The builders let me visit here
free to roam the halls.
They’ve built some walls
and stairs
to upper floors with streaming light
and to a darkened basement.

I’m honored to be allowed here
to write words on the wood
to see pages posted that could
render me speechless if I let them.
But instead, these writings of pain
these revelations of shame
are like knives that pierce my heart
and I pour it out on the floor
and ceiling and dark corners
through the windows
into the night
into the light.

The builders nail their dreams
and desperation and beams
of hope, desire and grief
and lattice of love and belief
trying to do their part to complete
the work of this edifice rising
each day each hour
we builders immigrants
looking for home.

My vacancy sign flashes in the night,
but love just drive on by...
And I wonder how I'll survive
in this empty room, my heart
left behind
...amp...

The broken barbed wire
wrapped around my wrist
like a blanket, not a bracelet.

A beetle catches raindrops
and bathes while hiding from fat clouds.

They are my steady friends,
the thunder booms, sirens at sea,
the watchtower that is never manned,
Yet the light casts blame in the face of a crab, scuttling and cackling
because he pinches past death, and
the fishermen fell overboard,
The net cascaded in slow motion
Deeper past the place they found my matted hair. A seagull landed on my legs.

The papers did not have the story with the name. My face puffy, swollen belly, crackers present on the lips that could not stop smiling.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me; if you dust off my skin enough, you'll see traces of the sighs we exchange — spilling down gracelessly, they bruise a fragile skin. i have mastered the art of naming them after wild lilacs.

maybe for once, i can say that i am soft enough to grow flowers on my wrists. my lungs. my sternum — all the parts of me that hurt.

but i know too well all about screaming in barren lands. i have thrown my poems in a forest fire. i have forgotten how to breathe without hands around my neck. i have wished to fall on a sword, way too many times to still call these open wounds as bruises — these bruises as flowers — these flowers as soft.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me — kindly, and yet, how can i tremble over gentle things? maybe pain isn't what it always is, and i wish to unlearn this language — the mother tongue, whose every word i know by heart. and maybe one day, when it sighs my name, i finally will stop sighing back.

but now, this bed is caving in under all these lilacs and glassy, distant eyes. oh, such a classic case of a girl gone mad at the sight of sunbeams on dying flowers — aching in silence, as she watches it all.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me. and outside, the sun rises in vain.

“To have loved you,
and wound myself:
heaven only knows why
I have succumbed to this emptiness,
darling, you have killed me by loving you– seconds, minutes, hours and lifetime.”

I used to cut my hair
for a new beginning, a newer look
to redesign the cover of this
simply- written opened book.

It seems necessity now cuts my hair,
leaving strands dull, blunt, no flair
a synonym of sorts,
sticking out here and there.
...amp