chaiNboli

You are a wound I return to again and again,  a bruise that blooms in the darkness  of my chest.  Your touch is a sacrament,  a promise of ruin. In the hollow  of your neck,  I find a terrain of wonder and terror.  You are a disaster  I've chosen,  a storm I've learned to navigate. Your body  a threshold I cross into the country  of my own undoing where the borders of myself  are rewritten in the ink of  your fingers. I find you everywhere; a torn sleeve a lost button,  a fragment of your hair lodged in the weave  of my shirt. Your eyes,  two wells  I fall into and emerge,  remade,  as if the water had washed away  the everything  I am drawn of  and I was new,  uncharted and soft. I am a river that  has changed course,  a mountain that has shifted its peak. I am a landscape transformed,  rewritten,  reborn. Your absence  is a door I keep trying to o...

Dear God, make my son's hands less like mine – less prone to fists, less inclined to break the things that cannot be mended. Let his fingers learn  to tremble with mercy, to hold the delicate threads  of another's sorrow. Teach him to  cup his palms  around the flame of a loved one's pain,  to warm it without consuming. May his touch be  a benediction,  a gentle breeze that stirs the ashes of  what's been lost. Let him learn  to handle the fragile,  with reverence and awe. And when the darkness closes in,  as it will, may his hands be  the ones that hold the light, that guide the lost  and the searching  through the wilderness of their own hearts.

The dawn's paw unfurls in the alley,  I recall the milkman's hands,  their veined maps,  as if charted by some restless sea. He, who would leave the bottles on our porch like offerings to a household god.  I remember only the hands, their slow crawl up the banister as he'd take the stairs,  mounting into a metaphor I want to forget . Summer's heat would thicken the air, and I'd watch, transfixed, as his fingers left prints on the glass, like a language only he could read. The milk would curdle, its skin a membrane between us, as if to contain what he'd done. Even now,  when I pour milk into my coffee,  I see those hands, their bruised geography, and my silence dying in it.

God visits your heart to weep Because it is a cinnamon garden where a temple lamp can't reach with its sighing light. Because a bird sleeps inside the bone dome of your skull,  chirping in its dream,  about lingering around  the pool of golden sunlight. Because you have familiarised the rhythm of pain, that now violence is your new gentleness.  Because yearning for nothingness sits in your fingernails, like a metaphor on a storyteller's throat. Because you are an asymmetrical cemetery built on marble floor of your mother's forgotten kisses, clenching to dead bodies of warrior butterflies who were lucky to fly for five days.  Because you are a sick lullaby, that is a hostage of webbed memory . Because you are an arrow, trying to hide in the corners of a circle so that you can't kill yourself. Because you are a burning ship, which lost its anchor and erasing thr smoke signals while drowning. Because in all your glory, you are sabotaging,  just like a god. So...