This Is The End / Is This The End?

You and I are pilgrims 

worshiping at the pyre of our pasts

We use each other's bodies as shovels 

to dig old skeletons out

Sometimes I wonder if we're just digging our own graves

We are countries with lost borders

so we keep spilling out of maps

We're magicians entranced by our own tricks

our styles too subtle for our own good

Our hearts are balloons filled to bursting

but too light to keep us planted in the moment

We're in constant flight and going nowhere

I collide into you you collide into me

and then we part, like waves, only to meet and repeat 

I sing in falsetto and you pretend I'm in key

You dance too slow for my taste but I still let you lead

I sleep in your arms because they are warm with sin

You don't ask me why, you're just happy to give in

You live like a corpse, I'm dying in my dreams

The end is in sight, and now it begins

A Close Call

All of eleven or twelve

He spends his day weighing

grains of rice

pretending it was a game

but sometimes it’s not as easy His eyes are red with boredom

His youthful joy and genius

being spent on cigarette maths,

memorizing different juice brands

and getting yelled at for being

distracted, overwhelmed, imperfect, lost in thought

in other words, a kid

I grab at a packet of chips without a second thought

Twisting at the threads of my laughable anxieties

“The red ones are better, for just ten rupees more

For you it is nothing. Oh, but you don’t care.”

I stare at him. Something in me turns to lead and can’t move

I’m transfixed by his unplanned moment of wisdom

I want to peel him away from this sunny, metallic shed

and launch him into the air like a rocket, a beam, an orbiting star

I want him to rise and grow and become himself

and I want him to laugh as he looks back

at distant, hazy memories of hopeless afternoons

and exclaim that it was a close call

Optimism

There is a tiny little pouch in my stomach

Half-full of optimism

There is a pin-prick hole in my skull

That lets the sun in

There is an old, rusty spring

Barely clinging on to the soles of my feet

These aren’t everything, but they are a start

Maybe I won’t change the world today,

maybe I’ll change the sheets