Love and Lamentations

I tried painting you yesterday.
You bled through my brush,
Mudding up my paint water
Until I lost myself
In the liquid colours of your deliquescent smile.
I tried and tried and tried-
I dipped my pen in your breath
Over and over again.
But you, wafer-thin, melted
Away in my palms-
Like camphor
Like a dead man's breath
Like candle wax that
Drips drips drips
Until my room, my world
Wraps darkness around itself
Huddling deep to hide
From the monsters that come out to play by daylight.

Your love for me is an electric bulb.
It gives light,
But dare touch
And it shocks my finger
With a needlepoint.
You are the summer storm
That lashes at my window panes
That tears up my electric wires
That claws at my vegetable patch.

I crouch in my little hole
Just a poet, a scared kitten
Left out in the rain.
My verse pours love out to you
Like ghee into a sacrificial fire.
I wish to make you burn.
I wish to make you rise higher and higher
Until even the mountain tops
Go white in awe of your might.

Oh my dear…
Would you swallow whole my poetry book?
Poor though it is.
Your appetite
Is as huge as the depths
Of your inhuman eyes.
I try and try and try
To press you to my heart
Like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.
But you are the sigh
Dredged up from my toes,
And my hands are too small to hold you.