parched wind, salt‑tongued
from the far edge of the bay,
licks the last drift of
mauve jacarandas.

in the tin‑roof blush,
I hear the slow heartbeat
of soil— patient, cracked,
still keeping the memory of rain.

I walk the market’s narrow spine,
hands grazing mango skins,
the laughter of vendors lifting
like myna birds into a sky
just beginning to remember itself blue.

and when night comes,
the stars lean low
enough to touch my forehead—
reminding me this place
is both root and horizon,
a country that holds me
as much in absence as in light.





.

You spoke first, or maybe I did—
the sentence already half-shaped,
like a bridge built from opposite shores
trusting the air to hold its centre.

Time had worn the corners smooth,
but its echo still rang true—
a low note in the hollow of memory,
your cadence arriving before your name.

glass sweat /
brass vines breathe /
sun-caged in clock‑teeth /
one amber falls —
the quell is whole

“a clockwork orangerie”

gears click  
in humid glass  

copper vines coil  
around brass struts  

oranges glint  
like captive suns  
hinged to silver branches  

steam drifts—  
a hiss-purr among pistons  
petals unfurl  
to the pulse of time  

shadowed aisles  
radial rods pumping  
light into crystalline blooms  

one dimpled fruit  
slips free  
into a glass basin  
and rings  
into silence.






.

“A Recipe for Disaster”

Take one part overconfidence,
two parts sleepless ambition,
a pinch of untested theory,
and a generous pour of
“what could possibly go wrong.”

Fold in the wrong crowd
at the right time, stir with a bent spoon
under flickering light, and season with
whispers you shouldn’t have heard.

Bake at the heat of the moment until the
edges burn and the center collapses.

Serve immediately —
while it’s still smoking,
before anyone realises
you’ve set the table for chaos.




.

a poem collapses language into feeling.
connection isn’t absent—it’s shattered.
grief lives in the space where meaning fails.

Love, once central, now spirals—
fragmented, ******, falling inward.
It doesn’t speak. It disintegrates.

"eye of the beholder"

Inside the iris, a soft glitch—
not failure, a doorbell. Dust
rings the bell of the pupil: enter,
bring whatever light you carry.
Every eye is a darkroom,
every blink a shutter fall.

You call my freckle a dead pixel;
I map it as a star that never learned
to quiet itself. Same speck, two skies.
Your lens likes the hard-edged truth,
mine drags its finger through the wet paint.
Neither of us is wrong. That’s the mercy.

We look at the chipped mug. You see fracture,
a hairline future of split mornings.
I see a riverbed, mineral and patient,
a place to wash the tongue of the day.
Some images refuse to choose between
wound and water. That’s where I drink.

When the frame tilts, colours misbehave:
violet stepping out of its lane, green
ghosting the edge of a leaf like rumour.
Chromatic aberration, the textbook says.
I call it the soul trying out new shoes,
refusing to walk heel-to-toe for anyone.

In your gaze, the city is all scaffolds,
angles knitting themselves into verdicts.
In mine, windows fog and write back.
Compression noise makes lace out of smoke,
JPEG artefacts blessing the brickwork
with reasons to be looked at twice.

Trust the blur, the image said,
and I do: not as surrender,
but as consent to the many versions.
Your blur is a fog I can swim. Mine is
a veil with fingerprints on it,
names smudged into revelation.

The child squints, invents a coastline
in the static of a late-night TV.
The elder polishes the cataract’s cathedral,
letting light arrive as it decides.
We inherit a thousand ways to see;
we choose which ghosts to feed.

Beauty is not a verdict but a verb,
rendering itself at different speeds.
In one eye, the face is chorus.
In another, it is a single bell.
We meet in the middle distance—
and call that distance human.

So, here: stand with me at the mirror
where mercy pixelates into ghost.
Let our grayscale longing lift its chin,
let nostalgia host our clumsy data,
and in the soft glitch near the iris,
find the world we’ve each been making.



.

On the ridge where borders kiss,
a lion learned the wolf’s quick heart,
a wolf learned the lion’s long breath.

They tied a city to their quarrel,
stitched an altar through a throne,
and walked the same ascent until
the feud forgot its name.

Brother, said the friend,
and the stones remembered.

Beauty isn’t verdict.
            It moves—
     slow, sudden.

One eye sees chorus.
      One hears a bell.

We met in the middle.
      Called it human.

          No greetings.
      No apologies.

Just the sentence,
already burning.

Silence held the shape.
        We stepped in.





.