Laburnums

When I first moved to this city,about a year ago,it was a little past peak summer and the laburnums were fading out of sight.

It's peak summer now,and they are in full bloom in the courtyard outside my room when I wake up on an obscure May morning.They're so familiar,so close,unlike the ones I used to look at from behind car windows while we drove through streets whose names I did not know.
I pack my life into a cardboard carton,seal it tight with space just enough for whatever will happen in the year to come.Staring at the dusty duct tape shadows that remain on the wall above my bed ,after I've taken my posters down, fills me with a profound sense of loss for a second.

Like the laburnums,
so much else has blossomed,
blossomed with metaphor,
meaning blooming
like annotations around a poem,
handwritten interpretations unfurling
like petals out of printed verse.
So much has withered,as well,
so many friends,so many dreams,
so many notions that used to be.
Black and white binaries aren't for me,
I understand neither extreme,
I've learnt that to let something grow
you have to inevitably let something go,
a friend once said to me,
"you grew,they withdrew."
if you love,you will love to know that you'll lose,
if you don't lose,how will you ever find anything you
love with that intensity again?

You're the laburnums,
firework,transient spark,
chandelier,crystal clear,
reflective,fragile,sharp.
But poster-less,whitewashed walls
and flower-less green foliage
can only mask
that you've been there,
not that you'll arrive again.

Look at the moon,I'm dead

Said my friend,so burnt out from the consumption of a neon culture we didn’t necessarily create for ourselves,but perpetuate,nonetheless.The moon looked huge from where we sat.We sat on some rocks,with a vantage view of the rows of shingle roofed houses we’ve lived among for a few years now.All of them aligned,identical,except for the different number plates behind the white picket fences guarding the well  manicured gardens.Paths for people to take evening walks on,but ones not meant for dogs to “dirty”.Are any of us human beings or just parts of a well oiled machine? Stepford wives and Complan children.

We munch on green apples dipped in peanut butter,sip on Caprisun,snack we think we’re consuming.In earnest,it’s the market consuming us.

It is a dog eat dog world,they say.

I dream of forests and wake up wondering why I only visit shopping malls instead of these seas of green I see only in a state of semi-consciousness.

Hair line fractures

       Broken bones reveal themselves in x-rays and we just let them be,heal with hours and days
But why can't people and places just be,too?Why are we not immune to change yet?
Maybe the fault's in us,we live off the cheap consolation that  it'll all come to a stand still in the end,
that today matters just as much as yesterday.
Somebody said to me recently,what's the point of living in the past?Well,what's the point of this pointless plot?It all flies away the same.

But we care anyway.
And you can never change the things that change you,you can only live with them.
You can never change how looking into someobody's eyes for the last time feels like,
or the first time someone made you feel special with a couple of words,
How it felt to be small and helpless in a world spiralling out of control
and how sometimes,broken hearts only heal only into empty cavities,bearing bullet holes holes inside your chest,
Stitches on old wounds always stay for keep,faint reminders of pain that teems.

Rhetoric nights

"Why do these things happen if at all there's a god,a higher power?" I ask my father.
Some things just don't have answers,he tells me.My hurting heart is not satisfied.It's not enough of an answer,it'll never be.
Why does society make mockingbirds out of the innocent? Why do harmless little pets die suddenly? Why do some little kids grow up to be the bullies you find hard not to recognize as beast like?

Maybe there really are no answers,maybe life is a constant existential crisis.

But I fight my heart to believe there are answers within these questions,themselves.I'm no optimist,but I live because I see questions as symbols of hope.Hope is real,rhetoric and relevant as it gets.
It's like we're living the rhetoric.
A new day is the rhetoric we know to exist in every stormy night.
Children are the rhetoric form of the questioning fear of oblivion.
Grief is the rhetoric to heartrending loss.
Late night conversations,the rhetoric to loneliness that these pillow talks revolve around.
Love is the rhetoric to existence,itself.Because the universe doesn't care about us,
we have always been infinitesimal.We care about one another,we are all we have in this world.