“I’m not mourning us yet.”

How damning is love with no wonder?
I don’t need you to know my atoms,
or the thoughts I hold to myself
in my little iceberg.
I just want you to look at me.
When you touch the inside of my gums
with your tongue,
my blood boils to 385 fahrenheit,
and the fright in my nerves
reach my temples,
mirroring the rise and fall of my heart.
Look at me.
Just look at the way I subconsciously
ivy around you, my pride.
What is love with no wonder?
What is the magic worth?

When we formed out of craters-
of elated phone conversations
over nocturnal hours,
we didn’t realise the binding ingredient
to all of this was sustainability.
Now stay with me,
because I know you like an elaborate analogy,
and remember the way we formed
this catastrophic crater.
As we patched each fallen gravel
with plasters of i-love-yous,
I yearned to be in the arms of the woman
who promised me sunshine.
We were cracking beneath the
whimsical demands of this concrete jungle,
and a voice asked to see that smile again.
That time in Nandos
when you couldn’t comprehend
the sheer beauty of never spending
another birthday apart again.

When you didn’t,
Loneliness woke,
crying funeral tears,
and yelled-
“I’m not mourning us yet.”

Which brings us to Monday morning,
when I read over the words you once
inspired in me.
Love, Awe, Glory,
like celestial beings,
beamed over the bubbles of dismay
you caught like an explorative toddler.
The child in me gave way, and
I surrendered the keys.
I’m not surprised you were dizzy and nauseous
at what you found.
I weaved cobwebs around most of my demons,
only some of which escaped this Narnia.
So I’m scared.
Scared that the me,
the cluttered me,
the inner me,
may never know a companion,
if you lock the doors now.
There isn’t a universe in which
the explorer in me ever showed anyone
the basement
until you arrived.
And even now,
you just wish your days were not
eclipsed by its massive structure.
Please,
spare me.
Let me go if all you ever bargained for
were the parts of me that are alive.

Darkness.

This here is an abyss.

Endless, boundless, ruthless.

It wants to claim me,

and you too will be

collected as collateral.

It doesn’t care for your emotions,

while it feeds on mine.

Your journey doesn’t have to end here.

You were whole when I found you.

I was already dead.

I’m sorry you couldn’t free me

from it’s grip.

I was porous and broken,

it may as well had been a strong wind

that blended my ashes with the June rain.

I cry because I don’t know how else

to stop this one inevitable downfall.

You cry because you know you can’t save me.

And trust me,

If there was a way, I would show you.

Bet. (summer dusk)

I could bet all the money
in both my pockets,
I’d end up homeless loving you.
And no,
Not roofless. That’s just the obvious.
I mean completely ruthless
with my glances.
like God herself spun
two rocks at different stages
of their crystallization:
combining in you,
the brute force and blinding bedazzle
of the cosmos themselves.
Rough, sure. You never learned
the womanly grace or poise
To make your mother proud.
But this prowess, this power.
Planets could
accidentally fall into your orbit,
struck and intoxicated,
oblivious to the healing you hide
in the tightly woven strands of your eyelashes
as they caress one another in contemplation.

These beams which collide upon our union,
do they grind knowingly to the beat of our
homogeneous moans,
homogeneous bodies,
homogenous worries-
do they feel this friction too,
as we toss and turn in unison?
Do they lick their fingers after we’re done,
watching two skulls lay
cocooned in summer dusk,
brought together by the grace of numbers,
off odds which defy serendipity,
do they hide blushing cheeks against this sin?
What of this serenity then?
What of this perfection?

vocalising arguments near endings, seeking sanity anyway.

I need a conversation with someone

outside of me.

It’s not a cold head you suffer from

my love

it’s the weight of my selfishness

on your temples.

It’s not old age either,

this exhaustion that surrounds your spirit.

It’s the mess I’ve made on your floors,

the kind you’ve never had to clean up before.

And if I had known half the collateral

I carried in my pockets,

I would never have entered

as confidently as I did.

We are not star crossed. Not really.

This is not a jigsaw with smooth edges-

this here is a maze.

It just so happens

that all the entrances and exits

that I appear to choose

carry me straight to you.

We are not the love children

of a god-fearing light,

and yet, something brought you to me.

