousness

Where belief unearths the fear

Of failing to find truth in the now,

Of uprooting a soul anomaly

Whose origins are too deep to materialize

And too devout to relate to

The regression of humanity,

Our purchased sense of self,

And the simulation of our insecurities.

Spherical oceans search for the nearest tear ducts

As the blue begins to sketch 

Continuums

          In each curve 

                       of 

                       an 

                    iris 

                pulse,

Drawing portraits of the internal

Onto mirrors of human potential.

Illusions begin to dissipate

And the dark divulges the depths of its creation:

Imagination breathes through a body of questions,

Feeling, freeing, remembering

Of love what cannot be understood

Inside illusive formalities –

Parodies of reality

That revel in false sensitivities –

These societal models made visual

To prove to our physical

That love is another market transaction:

A set of benefits

Taken from the pension

Of a slowing heart’s existence;

An incentive for living in the future

When the flaws of the present

Can no longer pretend to sleep

Under feathered retribution

As their pasts keep beating the body into emotion

Instead of releasing it from its own skin–

How fragile all of our hearts have become.

We are taught to survive

In a world of statistics

Where each accomplishment

Fills our measuring cup of self-worth

With accolades of constructed perfection.

We accept ourselves

According to audience applause

And the ways in which we can be loved

Instead of our infinite capacities

Through which we are able to love.

We forget we are more than just skeletons

In soft-shell cover-ups,

More than blood and genetics

And sensory extremities,

More than the emotions

We ascribe to each organ

And our nervous system of excuses.

We are more than texts

And the histories that define us;

More than the products of academia

And the figures that pay our mortgages.

We are more than just an assembly line future –

More than what we give ourselves credit for.

We are more than what we perceive;
We are without of what we perceive,

Yet we fear that what we are not

Will change who we have yet to become.

Descending a mythological metaphor

Where two hearts marry in a cherrywood casket,

The foundations of a better life

Are paved along the walls of graveyard hollows;

6 foot intrusions into nature’s rebirth

Where dirt beds and scripted eulogies

Preserve the fear in tradition.

While a deeper reality exists above

The burial grounds of today’s consensus,

We keep digging for salvation

Instead of breathing it in,

Convinced that destiny lies beneath us

And not within each of us –

How lost all of our hearts have become.

As we place our trust in wealthy hands,

Our love in selective memory,

Our health in tomorrow's technology,

And our futures in timetable deadlines,

We struggle to question

Whether we are living to be

Or living to do.

Each of us holds the answer to truth

But we cannot unlock it

When apathy and ignorance

Make for comfortable bedfellows;

Reach into the heart that was once unbroken,

And revive the love that gives light to the soul –

Awaken the unconscious from this century’s sleep

And begin to see

That life is more than mere existence. 

Anaesthesia

Reasoned silence beats blood

Under the skin of this tambourine,

Teaching wooden fingers to thread love

From a man-made machine;

As needles quilt linens

Into bedspreads of boundaries,

I sleep in blankets of inhibition,

Learning to sew nerve-endings

On pillowed intimacy,

So that I can fall asleep feeling

More than just the requiems of a synthetic reality.

I operate under requisites,

Painting premature canvases

With explicit habit,

Embellishing stylized scripts

To match postmodern wit,

And anatomizing body after body

For a language more complex

Than the usual tendency

Hoping they’ll study me with the same tenacity

As his anaesthetic human art

Because blue eyes can’t be the only colour to coalesce this heart. 

M.D.

A swell in blood pressure

Soaks through the tables

Of a disposable weekend vice,

Pooling across a wreck of unruly smiles

And lazy eyelash love

To sink its teeth in soft confessions

The lights dim further down our bodies  

And lace our hands in fingertip memory:

I'm running my mind over your mouth

To recall the way you taste,

Your kiss tempting poison and pills

In the same uneasy breath...

If we could all seal our lips

And prescribe opiates to our hearts,

We could trade doctorates for liquid cures

And censorship for talkshow truth.

