The Price
Love will probably kill me,
Long before I fell out of it,
Or madly in with another.
It will rush like a red hand,
With doubt and steady stillness,
Of another lover into something else.
It will kill with everything,
But a feeling of full self-despair,
And a moment of bitter nostalgia.
Love will probably kill me,
Leaving everything I am behind,
Or giving me anything I owe it in return.
It will blush my cheeks with tenderness,
Wailing my veins into stray lines
Of another’s love, an undying lie.
It will be neither slow nor gentle,
But rushed into words and memories,
And give out nothing but love, again.
— Laura Chouette
The Willow Tree
The Weight of Falling Leaves
Winter swept onto my doorstep quite easily,
Like it overtook every part of my heart,
The moment you left my autumn to fall.
So I kept things as you left them – frozen,
Showing no sign of any emotion or feeling,
Like the leaves that wither and die in the ice.
Never fulfilling the purpose for which they fell,
Yet crumbling under shoes heavier than the burden
The tree gave them by letting them go.
They long to be carried away by the wind or the elements,
Not trapped forever in this frozen expanse of white,
Beneath starry skies that gaze upon each December night.
I can no longer bear to look upon them,
So I set them free with a kiss to keep;
Filled with the fire of your lips, finally redeemed –
See how they gleam with beauty, long before spring.
A HOTEL ROOM IN PARIS #31
At the bottom of the lonely window,
The sky looks almost velvety lilac.
While at the top, the window frame
Seems to drown in front of an ocean of blue satin.
White window frames in uneven walls
Cast no shadow, so the light projects the soul of each traveller instead.
So I sit here in silence, filtering out the noise
That the boulevards inhabit and sing each day.
Only the music I keep in my room, the silent solitude each one carries;
Carries far and – may I hope – home soon.
Untitled #1
White blossoms on cold sheets;
Roses outside the garden's wall.
Falling feels easier than growing
Once you've reached each peak.
Untitled #2
Whatever I take from you,
Trust me, it is not enough
To build me back up.
I stare into walls you build
For hours on end,
Just to reflect myself in cracks.
A home built without love.
Untitled #3
What speaks slowly becomes bold.
What begins as a letter becomes a book.
Whoever crosses a line is a poet.
Whoever is a poet becomes a revolutionary.
Paris
The Seine dresses in light black,
Mimicking the dark grey of the sky,
And so, I drown my ink into it.
Each poem becomes art,
Reflecting and dancing
Around my hands with care.
The notes the river shares
Become a painting that inspires
All the great artists housed in its museums.
Still, I vow and pray by its sight —
Yet I dare not claim to be an artist
As great as the one in sight.
In Paris.
Parisian Endings
Endings share a bond between right and wrong,
Upon every poet who dares to cross a line.
The Parisian sky glows light with blue and orange,
Each hill a line of fortune, unique to every soul.
Words cross the heart I call cœur,
And dawn in the same eternal hues behind her.
By noon, I become the city itself,
Only to return as her passenger,
By walking far enough to lose her.
I Am the City
The spaces between streets,
The lights that bloom on corners,
The lines that hold us together.
I may be a name,
I may be a crossroad,
I may be a saint.
I am a city.
I am a name.
I am.
A Line Across the Seine
Whatever I made of you
Surrenders to beauty.
For I am a simple line
That crosses the Seine,
Remembering each wave
Upon the stones of light.
However often the light shines
Towards the blue of morning skies,
I’ll be here.
I’ll write.
Poem with Adjustments
And I write out of worry,
I write out of fear,
I write for writing's sake,
And I drown in between these motives.
I become a poet,
I become a lover,
I become a human,
And still, I seek to become a writer.
I become still in the seeking.
The collar sleeve I hold up to wish you farewell
The scars on each shirt that share a needle
Becomes a sea of white in between stitches.
The City That Holds Me
The sidewalks I stumble on more than once
Make me feel like I am walking home.
The place cold enough to die for,
Yet I walk towards the next day without freezing.
The river that drowns my words,
As I wander its same stretch, up and down.
My chapels know my favourite corners,
Where I light my candles each good Sunday.
Pothole in the Sky
My veins ground too deep to become a statue,
And the flight is delayed too late—
So I take off again.
I take off without the vein of the city
That lifts me to heaven with a million lights
And a few streets in between.
The darkness blooms like a desert,
And in my aeroplane, I become a small flower,
Travelling too far and without sight.
Clouds outside windows become a stair frame,
And the dark blue of mornings drifts by,
While I dream of Paris and every thought
That drifted by.
A Laptop in One Room
The corners I turned became a city,
While remembering the sidewalks.
Each street I crossed turned into art,
For poets past than turned lines upside down.
Horizons in blue and grey
Became a shallow water's sight.
Tears Above a Keyboard
The words you built inside a mind
One day destroyed you.
You became a single tear
Without the memory.