I must just carry your love

too close to my core,

the way your earthquakes

seismically, routinely

topple my house of cards.

Brave or stupid?

Stupid enough to follow

my breadcrumb bravery

back to your moonlit eyes.

I love you enough to change myself.

To relearn and maybe unlearn

those parts of me I never saw.

I love you enough

to trust your hands.

Me, a garden too angry to bloom in winter.

You- an architect of the soul,

yank my roots right out

of this lowly,

rotten soil.

I love you beyond both

my bravery and stupidity,

and all versions of our immaterial reality,

where I end up with you.

Genie

Your tongue, a landing strip

a foreign object,

shrinks this city right down.

A part of me, walks barefoot,

listening to all the stories you hid

beneath it, unrelenting.

The weight of which sin

laces it shut?

Tell me,

does it ever mutter anything more

than enigma anymore?

I saw your face and I know now

what you mean.

There’s no good

learning to orientate

a fragility

you couldn’t protect.

My efforts to provide peace

are almost as unrefined as my stubbornness.

Like yours, it cuts out of fear.

Tell me woman,

will the world ever be ready

to see your face?

Will you shed these glasses

which live to frame

your secrets.

I knew if I got too close,

I’d break at my own incompetence.

Isn’t that the irony,

that dichotomous irony of my existence?

My peace comes with a headache.

Woman. Ladybug. Burning Phoenix,

I became a raven to shut out the draft

of this autumn.

It hurts to shield you from the very thing

I wanted so desperately to bare.

But darkness is selfish.

It swallows the good and the bad,

and you of all people, know that.

But you take care.

You thrive,

breathe

and these synchronicities

will once again yield to your whims.

The stars will align,

intertwined with stories

of your head finally above the waves.

Meet me again.

Meet me again, when you’re dormant.

A blank canvas,

and neither of us would ever

have to

unread trauma to save others.

Meet me again,

where the train doesn’t stop at any station

where the destination

is the opening of a wall clock,

where we reset this illusion.

honeyed whisky- a complete story

The night you lost me in the buzz

of one hazy crowd,

you reduced me to rose petals

blanketed between aching free verse.

You sunk my shattered teeth

in more heartbreak

than I could ever swallow.

My windpipe chimed a new

song every time you touched my skin.

Akin to that of claustrophobia…

Is this suffocation or love?

See when I fell for you,

I gave you everything.

I watched from beneath

harvest moons, half-witchy

with a heavy intuition of our story.

I felt you before your flesh found me.

I loved you before I could justify it

and I cried the night before you

even thought about cheating on me.

And yet, my heartstrings, harp

Haphazardly lay their weapons

every time you say Hediye.

Three syllables of familiarity with

the echo of a voice in the bottom of a well.

No dime or wish could ever release you.

A ghost, my demon, my madness,

its nothing short of masochism,

how much I loved you.

Is this love or suffocation?

Self-inflicted asphyxiation.

God heard my untimely predictions

and watched from her crown,

heaving.

She knew how much I needed this.

So when I forgave you for my selfish reasons,

She condemned me to an apology.

Nothing more.

Do you know what it’s like to choose

a mortal over eternity?

I chose your life over my salvation,

with no questions.

And so falling in love with you killed me.

I learned lessons in blood.

And no.

Not grazed knees,

I am leaving kidney-deep

because I ignored my intuition.

You will never know what it’s like

to break so beautifully.

I didn’t cry until I got on the Central line.

I travelled half-way across

London to get to where I was,

and I watched in silence, a route

I will never cross again.

I wish I had released my own soul

through the window

that whispered our secrets into

the summer air.

I wish I had

never watched you turn that corner

into my existence

for now, I have to repaint these walls

so deeply embellished with your face.

I likened you to alcohol,

and only just realised why.

You were the most beautiful intoxication,

I could ever swish between gritted teeth.

A dream-like substance

I gulped greedily to a four-month old grave,

large enough to swallow me whole.

Your name,

sharp whisky turned shard,

sliced my tongue, clean.

I hope you never discover

the suffocation of this inward bleeding.

I hope you never question why,

it took a week to unwrite

one tireless legacy.

A love poem for my best friend.

It’s funny how your hugs

bind my broken pieces stronger

than any glue on the market.