Every tongue-slide seeking therapy

Could turn our mouths into educated scholars

With unlicensed intentions

And literary pasts

Where our names would only be remembered

To fit each of our faces.

A medical itinerary will define our psychology,

Wire every colour in a heartbeat

To play amongst our words

And sleep outside the doors of our ears

Because science seems to hold more logic

Than the loveless hearts of selfish youth;

And so my faults fall impatiently

From an arrested decorum.

Every soul in the room

Peering unconsciously

Through a pair of static eyes,

Holds neither envy nor desire

For a body of seconds in a timeless night,

But my words just seem to spin silk

Around the heads of numbed reality.

Only when the sugar begins to seep from my veins

Will I learn to drink my own remedies.

III

Je suis ton secret,

ton à part,

rien qu’une silhouette

qui rumine au fond de ton cerveau,

une indulgence,

une facilité éphémère,

une didascalie qui serait mieux avertie

d’arrêter son cinéma

derrière les rideaux.

Et tu diriges ton monde

comme si chaque moment était une scène manquée :

imparfaite, incomplète, insolente

On arrête et on recommence.

On arrête et on recommence.

On arrête

et on recommence

jusqu’à temps que l’épuisement ralentit le tournage

et la lucidité de ton acte

dévoile une lassitude

transpirante de tes paupières :

Ta finesse orchestrale,

Dévêtue d’un silence audacieux

Se détend dans un siège

Parmi le velours et le vide;

Son corps de bois

Feigne un repos mérité

Comme si son autonomie lui dépendait,

Comme si les fils au bout de ses doigts

N’étaient jamais reliés à ton cœur.

Dramaturge,

Tu pourras m’écrire plus belle dans tes rêves

Une muette dans ton manuscrit,

Complaisante entre des lignes

Rythmées, fluides, répétées –

Elles sonnent si joliment dans le noir.

Mais je ne suis qu’une analepse somnambule,

Ondulante entre tes délires et ta direction

Renonçant mon innocence à l’écran

Pour l’équivoque que tu m’assumes.

Et à chaque scène,

Nous restons figés sur nos mots

croisés dans chaque quotidien matinal,

Nos intimités se réconfortent

A chaque gorgée de café,

Préoccupant nos lèvres

D’une habitude si assoupie

Que nous n’osons plus résoudre

Les complexités qui se cachent

Dans nos jeux de mots,

Nos banalités prétentieuses,

Nos prétextes inutiles

Qui ne cessent de nous faire vivre

Dans un faux éternel.

Mais lorsque ce théâtre millimétré,

Collectionnant la beauté

Avec un magnétisme argenté,

Lâche un dernier soupir

Avant que le rouleau

Trouve la fin de son négatif,

Elle rallume ta réalité

Et te remet ton cœur emboîté,

Ta perfection enivrée,

Ta vérité inventée

Comme si de rien n'était,

Comme si on ne s'était jamais rencontré

Comme si cet amour n'avait jamais existé. 

Centre Street Platform

The streetlights glitter

under an onyx-speckled sky,

Winter’s miniatures play stars for the evening

in the fabric of its dark velvet coattails

A classic nighttime attire,

draped like stage curtains

over a backdoor balcony

softens its lip 

to lace its fingers around the frosted tips of a breathless kiss

Beaded deliquescence,

soaking the shadows of a silent solace,

disappears with the arrival of another

period in an extended sentiment of a sentence…

and the words trail off without being spoken

like smoky Friday school afternoons:

ashen shapes spiraling out with every expiration,

hypnotizing the eyes of innocent desires

as if the mysteries of a heart’s phonetics

were whispered in each smoke ring.

A fevered pulse beats under the faintest voice

a pretty Girl’s heart swells in a Boy’s embrace

her departure impressing upon last night’s choice

his hands clasp around her waist like a corset enlaced - 

She should have practiced breathing.

Haunting the curves of a weary track,

the train ghosts into tomorrow

its chains clink sleepily

against the metal ground

as its wheels take rest between blankets of snow.

