Happy Birthday, Armand

you are an event horizon,
a perfect black body
of gravitational monstrosity.
and i would never
be able to escape you.

you are a stellar black hole,
into which i
                     fell
               and
                          f
                            ell
and i'm
             fa
                 l
                     l
                  i
              n
                     g still.

i am alice spiralling into
a twisted dream
from which i'll never
wake.

you are the arcane, impenetrable fissure
in the spacetime continuum.
trapped in you,
i was ripped into shreds but
upon reaching
spacetime singularity
i have transcended
universes.

A Song of Marrows

i break your bones for breakfast

snapping into thirds your

fragile vertebral column.

i name your cervical vertebrae mary,

draw a pocket knife

and carve on it my name 
and words that i've never gotten around saying. 
S-O-R-R-Y over and over again
until the words overlap each other
and my fingers are coated with a fine layer of your
osseous dust. 

i name your thoracic vertebrae susan,

kiss it reverently

and burn it in a sacrificial flame.

the smoke curls smell of winter and faded dreams and
long hours of crying late into the night when
you thought i was asleep. 
i keep the ashes in your vintage
lidove umeni matchbox. 

i name your lumbar vertebrae katie,

braise it in pinot-noir with a dash of paprika,
whisk olive oil and capers and shallots
into the wine reduction. 
drizzle it lovingly over the crevices of your vertebrae

and suck the living hell out of

you. 

your kyphotic sacrum sits on the table

beside my bed 

because i am now alone.

Down the Rabbit Hole

This is one of those nights when you wake up groggy and disoriented and everything seems so distant and faraway and you find that you’re in the midst of giants. Your entire head vibrates excruciatingly as their thunderous footsteps make contact with the ground, one after the other, and the nerves in your temples are throbbing so vigorously it’s a wonder they didn’t explode into a mess of blood and capillaries. The giants are all around you, talking and laughing and occasionally one steps over you delicately - but other than that they do not seem to notice you. You’re watching them with disinterest until one of them leans down and grabs your shoulders and shakes. Hard. 
 

“Alice,” the giantess shouts, “Alice, get up.” 

I blink once. Twice. And my eyes begin to focus on the face inches from mine, her eyes wide with – what, fear? – for that few seconds until it is apparent that I have not overdosed and am still very much alive, thank you very much. 

“Tara,” I croak, “water. Please.” I’m still lying pathetically on the floor – which pretty much explains the roomful of giants.  

“Jesus Christ, Alice, are you trying to kill yourself? How many goddamn pills did you do?” 

Tara licks her red, red lips, livid; and I say, “enough to go to Wonderland”. 

Wonderland, where all sorts of magnificent creatures – gryphons and unicorns and even mock turtles (which according to the Queen is what mock turtle soup is made from) dwell. I want to tell her that it was a place where animals talked, like in Narnia, and they sang rhymes and had the most outrageous croquet games. I want to tell her that there was a Queen of Hearts, who was pudgy and rather stout but oh, how she loved having people’s heads cut off. “Off with his head,” she would say, “off with his head” because she liked the way it sounded, “off with his head” because she can. 

I could stay there forever because they were all mad. Everyone was mad and no one cared that monsters live behind my blue irises and my teeth were stained with blood. The Duchess served me soup with too much pepper and put a baby in my arms who turned into a pig. I didn’t want a pig any more than I wanted a baby so I slaughtered it and made a pork pie. Everyone at the tea party enjoyed it and the Mad Hatter pulled me aside and told me it was the best he had ever tasted and he kissed me but his mouth was full of porcelain chips and they cut into my lips and my tongue. 

Only the unicorn saw me for what I am. “You’re a monster,” he said but he got into a fight with the lion over the White King’s crown and died with his flank torn into ribbons before he could warn the others.   

“I was in Wonderland,” I repeat.

1001 Arabian Nights

i sometimes wish i was born in the desert sea,

under the harsh, unforgiving glare of the sun, during

the worst of desert storms.

i dreamt of rising like a cobra from the ubiquitous sand,

with the trickle of golden grains sliding down my body.

once i was a king

but that was before caesar.

theirs are a tongue i would give anything to speak.

rich and thick and creamy like the scented cones propped

upon ancient egyptians’ heads they rolled out of their mouths

like a lullaby.

even the words smell like

za’atar and cumin and cardamom.

the evening air tastes like baharat and the waning sun.

they say that only the strongest survive

but what is never born

may never die. 

Red Riding Hood

A figure cloaked in crimson disappeared into the enveloping gloom of the forest. It was winter and the trees were bare and so densely packed that the forest grounds remained shaded from the moonlight. The barest of light shone through, just enough for her to make out the silhouettes of objects around her. As far as fairy tales go, it was a predictable breeding ground for monsters and creatures. And indeed, the forest had been the inspiration behind many tales the town folk told to their children; most of them featured disobedient children who wandered into the forest despite their parents’ forbiddance and were ravaged by horrible beasts.

