Untitled [it was supposed to be a song]

You've got a tiny freckle on your arm
Beneath your wrist, it dapples pale skin.
I touched it with a naïve lover's charm
You flinched away with familiar chagrin.

Now, I know you're not one for compliments
A "thanks" and bashful smile's below you
I built not pedestals but monuments
I hoped you'd be able to climb onto.

Paperbacks lay in scores, scuffed by your gaze,
The austere piles of which still linger,
Your cigarette smoke formed your guileless haze:
Pinched between your middle and first finger.

We danced, from ruffled bedsheets to stone floors,
In arabesques of clumsy solace
Your collars, opened by your shirt's soft doors,
Bore gales till erosion made them flawless.

You've got a pretty large scar on your arm
Upon your wrist, a scratch of pale skin,
Rivulets of red and blue course on through
The crack from where those pedestals caved in.

Filial Piety

My father lived with his head in his hands. Those clumsy, boisterous fingers forced the keys of even the most fragile laptops to be as robust as a typewriter, yet tragedy softened them enough to perfectly form a cradle for his temples, hastily pushing brow to receding hairline. It was as if the very gesture begged the memory of the one instance he ever let himself remain in that position of expressive acquiescence. The morning Grandpa died, he let those eyes –that perennially tender, bloodshot gaze– sink into the contoured blackness of his palms, possessed by a sudden need for paternal comfort he had so vehemently denied when it was there for the taking.

I'll always remember my mother as a figure of activity in the small hours. The lonely orange glow of the landing light was the dawn to her, the only light by which she made the distinction between white and black in my laundry basket. All the while I feigned a motionless slumber. My lasting memory of England isn't of the dreary rolling hills, or even the melancholy fluorescence of a suburban corner shop, but of her silent crouching on the day of our departure. Paintbrush in hand, she dappled at the scratches of deep pumpkin in our living-room walls with all the meticulousness of Michelangelo and diffidence of Van Gogh. Sometimes I wonder if she'd have her head in her hands more often, too, if they weren't always holding something.

And then there's my only sister, with her Pre-Raphaelite hair and her laugh always accompanied by a reckless tilt of the head. For years I had myself believe that a laugh that juvenescent would render her immune to growing up; give her the power to transcend a world filled with inexorable occurrences: brine-soaked pillows and teary gasps, untouched dinners and text messages that knock the wind out of you. However hard I try to maintain this faith in her preservation, the innocuous pastel blemishes of last summer's memories are still tainted by the crimson in her cheeks, which somehow found its way to the edge of her knotted sleeves.

Brine

I need to stop shaking
(and and calling it the tremors of undiagnosed Anxiety)
I need lithium
I need a friend who tells me not to apologise and
Who understands, with weary acquiescence,
That showing compassion for someone like me
Is cushioning the blow
For a bird on its hundredth crash-landing.

I need to be an only child –just for a second–
So that I can tease the surface of my forearm
Without hearing guilt crack like a sledgehammer
Against the pristine sanctity of an oath "I won't
If you won't" I need to stop feeling
Sadness like a gastric band around my internal organs;
Inviting my waist to implode as each
Appetite languishes where it once waxed
Indomitable.

I need to stop shaking.


[Disclaimer: I feel the need to state that this is merely the voice of a persona –wouldn't want to arouse any unnecessary concern!]