ajulea

When bullets shower down like assorted chocolates from a blue star-shaped piñata at a little kid’s birthday party, God, whom do you pray to?…

I swallow my pride like pills and I swear it will only be a short trip down memory lane before sleep kicks in. It is easier to overdose I suppose and lose your way when you’re on your own – the four am ceiling is my favourite…

I was away on a hillside vacation, when I received an SMS, an SOS in all caps, from an unknown number. but my phone was in silent mode and I didn’t see it till later. I suppose it was my plant asking for help, but I guess I’ll nev…

on bad days my body is a block of dried terracotta a lump of clay rigid beyond moulding I sit on the black and white tiled floor my vulnerability is proportional to the height from which I fall on good days my body is a rusty machine which…

the skyline yawns pink. orange ice cream clouds drift by. dusk is when all my tales begin. I write poems with bleeding ink the way a mother sends up a prayer for a damaged daughter – desperately. I’m a dogeared leaf out of a yellowe…

This ground glass heart is a few heartbreaks old, and I see the light pour in….

crowded streets sigh, the two-way traffic stands still today and I wonder if the primaries and secondaries of zebra crossings and traffic lights are the only colours that keep you afloat. (or do big cities suffocate you?) our ha…

I hang grey cotton soaked in worry, like water that fills me to the brim, up to dry in cerulean blue skies and call them clouds on sunny days, like today, when high winds drown out sad songs and red wallflowers bloom from cracks i…

I press red oleanders in between yellowed pages of a journal bound in black leather skinned from a frozen heart which had begged for a simple eulogy (and a poison bloom is as good as any). This circulatory system housed more glue than blo…

I stranded my poems on storefronts and on deadend streets in crisscrossed lanes of the maze I called my city. They looked to me like three year old boys lost at the fair in the country heat, silver ribbons dancing in their eyes three seconds b…