Truce at the point of departure

i try to get thingsbut things do not get gotten

facing the brick walls, someone said, ‘stupid’ is for other people. people that aren’t ours

i could have called her ‘stupid’but she was my mother. noise!more noise and a vomit of flaws

you will never recollect,nothing you will never forget,nothing when noise meets noisenothing even the air carries with it, violencewith things, indigestible, un-inhalable –annihilable:things rife with vehement nonsense

when we were donefighting, haggling done talking not talking screaming our heads off, fist-bunching into stoneswearing hot –huffing red –swallowing morsels of nonsense: we both felt like counterfeit kindred, like contraband parcelsimpounded at the customs check area

yet ‘stupid’ is for other people. people that aren’t ours.

i’m feeling older, older,feeling the failure of things –now,older, exhausted of alphabets, trying to make sense of nagging-language

mother and son, chagrinedshe wondering, why he –nearing forty is yet to be mad about any woman

or find love for keeps,in a city replete with love and music

then against the walls, our holey spines knockedlike jute sacks stashed with odds-and-ends, like a dumped sack from war,perforated with fatigue

then we found a way,magicked into bagsof sachet water,straining with contents within full –with reason to bust open

at the final notice of boarding passwe pressed against ourselves,squeezing tightuntil fluids trickle,

shot up, eye-wards –wet like freshwound-cuts bleeding clear fluid,our sockets leaking angst and pardon and healing,quietly with half-moon-salt-stained-smiles.

The Right To Not Be Right

She can’t see a speck, when he barks

She can’t hear a thing, when he yaps decibels

Arteries dry up, her lips pop open,but words refuse to collocate a defence

She can’t say back a thing, whenhe yells and walls holler words backin solidarity with him

fear ducts her nipples to her bended kneecaps,to stand now is to instigate more entropy

she’s leafing through pages of pain,the chapters fail her again

something feels like a tired riverweary from tasting its arid riverbank

feeding her with so much opium,and salad-dressing her down with oversized godshe is retching scads of sawdusts to his scud of words

inside her, things texture like steel-nails inchoately jumbled in a mortar mix of rising bile

yet every ‘wrong person’deserves the rightto be wrong,

allowed to be zig-zaggy to common-sense, suspicious of the truth –your truth,guilt curling up in her tummyuntil she finds good worthits goodness

because while you are mapped on this side of good seeing her

wrong, she’s on that side of wrongseeing you wrong –dizzy,weightless in dust of blame,half-starved of motivation.

Segregated cemeteries

We should thinkthat in death, as is with hungerdiscriminations and colourings,gendered ideas and versions of history willcollapse intosand,while bodies cohere unto the grains of the earth,when cadavers have nosay as to where to sleep,man still carvesfor them, a niche.

for a taste of honey

Though she lived in a farmhouse where her parents kept an apiaryand an aviary, not far from which stood blocksof tenements repurposed forlove-peddling

She speaks five dialects,but couldn't say "No" in any language.

She claims, if they had told her about the birds and the bees she wouldn't have got stung too early by bees bellyful of honey.