How my limbs and my tongue

bring me to you in every situation.

How your palms cup my cheeks

at every turn of disaster,

and my doubts blow away in the wind

when I hear your voice.

This is more than a love poem.

It’s more than an ode to our relationship.

This is my bent knee of surrender
to the universe to keep you alive

longer than me.

I love you more than

what’s good for my own health-

and for that reason, I am damned

everytime I fail in protecting you.

My soul splinters at every blow you endure,

but my body can’t weave itself

into a bulletproof vest to shield you.

My particles don’t dissipate into the air

to form a magnetic force around your steps.

And I certainly never anticipate

the curiosity of the London population

but I know for certain,

I will burn down TFL with a single gaze

the next time someone makes you

leave your voice on one of their platforms.

This is more than an ode to our telepathy.

More than entire stories you pry out of me

before I could answer your questions.

This is more than a love poem.

This is a realisation that the universe

is yet to conceive a black hole dim enough

to capture your darkness

or a star large enough to mirror my blindness.

Cause the way you carry yourself

with such ease,

I should know you don’t need protection.

I am sitting in the crowd,

beaming

because this world is almost ready

for your lessons.

My permanent companion,

I will burn this world down

quicker than you can imagine,

if I ever had to become the Sylvia Rivera

to your Marsha P Johnson.

I was crying when I told you I suffered

at the hands of men all my life.

It was in that moment, I realised

it was not the gender, but the toxicity

that shattered me.

By that definition,

I had never really met men.

Not until all the boy in your body

stepped up

to be the man to unburden my misfortune.

So thank you.

for all the tears of mine you collected

in your sleeves.

And here’s to many more tears

over countless years,

collecting between our endless love.

I need a forest fire

I can’t discern which came first,

but I know which burned deeper.
I know now,
the way your knees will
carry you to my rescue.
My madness,
cigarette butts,
an etching on my ashtray lungs.
Your presence?
A forest fire.

A slow calamity.
An outpour; a reckoning;
a thank-you.

Both burned, but one scarred.
Both tarred:
but one scabbed and fell;
the other tore the flesh,
open wound.
If I had waited longer,
I’d never know the sensation.
If I left my house
five minutes outside
of your goldilocks timing,
I’d never know what it feels like
to smell my own flesh on fire.
A forest-y,
cedar-scented,
slow burning
calamity.

The Sun will cleanse me.

There’s a certain redemption-

laced in vitamins

a bouncy castle release

that glazes ones skin.

It sizzles in a firefly hum

and takes me further away from you.

I know in the end,

the sun’ll cleanse me.

It’s not the kind where

I’d have to bathe in volcanic streams,

in rocket juice

touching a substance capable

only of carnage.

No. I am purer than that.

When I bask in her celestial presence,

she takes me back to my childhood.

The way fruit oozed out of my pores.

The way it trickled down my arm and dried,

an all too familiar stickability.

She understands me.

She dries my feelings right down

a pencil too short to be held.

No stories will ever get written-

there’s no destiny left.

honeyed whiSky

I turned the corner, and there you were.

I had been expecting you

3 lifetimes ago.

You couldn’t see there and then

but I concaved and curved to accommodate

you.

I fleshed out contents of past cremations.

I thought nothing as beautiful as you

could ever reside here.

I sipped you,

slowly at first.

Swishing swirls in semi circles.

Sheyi.

Smooth whisky on an empty stomach.

A cinnamon heartburn that I

didn’t ever fathom to belong so close.

I got greedy with my ingestion-

swigging a moonlight blue

that before tonight

never swallowed me whole.

A glimpse of your iris,

sent me into a trance-like sedation

and erased all past ills of my lifetime.

I was light when you scooped me.

I shed my past skin,

hanging loosely around my ankles,

the seams ripped all the way through.

It was not blood that radiated

through my veins, it was your warmth

and I crumbled at the untimely realisation

that I had been freezing

this entire time.

How it took a single touch

of yours

to thaw me.

Falling in love with you might kill me.

Fragments of our passion,

Your tears,

salt grains

linger on the bed sheets.

I crack open the window

and the mingled hues

of our endeavors seep

into the morning air,

kissing strangers as they walk to work.

Falling in love with you might save me.