If I told you

When I breathe in the moistness
of ancient ocean woods
and trace the path
of butterflies in hurricanes
raging along your plexus
if only I could tell
how deep it wounds
to know it in my soul
that it’s probably best
to look away;
yet I’d never have
felt the rain
like I do
today,
if not for the afternoon stillness
of our tropical winters’
quiet corridors, gold steam
streaming from the sun,
the foggy light
through the laces of your curtain
bathing us in our quiet little
Egypt.
I remember Bodhi sometimes
when I think of afternoons
and his high chemical terrace,
albino snakeskin fingers
aged by evening monoxides
slowly drooping, drooping to sleep beside
the ripe warm orange engine glow of the bypass
calling on old triassic shades lining
the saintly junkie aghori jaws of Dhapa,
the holy savagery of the moon.
Distant lights of Vegas.
It’s a shame
you’ve never been there
but then it’s alright,
you probably wouldn’t
want to see it anyway.

_

Hikikomori

Flat screens bang each other
in my country,
everyone is right
everyone is wrong at the same time.
It was not the best of times
only the worst of it;
no job no love,
shockwaves, wave after wave,
the air in Delhi could change for a handful
of minutes, people don’t.
Hikikomori draped in your curtains
far out in the island workhour bone-weary tentacle
trains of Japan
you’re not alone, they’re all coming home.
No job no love and great skyclad visions of suicide
are not your own to feed and wrestle through
the sun bright disk pill of the day.
The age-old sickness of your parents
not your own,
your videogames in deep-space,
wise, understandable quests
to free the world from real evil
cursed on the midnight of the soul, inconsequential.
What you feel wrapped head to toe in wet pillows,
soaked by fluids,
your own skin melting from the heat of insomnia,
inconsequential.
Only surrender to the bosom of the great ink sadness
to the point that your heart stops
your will falters and falls,
fiber wires light up in ecstasy, your anxiety,
taxable depression and the old house bedroom songs of comfort.
The sink, the tap, the buckets dry.
A night of unadulterated darkness
when finally diluted
did it occur to you
in your shutout room,
some truth, something
that changes you
and then changes
the world,
did it work?
Magick and chaos and the wisdom
in quantum physics,
did it work?
Truth be told
the atoms may know what makes it all tick,
but down here in the KBC void
we are alone
till Andromeda runs the dark skies of Earth down.

_

Notes for the poem Hikikomori-

Hikikomori- (in Japan) the abnormal avoidance of social contact, typically by adolescent males.
· a person who avoids social contact.

KBC Void- The KBC Void (or Local Hole) is an immense, comparatively empty region of space, named after astronomers Ryan Keenan, Amy Barger, and Lennox Cowie, who studied it in 2013.