She waits behind the yellow of a do not cross

for a way out of fate

and her skeletons’ beds,

for a life that will blush her vacant heart red,

for the doors to sweep open

and release her from his touch,

for a present that could rewrite this instance as such.

She stares into the starry bodies

blinking from inside,

their lives thawing through every sealed window pane

like his smile in her eyes - 

She should have practiced crying.

Winter picks up the space between their warmth,

white flecks filling a translucent outline

of leaving footprints

heel to toes and heel to toes

her presence still lingers in the midnight dust

but the chimes have sung their goodbyes

and the yellow has turned to black

and the streetlights have closed their eyes

and taken the coattails off their backs

Winter’s miniatures have fumbled in their script

to crack the sky in this velvet eclipse

a canvas of white,

bursting from the only breathing heartbeat

out of this nighttime tuxedo,

the only heart beating off the centre street platform 

Vinyl

Plush, upholstered booths

Shadow the slender silhouettes

Of red-lipped mysteries,

Breathing smoke out of velvet cigarettes

And sipping liquid sex appeal

As if they’d been paid to photograph

Black and white –

Their fingers muse along

The ashes of a dark morning,

Their gaze slipping between ice cubes of ecstasy,

And down the throat of a jaded bartender

Who’s seen too many candles burn out to the night –

They seemed to own the place.

Raspy melancholy wraps its thorns around their heels

Like a needle digs into vinyl;

Jukebox violins begin to play

From the mouth of a mechanical change-purse

As midnight men reveal their faces

Under dusty luck and charm

To find that tonight won’t end

In placid conversation.

Finely woven legs uncross

One by one,

Sinking their toes into the tapestries;

Red and gold tassels

Wake writhing

From the unmistakable caress

Of illusive grace.

Stroking secrets from beneath the concrete floor

Like the satin touch of working sensuality,

They tease the nape of each habitué,

Willing to tempt himself

Of more than the regular invitation.

Their spirits seemed to do the talking,
Their clamour seemed to do the smiling,

And with rose-stem heels

Untangled from the weary threads

Of seamless mosaics,

Coupled legs slip out of stillness

To sway in musical time.


Hazy in smoke-filled attraction,
Their casual seductions 

Begin to rise above the nightly lyrical,

Stirring a lucent mystery

From the comforts of her plush aesthetics

And the debris of lonely red-lipped filters.

With a raven curl rolling loosely down her cheek,

She dips into the carpeted ceramic

To lift the needle off the vinyl

She did not want to dance tonight.

sleeptalking

Fleeing time won’t end this fight

When you’re fishing for words in a desert well

Waiting for inspiration to bite

And nostalgia to lift its spell

So that the body can remedy

The drought of propensity

In its north to west trajectory.

Its scintillating circuitry

Reroutes of pasts and histories

What today’s weatherman cannot forecast:

A logic left to gypsies and barefoot arts,

Alleyway pocket change and lucky pennies,

Coups de cœur et coups de foudre,

To explain why our lips never move

As fast as our hearts.

We spin webs out of dreams

To slip under the silk

Of what unconsciously frees

The truth from its pages,

The mental manifestos

From their lofty cages,

This writer’s block from a canvas’ empty spaces –

Because falling asleep

Needs neither charm nor eloquence

To relieve the mind of its mysteries.

And so we fall in to feel free.

We fall asleep to create

Perfect dialogs of sentient intimacy

Where speech beguiles

Every bone in a frozen body –

It makes the blues blush silver

Under the moons of fairytale eyes,

And paints the shadows of their irises

With brush tip syllables;

All to let its nighttime creativity

Make us believe that we love better

In our imaginary.

Pixels of three

Weave their primaries

Around our artist dreams,

Our static screens of faded l-ve

That live lightless and silent

In unawakened vacancy.

But the dark can only keep us quiet for so long

So bundle up baby

And press your lips against mine,

You don’t want your words to catch cold tonight.