The town nearest to the forest was merely a kilometer away and the town folk, raised on generations of such stories shunned it as best they can. The ominous presence of the forest loomed insidiously over the town and when the moon was at its fullest, the howling of the wolves sounded like an army of banshees descending upon the town. It was enough to scare even the most foolhardy and reckless from ever setting foot in the forest. The bravest of the town folks would plan a wolf hunt that would never be carried out and the craven would be hiding in the warmth of their beds, hoping against all odds to catch some sleep in the ruckus.

In the town where everyone cowered from the sinister, impenetrable forest, there was a girl who would sneak off into the darkness of the tall, distorted trees while the town was deep in slumber.

The girl hurried along, her scarlet cloak trailing behind her billowed in the chilly breeze. She was aware of the pair of yellow eyes that was following her every move, the footsteps dogging her own. Whatever it was, it was hidden in the shadow of the trees and its movements were silent, predatory. She stopped in a small clearing in the middle of the woods and it finally stepped out into the moonlight, its lithe and graceful body bristling with silver fur. It stood tall before her, its red red tongue hanging out of its mouth lewdly.

The wolf edged closer, putting one massive paw in front of the other as its eyes scoured her, stripping her naked, layer by layer, through skin and muscle and bones, as though contemplating which part of her to devour first. Its eyes were dark with hunger and its sharp, perfect teeth glinted menacingly in the moonlight.

She slipped her cloak off her shoulders and shivered. Her body was as white as ivory, breasts small and high, nipples taut. The wolf pounced forward, closing the distance between them and with one paw gently pushed her onto the ground. It nudged her legs apart with its muzzle and licked the inside of her thighs with its hot, pulsing tongue.

She didn’t feel cold anymore – the fur of the wolf was warm enough – and it had lowered itself onto her so that she was shielded from the freezing wind. They did it on all fours - like animals. Amidst its throes of pleasure, it had let out a blood-curdling howl and raked its claws across her back where half-healed scars marred her translucent skin and her blood-soaked cape was stained a darker red. She moaned in ecstasy, her burning back tingling as her wolf-lover ran its lascivious tongue over her wounds.

“What a big mouth you have,” she remembered saying once upon a time, long long ago.

"The better to eat you with," answered the Big Bad Wolf. 

Some Words Are Just Too Sacred

/always/

is never a good word to be used

in love.

do not reassure her with words interlaced with

‘always’. she will be soothed and appear to be assuaged but

it will be a word that would come back to haunt you

like a bloodhound. it will sniff you out years later,

aroused by the dwindling affection you feel for her, the

utter dissatisfaction and insipid detachment in your relationship.

and it will devour you.

i will always love you,

will become the most fearsome boogeyman

under your bed and in your closet.

/always/

is for the use of immortals.

there are people who understand love (these are the immortals)

and there are people who vaguely grasp it, but are

too afraid or too ignorant to penetrate it

further. to delve deep into its core, and yet

never lose sight of the starting point,

to never forget what your heart might have forgotten.

and even then,

it must be a word that can only be written; it must never be spoken,

for the spoken word, even when whispered, can be devastating.

Hypothesis

If you would love me, know first, that I'm a free verse. I am not a Shakespearean sonnet,  nor will I ever be the immaculate, rhythmic structure of Dickinson's meters. If you love me, it's because you understand the beauty of chaotic abyss, you appreciate the exactitude and veracity of each chosen word and you manage to find structure and cohesion under the epidermal pandemonium. You know that I will be mercurial and volatile - you will love me till your heart feels like breaking and you will hate me to my marrows. If you love me, you'll know that I love savagely and painfully, because I've never learned to love otherwise. If you love me, I will always be a part of you - at the fine line between sanity and insanity, in the darkest concourse of your mind.

God-I-Hate-It-When-My-Awesome-Story-Ideas-Get-Stuck

So If I Can Finish These By This Year I Would Be Satisfied:

1. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
2. The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard
3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
4. The Plague, Albert Camus
5. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

And by the time I finish these I would be one of those people who stay up all night chain smoking and thinking about the complexities of the universe with a scotch in hand and I wouldn't be able to survive without coffee in the morning and actually coffee all day. I would write motherfucking god awesome books about things no one really understands save the people who osculate in this dreary and infinite field. I would zone out in the middle of a conversation for a long pause and proceed to say the most kooky, depressing things ever. People will start shunning me because I'm too creepy and too goddamn wretched for them. I would be the ominous, gloomy overcast that looms over their happy little cotton parade.

That actually sounds pretty fucking awesome.

P.S. I don't know why, but philosophy triggers my foul language button.

But I Don't Want to be Saved

If the sky is falling
put me
in your mouth, in the
soft, warm crevice under your
tongue
and keep me safe,
until the sky
stops falling.

And if at four o'clock in the morning
of a sleepless night
you feel me convulse and
quaver and I'm tearing at my skin -
know that I'm beginning to
drown in
you.

When you see that
you're asphyxiating me
(horror-struck, you will try to save me,
but naturally fail to)
and you'll never understand why
I refuse
to save myself.