My Lines
My lines cross tragedy,
Hope, and love;
A mere poetry of life
Keeps anyone alive.
I may wander along,
Yet I’ll be a part of it—
Life—I seek.
All The Ink I Wasted
All the ink I wasted
Climbing up ivory pages and cursive titles
Of whoever asked to buy and sell -
Words and souls and hope and pain.
All the nights I spent
Crying out to the world what I thought
Or blaming myself for not hearing back -
Worlds are crashing inside myself.
All the fights I fought
Calming my strife to succeed and feel
Overwhelming hopes and dreams in spare -
Wondering if I write my fate or dare to seal.
All the wasted words
Counting each number up I tried to spell
Only to be reminded of despair once again -
Worth is nothing nowadays with a price to sell.
What Other Can a Man Lay but Tragedy?
What other can a man lay but tragedy?
No other thing would be ripe in time.
Grief is a flower that blooms often,
And sorrow is the rain that waters it sometimes.
Each man reaps what he once sows—
With pain, and some with bitter ease.
The sky above every head of gloom
Grows thicker with clouds and earthly deeds.
The field does not bloom in summer
But on the last day of every man's each.
The Ghosts We Leave Behind
When I meet you again,
I will walk past you;
Leaving the ghost behind
That haunted me for years.
I will walk fast and steady,
Not looking back.
May I think about today
Or tomorrow? — Nobody knows.
I Will Go Back to Paris in Spring
I will go back to Paris in spring,
To see its life and not the still,
To watch the sky in a different hue,
With the same buildings at each rue.
I will walk and pass the same things by,
And wonder again with a sigh.
Till winter comes, it will be long,
Yet I wonder when I will come back along.
We Haunt the People We Love
We haunt the people that we love,
And we become ruins by doing so.
Chasing them down every line,
No matter if spoken or lived by it.
Running in circles, remembering them,
While watching ourselves turn into others' ghosts.
We haunt and live—
And we will outlive.
The Weight of Perception
I destroy myself by thinking about what I’m not;
And they who love me destroy themselves by thinking that I am.
The Tragedy of the Ordinary
The ordinariness is tragic—
Not because it happens all over again,
But when it doesn’t, it hurts every day.
Wasted Chances
I think life offers many chances,
And we waste most of them by never taking them—
(Just like untouched glasses of champagne.)
Unmoored
I set myself abound,
Like a new ship standing against the ocean;
The waves set free
By land of long imprisonment—
Alone.
Ireland
The land is scarred
by hills and roads of foreign.
Ways lead to false capitals
and answered calls of long-ago wars.
The Might of Me
I won’t write about
how I saved myself after you left—
The truth is
you never really stayed,
so I had nothing to save
but the might of me
and the "could have beens"
in every sentence since then.
I Want…
I want to inhale life,
Not just exhale it.
I want to feel alive,
Not just go on living.
I want to exist,
Not just fade away.
Untitled #100
Lost in the lights of everything you touched
And promised to keep with steady hands
(While the flowers in our living room starved).
The Scar That Always Bleeds
The scar that always bleeds
Hides behind a heart that broke
More than once;
And a mind that tracks
The bruises of each week
Like a routine.
It causes pain all over again,
But with different thoughts
Spinning the mind—
All over the body of myself.
Fading in between Seasons
The bottle-green corners of our favourite blanket
On the bed we haven’t made in weeks
Faded out since last July under the window
That faces the olive garden.
The stone walls are not as green as our drinks,
And the feelings disappear more each day within them—
Like the yellow grass in summer fades in winter,
Growing dimmer like the sun in autumn.
The Weight of Silence
The hangman’s noose couldn’t be as tight
As my heart that suffers from all the quiet;
Under the same gallows
That swing for each man’s promise –
And for a woman to keep more
Than the memory of him.
Weight of Ink
It is easier to write words that are not true,
To imagine something worse than someone is,
And to bleak the world with one’s own tainted hands.
Leaving marks all over imaginary people,
Self-loathed places and cities that carry one’s own name,
With nothing but a page to drown them in.
The weight of the world rests like a sheet of paper
On a writer’s desk — filling up with ink that turns it dark,
And still worth no more.
Forgotten
The cities I drown inside my ink are not Atlantis,
But murmured whispers of Venice —
A forgotten sentence between verses of mythology.
Echoes from the Corner
I cannot forget what you wanted me to remember,
The one small thing you told me on the street,
That was two blocks away from mine.
How you said it washed all the drunkenness away,
Even if it was hard to hear, since you sang it more
Like one of the lovers in the movies do.
I cannot cross that street anymore nowadays,
Forgetting who I was before that night,
And where I am going from here — but back.
Repetition
Feeling the same every day becomes like a verse,
That writes itself all over again on the sheet of numbers
That you should calculate and pay.
Feeling the same every day becomes like a verse,
The one you always repeat to calm yourself down,
And to remember what it feels like to be in rhythm.