Two Poems
by Aseem Kaul
Mourning
The dead are easy:
it is the living who require
our special sadness
the loss of desire
too delicate a wing.
What begins
as escape turns
into forgetting,
then into loss.
A door left open
empties the world.
And the silence echoes
with words unspoken
with the faces of loved ones
we no longer recognize
blank as windows
awaiting the light
the things we were afraid to hold
too tight
prove to be the ones
too easily let go.
Exhalations of sorrow
in the summer air.
Absences that rise
out of sight
like prayer.
Neverland
Eternal thrill-seeker
you stitched death to you with needles:
a shadow you dared not lose;
stole lines from the sputtering moon,
and let cocaine make love to you,
her kisses doled out in
thimbles, her tinkerbell touch,
her poetry of bubbles expanding
in your chemical heart.
The hook claimed you at last—
a habit impossible
to grow out of—
nights when you woke to find
the window closed against you,
the darkness sweating stars,
and allowed yourself just one more chance:
second hit of the night
then straight on till morning.
Aseem Kaul lives in Minneapolis, where he is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. Aseem's work has appeared in Eclectica, Blood Orange Review, The Cortland Review, RHINO, and Mascara among others, and a collection of his short fiction, titled études, was published in 2009. More information about Aseem's work can be found at: http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?rid=262985