1

#

I’ve woken up to bad days
I’ve quenched my thirst for life
With inadequate sorrow
I’ve watched sunsets
I’ve watched the birds come home
I believe in coming home
I believe that life could be a lot worse
I have to consume life
In bad times,with faith
I have to live,
I have to believe in hope
Call it dangerous
But I have to,
Linger on, like a pale dot
In a manuscript
Washed away by
Monsoon

2

#

As I blink at life
Through the lens
of my tear stained eyes
To negotiate
The terms of my sorrow
No matter, how elaborate
My charade
I won’t return home
To a woman
Making soup, or just
Just, boiling some bones

3

#

Hope is a slaughterhouse
Belief is a graveyard
Sorrow is a lonely house
And loneliness is a prison
I carry them all,
In the fingertips of what remains
Of me

4

#

I walk around
Beheaded
Beastly in form and shape
I’m human
I’m in despair
And I have not, a song to sing
I’m in need of saving,
But it’s been sometime now, and I think
I’ll be all better tomorrow
I have to bite into the grandeur of hopeful tomorrows
That’s all I can do, to live
As I stare into the
Whirlpool on my ceiling
Every night
I think of drowning
But no one’s coming with me

5

#

And I believe,
In the spectrum of life
In the tired and weary, homesick memories
In love, that’s stranded in the desert between us
In wrecked houses with aching windows
In an identity of waiting
In lullabies sung by the dying
For the living
In canyons that run through broken femurs
And in silhouettes of worn out smiles
I believe,
I exist, I exist
I find myself, over and over
Again and again
In this strange life