Throwing and being thrown

To my martial arts teacher.

You never loved me back.
At least, not the way I loved you.
You were in control of it; I was not.
But, I have no regrets. None!

The first time I fell in love with you
it was February or March.
We were training as usual.
You were laughing, happy.

That was several years ago.
I have watched your hair turning grey
I watch your smiles change
As you age.
I have aged too.

I don’t seek your attention anymore
Except in your teaching.
The art we practise together, I learned to love that
As much as you. More.
I have almost learned not to be jealous.
I have almost learned to not mind
that I don’t know you, can’t know you.

But I have almost known you.
When I throw you, when you throw me, there is a moment
Of complete focus, of harmony
Of balance.
You taught me those things.
It is an amazing feeling - One we train our human bodies
and minds for.

It is only in those moments that I know you.
They are precious to me.
I hope you never stop practising martial arts with us.
The thought of it is suffering.

You showed me:
When we practise, our bodies are not our own.
They are heaven, earth, thunder, mountain.
When the sweat pours from me and you
We are water, fire, wind.
Bodies, minds.

There is magic in it, you know.
The heart crashes into the mat.
It is the heart’s pleasure.
It rises to fall again.

Radioactive Girl is surprised by love

What must you have thought?
When I closed my eyes, it was
To protect myself.

It must have been the impact of you
For my heart suddenly reached critical mass
And I felt like I was going go nuclear, immediately
My coal-darkness shattering –
The blooming burst of it, the ravaged atoms going haywire,
Leaving radioactive waste all over your bed
Repercussions lasting for ages

And the saddest kind memory, which is darkness, into light,
Into darkness.

Then, timid, having to skulk out in the morning
Without even a puff of gusto left in me
And you smiling faintly as I go, with glowing flecks in your hair
Like daytime fire-flies.

Did you even notice?
I closed my eyes tight but could still see you
And my insides turned to green glass.

Three Poems

Cleanliness

I would like to wipe myself clean,
Like the way one cleans the screen
Of a mobile phone.

Scrub
With paper
Until the greasy fingerprints
Polish the glass.

Passion

I would like to unwind in your wet heat
The way this dry leaf
Unlocks itself
In my teamug.

I would like to be Big Brother
And have a panoramic view
Of your movements in your bed.

Longing

There are great distances of silence, inside.
I would like to float along them, and come back to this body
Only to sing myself sadnesses
All in hollow vowels.

Oh, Aah, Aaw.
I don’t understand my own song.
The vowels are not only those found in English.

PARTY DOWN

DO IT NOW

I would have that world

I would like if there was a verb for the action of holding something, like science, or love,
in the mouth.


Sometimes I find science in my love-mouth.
I can press it between my tongue and my palate
like sweet leaf.

I have read of the million universes.
Find them hidden in the perpetual soup of non-existence
Tripping under your heels,
Dripping off your breakfast spoon.
But, I couldn't care less.

I think of all the minuscule details
Of how I might love you elsewhere than here.
I think of worlds where you want me.
When a concept is so big
It becomes boring.

When I can't help myself, I think of a world
Where you just took my hand.
I would have that world.
I pick it out
the way the eyes finds a single firefly
on a dark beach.

The goldsmith's daughter

- After Rumi


The goldsmith's daughter, dearly loved,
Did not love herself.

But one man failed to love her
And she, marveling and relieved, loved him.

She went to his door
And knocked. He was brewing tea
And she was jealous that it might burn his lips
Where she wished to sear herself.

He said,
"Who's at the door?"
She said,
"I can no longer see my face, please look for yourself"

He said,
"My door is no mirror, and it has no peep-hole"
She had seen enough of mirrors, wanted no more of peep-holes.
She said,
"I am a girl"

He said
"what do you want?"
She said
"To be whole"

"What do you bring?"
"My loss"

"What have you lost?"
"This that you see."

He said,
"Such claims require a witness"
She said
"This longing, these tears"

He said
"Credible witnesses"
She pointed out
"I am still crying"

He laughed
"Who puts the tears in your eyes?"
She said
"The same who draws them out again"

How to clean the eyes? Fill them up.
How to cure the self? Send me back to you.

Of you, my Kung Fu Master

Glasses off,
you would look as you were:
A farmer’s grown son
A strong child of China.

You would say ‘Your eyes, they must look like this’
But mine are not so dark, you know.

You rode a girl’s upright bike.
I would for you rise at 6
And you would be angled against the bath-house wall
Pulling your tight morning calf-muscles
Waiting coldly for my coming.

You always wore the same sweater that winter.
We would slip on the icy tiles, and eat hot pork baps before class.

Spring, you asked me why I was so happy
And it was because I had dreamed that we ran,
Flying, really, the dust of comets on our heels.
Somewhere beside me, you asked if I was ok,
And I laughingly swelled in delight at my legs,
And at you, my fearless leader,
At the sunlight slanting, sparkling, on us.
In life, you never spoke to me that way.

Summer, I would practice in the cool nights
Alone on the badminton court, but for the bats.
Eyes closed, I would occupy you,
Hear the rustle of your coat
Finding your movements in the arcs of my hands.

Rehearsing your coldness
I would miss you less.

Your skin isn't smooth

Your skin isn’t smooth. It’s white sky and peppered birds.
The trees in it hung with black gloves and red talismans,
Your carried luck, your sharper guide.

We are not lovers
But you have drawn on my face with your fingers these past mornings, so
I try to press yours with my darker autumn colours:

I am not your paperpaste wings, and you are not my sparrowhawk
(Although
seated next to me
you say (you look down) you might fly, and I,
all eyes and no breath
am also thinking you might)

We run the fields separately
And return to each other bashful:
Hoping it will be enough.

I wrote you a haiku:

I hold your wrists, locked,
Unlocked, us both ensnared
By their faultless red.

I won’t show you. We might be lovers, one day.
For now I will content myself
Plucking at the stars,
Putting them in your already-glowing hands.

If I was to locate 'I'

- After Rumi




If I was to locate 'I'
It would be entered between these eyes, lodged perhaps
in the nasal bones, or otherwise
in the cave of this mouth, rubbed back
Up into the stem of this brain
and further
Into the brain Proper, which crackles and pops
like electric breakfast cereal.

But sometimes I is wandering.
Today. Running by the canal. I shifts
out in blobby space and swings holding, bedazzled,
onto the water
which is entirely light.
The entire canal and the light
is now I's phantom limb,
and for a moment it headlocks North London.
Playful.

Later I is busy tweaking in the swollen thighs.

Over the cup of tea the face is warm and I floats there
And annoyed shoves at the steam
Demanding:
Why is I tied to this and that?
Is I in the flakes that drop off this skin?
Is I in the bumps of air that trundle from this mouth?
Whoever put this I here, will have to take it away again.

And then the infant, face tight as fist:
Her I must be in the lungs
And, sometimes, in each toe stretched
In every direction as far as it may go
I, I, I, mine, me.

The infant saying:
Stop making all those choices.
I have always been here, I know that
And anyway if someone brought me here
they are mine too.