By the seaside I sat and waited,

from dusk until dawn.

The tides ebbed and subsided

and soon came another season

that the boat moored at night

had the thousand days strip its name;

when once it sailed under the moonlight

it now drifts listless by its sagging frame.

(My dear)even a stream will scrape a rock

where it lies on a shallow riverbed.

If the black, empty sea would only mock

should I ask the stars to wait (for you) in my stead?

What of bluebells and cherry trees

or letters sewn across the sky,

the stars may fall, stricken on their knees

yet I have no tear for them to supply.

I do not care either for honeysuckle,

butterflies slaughtered and slain.

The wind, enraged, a hymn cannot quell

will have to blow its fury in vain.

Alas, you may praise Neruda's pen

but to me his hands are stiff and foreign.

I read your poem and in a sudden

a flood rushes across my vein -

(Like) rain at the peak of monsoon,

the gutters fill and the rivers swell.

Water, ink, feelings trampling on,

the paper drowns, I drown (in you) as well.

When I was fruitless, barren as the soil in summer, you came in and still thought me, fair. You waved your hands like a master and made markings in the air as if putting Xs on invisible spots you saw life where I deemed as putrid rots. I thought how foolish, this breath in vane! Yet your expert hands casted seed and grain and planted over the vile, your heart instead saw as worthwhile. If I was dead, there is now blood in my vein - as red as the roses, drunk in the rain.

I am that still pond in the warmest of days, when even the wind forgets to blow and laze. Where beneath the surface the fish circles, drawing eights with each swim - and a boy picks a stick or throw a stone. And in that action made joyful ripples.

Who are you, quick-paced as the wind in a storm, that you come and ransack the things I own in one, mighty blow. All I built in all my years, I watch them go. Who are you, to cross and trespass. How can a heart ache in so many ways - You throd and stomp, and pound then snip, and without conscience nor shame, makes another rip.

And I am lost, while I think I am either here or there. I wonder if you can tell I am floating, as light as fine dusts dancing midair - while I am locked in the stronghold two arms built. My cheeks blush red while I fly alongside clouds in my head.

A More Permanent Solution

I was ink that stained your skin

until the water ran and washed you clean,

perhaps then in my next life,

I would ask them, gods, to make a

a knife.

I wonder wether it is my eyes or my heart, which is at fault between the two when I see you as vivid as day before me, yet see a stranger too. As if both our youth were corrupted, how my senses fail me so! Your eyes then bright are dead and you smile with teeth, all crooked.

Perhaps on the morrow when the sparrows sing, and the tulips 'a kaleidoscope in spring, perhaps then my heart, now old and waning will emerge as robust as when it beat steadfast for love at sixteen, safe from the perils that heartbreaks bring - then what ache and doubt it harbored within it could discard and beat, without.

I'm sorry even the blackest coffee cannot desensitize the bitterness.

On Greed

Some days we are the fly, some days we are the web, some days we are the spiders spinning a death bed at a lonesome corner - how these fine, quiet things will deliver us to our ends, the silken threads, our wings.