Four years have passed this book was published on 4th of June, 2019. I consider it in hindsight, as if something new will unravel through a slightly older lens. There is no real measure for how it was read or how many people read it. Maybe someone skipped a poem or ran over a verse or didn’t pause at just the right spot, so understood, no misunderstood a whole universe. But that is the burden of poetry. The poem is the reader’s own space to colour with his own thoughts. Inside or outside the lines. But there is a measure for how it was written. Or why. Those answers fight for space, pushing against verbs, gathering commas, erasing, overwriting, letting meaning bleed wet through the pages. Yet, like a first love, the first book is a moment of sweetness, no matter if it broke your heart or is still in your bed. Or both.
Here’s a poem from the book, to mark this day. It first appeared in the Ekphrastic Review.
Turbulence
But how can a storm be elegant? The contortion of
the visible expanse, incoherent elements clamouring
for release, morning pretending to be a newly birthed
night, night lit up like a funereal morning — didn’t we
also do it awkwardly, dumping darkness into the space
between us, letting the light grind into the ugliness? We
could sit naked on the parapet to see if the rain understands
when the earth says no or trace the immorality of the tempest
to a karmic reduction, a consequence even after it is removed
from its cause. But you stand there, smiling, the universe
reduced to a point on your finger, telling me why the
frenzied sky tries to shred itself so it can become
water, after the penitent water has patiently gathered
itself, day after day, to become the sky.
THOUGHT PURGE 