Sand in My Toes

And other poems

Sand in My Toes

The moon has learnt to invade my dreams
Full behind my eyelids sometimes
And bulging achingly in a song of stars.  

They ask me to marry you quickly
In the dusk’s frenzy of foaming sea
Before she pulls away in wooing sun.  

A swing sways to the pull
of wavy thoughts
As tides froth into my eyes.

I stand thus in your summer eyes
With love under my toenails and
Inside every pocket of my tanning skin.

Overwhelm

I want for my birthday, a cup overflowing with prayer.  
It is a month I dread because of a question that haunts me.  

What am I doing here all these years?
But love finds a way to make it a place.

Some contemplating sages concluded
That poetry isn’t a place for answers 

And so, like a summer meteor, I’ve learnt
to find comfort in a pool of wonder.  

I burn, O, I’m on fire, and every hurtling spark is a firework;  
A furious question in a vacuum of quiet prayer.

Tonic

After a year of brooding
The next time I see Byron
He sits contemplating a mug
Of black tea and green moonshaped zests.  

We chat for a few fruits about fasting,
About how lemonade really
Is a calorie-sweetened Trojan horse
And I wonder what it is that happens  

To conversations that used to dress
Themselves in Narcissus’ looking glass
And saunter into seats by tables
Of comfy middle-class cafés,  

That now, they stalk, hesitant
And self-conscious and even the love
That’s spoken of groans
With the nostalgia of pastries.  

When someone asks why aliens haven’t
Visited us yet, another says time understands us
Better than we do it, and I think time is a
Mug of ginger and lemon letting  

Healing relationships back to a scar
Unwilling to unfasten itself open
From a learned place of forgetfulness
And sugary complacency.