a diamond for the I love you, a martini for the let me fuck you. (poems by ishani)
mads in her room. film by abby
ONE.
A beat I can’t put sound to name
Drowning in the liquid silk beneath my ribcage
Slipping out of ears
Dipping down milk bones
Wrapping around stained necks
A velvet ribbon tugged and tied by time’s cool fingers
The motel sign buzz of his lips down my spine
Cracking until they trace a whole
A bleeding angel behold
TWO.
Pick a card they say
Any card
A colour a shape a number
Fingers trembling eyes fluttering
There must be a mistake I say
Let me play one game
Empty your gold and scratch your silver
As they clink like the wine glasses of blood they drink
Toasting to an end that will never come
Like the wives they keep at home with their feet cold and eyeshadow staining their
fingertips
A diamond for the I love you
A martini for the let me fuck you
My lips are dry nonetheless
I’m done I’m done
I fold
Creased from the inside out like the card I just slipped in a glass asking for another tonic
Any tonic I don’t mind
The one that’ll leave me naked on a subway
It was the colour I say
The shape or maybe the number
Nothing or all
Let me make one fucking call
THREE.
White linen dipping down collarbones
Silk across the crevice of your chest
The dulled gold of a cigarette bitten and bent
Lips that came and went
Death is wanting
Life is waiting
Birth is waking
Eyes closed as I let out a moan
They say a heart is a home
But my fingers traced by silver they roam
I never knew the power of a telephone
Cord twisting around my wrist
Hushed circles around my legs pulled apart because you told me they never quite fit
A button and a zip
With a lighter in my mouth
I said yes
FOUR.
The first time you said my name
It was wrong but it felt right
Fingertips tracing the spin of your curls and the rises of your chest
Dotted with goosebumps and ink that’d been poked and stuck
A little girl with sun stained skin and tears swelling like the belly of her mother who wanted
me more than I wanted her questioning her luck
Jaws tucked into collarbones
Wrists against your neck as my fingers held each other instead of yours
Tongue cold from an iced latte
Still lighter than my legs against your bedsheets
Even after summer evenings with lemon in hand
Skin stinging but never as much as what they would all say she told me
Kala
Kala
Kala
Always cooled by bathroom tiles against my bare back with hair limp and foundation wiped
Crying over a porcelain that I could never tug on
Like the coat you gave me on one of our first nights
The pinks and blues from city lights that never slept when they looked you straight in the
eye
Dizzying as they specked your skin
But couldn’t I see
It could never be me
Because I was never even mine to keep
FIVE.
Stray hairs tucked beneath your collar
Linen shirts dipping down your chest
Gold wrapped around your neck
Idle sways to gentle jazz
Sun-stained sheets
Tracing the silhouettes of the wonderfully mad
Adorned by silk ribbons and pale melancholy
The bliss
The sin
The stars
The skin
Goodnight young lovers
May dust rest against your old entangled bones
<3