School

And she had to learn,
That all things exquisite,
Came with allied ambiguity.
The tiring hunt for the silver lining.

She had to die a little,
Each time love turned his back on her.
Before she grasped the pattern,
And wove her answers around it.

To grow
Is to recognize limits.
To feel the texture of imperfection,
Rub up against the flesh of life,

And despite everything,
To look up at the infinite stars,
And still be able to wonder,
And smile.

Serendipity

In the stillness
Of that quiet sundown,
An uneventful conversation,
Over a cup of tea,
And music.

Also the wordless exchange
Of soft glances and self-explanatory smiles,
In the comfortable silences in between.

What an unremarkable evening.
What an indelible memory.

Song of Reprieve

Writers look for a muse,
I only search for my own voice,
Timid and trembling,
Crouching behind the curtains of silent doubt.

If music ceased to weave blankets
Around the fissures of my wounded soul,
If brushstrokes from the past
Failed to paint a smile on my face,

No personal versions of Maud Gonne would suffice.
The sealing seam of hope would then split open,
Bleeding a river of blue songs,
From an old, discarded shadow that used to be me.

The Uncertainty of Answers

I met your wandering face,
The intimate stranger in your eyes,
I waited for the colours to fade,
I was told that shadows are full of lies.

The details of the numbered weeks,
Stretched into an unconscious blur of time.
Yesterday's paper became today's coffee cup coaster.
I was a lost cause, tossed around in the ocean of your thoughts.

If only I held your face as tenderly,
As I held my steadfast opinions,
Relentlessly stubborn as the baking summer sun,
I changed my mind in haste for all the wrong reasons.

Lines have been drawn,
The distance has multiplied.
The mirror has an uncanny way
Of reflecting the wisdom of time.

The process of reason is tedious,
The pattern repeated, broken, and resuscitated furiously.
Countless decisions have been hurled out of the window.
A leisurely answer may arrive any moment now.

The Door

I hope
You aren't like the door in my dream.
To keep walking along the corridor,
Desperately fumbling along, groping for the handle,
Eventually trying to forget that it even exists.

Sometimes the search
Feels like looking for my glasses underwater.
Blurry, like night vision through a rain-swept windshield.
As if I could fall off the edge in the darkness any minute.

Nothing hurts like the fog of doubt.
Not knowing whether to keep going,
Or stop trying,
And retreat with self-fabricated dignity.

Sometimes it's good to hurt.
To have life fling you into its deepest abyss.
The rock-hard bottom teaches you lessons.
Fulfillment might just be out of reach.

Or maybe,
I'm not dreaming.
Maybe the door is staring right at me,
And I have my eyes closed.