wb :

It's a night and day affair
and both ways it's the same
for two weeks now we're playing
this nameless, ancient game

and now you're eating at my mind
like a two week mold
left out in the cold to grow
and I hope that I return in kind
or i'll be growing old
left out when the cold wind blows

and I feel it in my stomach
every time you call my phone
and I feel it in my liver
saying I don't want to be alone

but loneliness is all it is
like a sunflower by the hour
grows toward the sun
my love grows like a weed
and lower my standards grow
the longer since it's begun.

So dance for me, sunflower girl
and I will shine for you
high love is lost on such as us
but i'll love you til' the morning dew.

A step out of arrival
and a foreign English’s eclecticness explodes in my face
like the spray of confetti at
a party of middle-aged women in pink tights.
This morning’s babble should please me more
but I now deem it unhappy variant—
though telling of home,
familiarity smacks like the mismatched attire of
a hawker whose tone demands patronage
to justify her lost sleep.


This is my country.
Open arms decked high with
consumer commerciality,
her once warm embrace now
exudes indifferent materiality as the cold
adorning charm she loops around my neck;
I hesitate
(but as the crowd presses closer,
and the scent of physicality
engulfs me in a swirl of designer perfume)
I join them, and let the mob
sweep me towards the
shopping districts.
In the background, music blares
from a store window and they chant,

“Welcome home.”

Let this be the last summation
of our moments snatched
in between movements of crowds—
Wide-eyed interludes,
the low cascading of your voice
and your accidental touch
sends undercurrents through my skin.


Now, you sidestep me with your gaze—
there is time for one last laugh and you are buoyed
away by the tide of faces;
Like pebbles, they wash unspoken hope
from the sands of my heart


but leave your memory
accreted on its plains.
Day breaks on the horizon,
and you have forgotten
what I must forget.