ajulea

This is a survival poem that clawed its way up the ziggurat of buried ideas and reached the temple top to pray for an escape. Fresh ink drips off the edges of the walls like guilt on a retrospective day. It camouflages into sunshine smile…

My dreams rise up, inky and wet, blue, black and red – a testament to all the bruises that birthed them. They surround me, like smog at dusk, and call me an imposter. I tell them I’ll write about it, but the bile in my throat chokes me. Two…

Milk splashes on cereal and a drop makes its way to the black granite countertop. I pour my love into a bowl of white bone china, and serve it to you with hesitant hands. “I see a chip in this one, a crack in that ; this bowl has lost it…

Purple plums and dangling grapes leap out of living room art mocking empty fruit baskets, while the monsoons rumble outside – loud and silver with a hint of gold, swallowed by periodic darkness like you and I. I wear half a heart on each sleev…

I looked out at my checkered lawn, where sunshine and shadow played tag and daydreams trod slightly in the slanted sunbeam soaked half light. Inspiration, like sand in an hour glass, drained out until I turned myself upside down – a cold…

I wrote our names on the wooden bench in South Park lane, at the very end, with a fountain pen and erasable ink because relationships are fragile things with weathered wings perched on vines, withering….

I warm my hands around autumn like it were a cup of tea, clinging to the heat until the flavoured water is down the sink or down the throat, and the minute hand does not run any faster than it did when the water came to a boil. I fol…

i. The muddy moon hangs low in my window pane, rusty red on the edges like my love for you, strong but tired, strong and tired. ii. November nostalgia settles like a crescent wound between my sternum and a floating rib, the cavity cold…

October, you’re the backyard harvest of homegrown goodbyes, packed into cardboard boxes with holes in them, like pumpkins from the patch. You’re the sleepy sunbeam that throws longer shadows on questions that were dug up from their graves…

It’s half past twelve and some ticks, neon blue lights on dark streets flicker in storefronts and fizzle out; the rain slows down to a drizzle now. During the dive, the clouds confess I reek of moonlit loneliness. Is it a sin to feel nothing…