My steps are careless
My soul runs wild
I float like dreams and nightmares
Enmeshed in the air
Of the night sky.
There was no remedy
To this ailing condition
Of beauty and terror;
Of good and evil,
Till you cast a spell
Apotropaic magic
That sliced through
My flesh and bones
Entrapped my heart
To a stagnant whole.
And now, though my soul
Runs wild at night
I have the sight of home.

-A.B.

-

If I were to remember you, I'd revisit the laughter faded under my blanket, when we shared our endless nights with endless discourses.
If I were to remember you, I'd remember staring upon the creases of your eyes as your lips spoke with passion.
If I were to remember you, I'd think of days you held me high when I was falling apart. You'd hold me close when I was distanced.

And I'll always remember you, for being there, for loving me, when I had forgotten to love myself.

-

To let you in on a secret,
I've never needed vodka, gin or rum
The night I was with you.

Intoxicating laughter, vision blurred
My dark room with tiny lights
Gloomy screens barely looked at
Fingers fumbling to get a grip on the second hand
Ticking, fading, appearing, enhancing, drowning
All in all the prosody, your storytelling
For I barely remember what was spoken

I lived that night as you blinked
An unintended spell, an unbecoming assurance
Magic that ends when clock strikes twelve
Yet a melody etched so deep
That the scar still oozes yearning.

-

I bend to rest my head on your shoulder,
You dither to find the proper posture;
So, I look at a star filled sky,
Meticulously spaced apart, without a speck of cloud;
I speak to a child,
All answers and no questions,
No folly, but perfection.
But the colours keep filling,
They keep crossing the lines,
Spilling in the spaces and punctuations.
Hold on, hold on! But you're gone—
Pacing with measured steps at each go.
The colours, filled to the brim, start dripping as I flinch.
I close my eyes, counting ten—a perfect number,
The perfect symmetry of my fingers,
The clamour of your unvarying reproval.

Tainted, I stand and strive and falter;
I tell myself of stories
Where crooked lines make a world.

-

A rainy day
Your dark, cold room
Tipsy from the rum
Lana Del Rey
A broken heart.

-

You break me up in thousand pieces and break me up in thousand more,
When your words fall hollow on the parchment, your eyes no longer read my soul.

You break me up in thousand pieces and break me up in thousand more
When your arms feel cold upon my skin, so does the voice, I so adored.

It breaks me up in thousand pieces and breaks me up in thousand more
When love was all I longed to feel, yet longing's all that I had sown.

-

Long distance relationships are difficult, but nothing compares to the bittersweet moment of longing, as there remains the last few hours of reuniting with the one you love.

As time syncopates, the longing intensifies, the stinging agony of separation, of parting, keeps lingering at the back of the mind.

Another wait. Another penance.

-

One of the issues of being clumsy is that of ending up with bruises that you aren't even aware of getting.
You notice them when they turn into a patch of black and blue.

Strange how our minds work in similar ways.

-

Funny thing about people who feel too much is that after a point, exhaustion hits so hard that they don't feel anything at all.
There's a comfort in that numbness like no other: like a hum you get adapted to; one that used to seem like lengths of discourses, seem nothing but a one-way monotone.

Funny thing about people who feel too much is that they sprout back to life with the thinnest glimmer of hope, with the faintest efforts of love.

-

And I looked at the night sky, while you spoke tonight--
The translucence of your voice, as dreamy as the flickering stars and moon, shrouded now and then by clouds of silver satin upon the Payne's gray sheath.
They appeared like yarns so old, so mystical, that I couldn't tell apart reality, until you paused to take a breath.
And as you spoke, the night reclaimed its magic, as the clouds traversed to foreign lands, to fill up the void of your absence.
And as you spoke tonight, I cloaked myself in wishful thinking; drenched in love and longing.

-