The Roadkill
You already have arisen to the steady sobbing.
“Do you think her son is still locked inside?”
I step out.
Night has left its sanguine plumes on our staircase;
its predator moans in the darkness; spring mates
in the pollen ridden milieu with humid heat.
No snivelling I hear.
Your hands have the threshold in their choke-hold.
The throbbing in our hearts is singular and dead
by asphyxiation. I say, “No. They took her son away,
remember?”
Rita went to her job the other day and didn’t return.
Her three years old son remained bolted inside.
We would not babysit him since we found F-words
lying around in presence of our own child.
Idle Haunting
The senescent ghost of our household
dies everytime it stares at a mirror –
an ever-playing groove, and the frayed music
roams around our flesh and its spirit.
One mandatory rope swing in our yard
gives away one or two untimely creak.
One black-naped oriole calls to nothing,
and I do not know which bird’s titular tune rings.
I and my daughter stands at the oblivion point
midst the threshold. Light laves us and the ghost alike.
Again and again summer comes, goes.
The shadows grow to decay to regrow.
Sometimes I push my daughter on the swing.
Some nights it rides high on itself.
Crude Letters
One ‘I need a white shirt day’.
Wrinkles set dumpster-fire
in the yard of ‘Yes sir’.
My colleague’s ears itch; still he hears me
while sucking one dead insect from his latte.
He whispers something about an F-word mail
one should keep in an ‘in case of emergency’ folder.
I stare at the pavement below, a naked man
turns in his bed made from a decayed overcoat.
For these days we keep ‘I support’ badges,
and then there flow the other days when
we toss a coin that bumps against the homeless flesh.
Dumpster Fire Press 