Placed at my feet one evening were four marvelous flowers. Oozing of Amber and whiskey, these perfumes dripped onto my feet. I stared up with the question: were you all plucked straight from my imagination? It’s as if this flora was only created to spark awe; the 5th element. I wonder if the width of these smiles is a message for me to flaunt mine? I wonder if we’re sitting in the same soul, simply counting time.

One time for the summer that leaves my jaw hurting from how much I’m smiling. One time for the lovers who keep me warm and safe. One time for this heart of mine; big, bold & enveloping the night sky. One time for impermanence and a changeable moment. One time for alchemy. One time for the strangers, I mean, Angels. One time for the street lamps that light the way. One time for serendipity. One time for divine orchestration. One time for hand holding. One time for time folding. One time, two time…

ruby red.

you rouse me. whirling colors in a radial spiral, you beam in many different directions - I have always liked my men tall with a soul flattened in a Great surrender. performing a prophecy by how he walks, plummeting towards destiny. labored talks and a drawl that tells me time only escapes me when I let it. a lisp that sounds like the crackle you hear when the record scratches, signaling a classic. you are a classic. and I can’t find a sliver of will in me that wants to hold you down. instead, everything in me desires to uplift you. inspire you and raise your degree as it were decreed. just for a minute, if you’ll let me.

the ground ate my crystal.

I fed the famished ground a crystal

under a tree that lives behind my home.

This is no allegory

Nor is this a metaphor

But a retelling, a narration

of how what lives

is beyond what we believe life to be.

These successions and crying out

Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So on that sweltering summer day

When the ground swallowed up

The Malachite I gave to a friend

And I dug and dug to find it again,

I heard a whisper from a cloud

Confessing that the soil was asking for me.

And in the many days I sat silently under this tree

Helped it form a kinship with me.

So when that very friend gifted me

that forgotten luminous green stone

thickened with speckles

the tree living in my backyard back home

lined with its vigorous soil, rejoiced.

And swallowed up that jade emblem, whole.

vocal chords.

tears of joy overflow and in my heart lives an echo I wish I could muffle. an echo so bright that it blinds me as I wake in the mornings. I send out letters into a doomed sea. and into that sea I throw these bottles filled with scrap papers, scribbled with prayers and hymnals from deep within the recess of my soul. and in these songs sit the hefty parts of me. parts that have never known softness and only sing jagged notes that cut up your kneecaps just from hearing them. songs sung purely out of hope, music born out of a desire. a desire that raged and rolled in me to be heard by The One I loved, most. The one with ears for my confessions. And hands for my innards. The one who lives gently placed over the space in my heart. The one who is closer to me than my own jugular. I vow forever to sing my tunes to you, as if this love in me is a well, never running dry.

how naive. 

did I know that one day, I would grow and that my enthusiasm would fade? The verses suddenly turned flat and I began singing in keys that were short, stifled and mingled with a scent of betrayal. my beloved lost the taste for my voice. I was sure of it and that rancid sea no longer flowed your love back to me. indeed it was doomed from the beginning, a whisper tells me. this sea, my letters and all the faith in the world could not convince me that the ocean was not swallowing up my insides. Becoming deaf to the tune of your love, I wanted to give up. Love like this is eternal and it will never fade. To the heart of a believer, this is an indisputable fact though all of me quaked with denial. 

My grandmother etched something into my soul when I was a child - that two steps towards the One warrants a love that rushes back, fifty-fold. 

And now the tears that stain my cheeks burn because I know You. I know where you reside and how deep in me you live. How you stretch over my body and call it Home. I know you so deeply that to house doubt would be a disservice to all the love you have revealed in me. tadakhar//maktuub … you were never silent from me but taught me what tune to listen for. refined my ear and showed me how frivolous love letters are when ultimately, you have never left me. you, as the everlasting breath in my body and me as the canvas with which you varnish - a love affair I would do nothing to rid myself of. 

I sing, again.