Jason’s turning on his side of the bed
as I leave the room with my suitcase
packed for the weekend: not a long trip this time.
I flick on the kitchen light. The cat’s used to this:
he doesn’t spring out back into the dark.
I pour ground beans into the percolator,
stroke Damien’s back as I wait for the coffee to fix.
He hasn’t slept all night, not ( Read more... )

The wonderful people behind Sayoni Speak have requested for works read during Contradiction 2008 to be published on their website. Two poems of mine published here. The other poem that I read during the event being previously published in ditch, is probably the reason for its non-inclusion in the series. 

Because he could not outlive the judgment he places upon himself, his children would have to bear the cross for him. He calls it inevitable - a pardon for his own soul.

... Functioning as a trope of detection, Holmes is a figuration of that ambivalent state that lies in the interstice of the Inside/Outside divide, traversing the two realms as much as he is resting snuggly within the representation of the fortified immutability of that singular position. This Inside/Outside divide can be stretched to encompass ( Read more... )

To know
even your self
can err -

Would you
choose
to be forgiven
by God? Or would you choose
to be forgiven by man?

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died, who "walked to meet his death [for] he feared the loss of language and not the loss of his body".

Because the years were walls, the body could touch them.
Because the soul was held in the body, the soul is intimate with jealousy.

Love demands the soul to give unto itself what it would also give unto the body.
The body learns from time the persistence of desire. Meaning: the body
            wanted to give the soul up.

Without the soul the years ( Read more... )

My mother never told me
who told on her,
or if she even knew.

Overnight, the old laws
that once governed
friendship, attachment, love -

disposed, overtaken
by something more lasting, more instructive
henceforth.

For ten years, my mother
lived accordingly, abiding
these new laws

to outlive those years, to spite them.

Because she had grown to believe ( Read more... )

"According to Agacinski, preventing same-sex couples from marrying is not a way of guaranteeing a heterosexual hegemony. The institution of marriage does not legalize heterosexuality, it regulates filiation. The point of the prohibition is, rather, to guarantee that every man and woman is inscribed ‘within the order of a humanity that is itself ( Read more... )

Link to Clive James' essay in Poetry.