Seeing ghosts

Stranger with the memorable face
Are you a ghost?
Or am I imagining you
Whenever I'm in one of these places
Where we remain anonymous
Hiding behind our name tags...

I think about the future and despair
These are not my people
All these polished masses
All social, sociable, secure in their steps
And I try to blend in, hiding in plain sight.

I saw you having lunch alone
Sitting at a table, all on your own
Seems impossible when I think about it
I must've imagined it
I must be imagining you
Looking for an excuse to distract myself.

Ghost with a pretty face
I've yet to see you smile
Must look magnificent on you
Will I ever learn your name?
Or will I forget all about you once more
Until I see you in such a place again?

It's the last day, I'm tired
My head is hurting
I miss my home, I miss my routine
Yet I know you're sitting two rows behind
I followed you there, then acted casual
Suddenly I turn my head and you've disappeared
The world closes up around me.

Maybe I should consider a career change
If I need ghosts to anchor me to these places...

Message received

The waves had sympathy for me
or maybe I picked the right ocean
or maybe it was all just a coincidence.
I don't know, I don't care
I'm so overwhelmed by joy now
I can't think, I can't even breathe.

I know this deserves proper poetry
But right now I lack the calm patience
to slow-brew pretty words in.
Instead I'll keep smiling like an idiot
and just be unabashedly happy.

Message in a bottle

Where are you, my friend
Just when I need you this bad
I'm confused, heartbroken, upset
When I have no right to be
any of that...

How does one cry on the shoulder of one
While the trouble is on another
Why am I this emotional all of a sudden
Just when I thought I purged
All that remained of my former self?

I wish I could talk to you now
I wish you still cared
No, you probably do, I'm being unfair
It's not nice of me to expect
To have you still where I've left
Especially since I'm the one who left.

Or maybe we both drifted away
Life always gets in the way like that
Our closeness, like a prehistoric fossil
Encased in amber
So beautiful to look at, remember, cherish
But inaccessible now, dead.

I have no right to even call you a friend
But you saw me through such hard times
You'd be the only one who'd understand
So I'll keep writing these letters
And keep putting them into bottles
and release them into the ocean
In the hopes that one day
You feel like reaching out for me again...

Riptide

It's bad form to bond over other people's misery
And just sad to bond over ours...

You were wearing fitted jeans
And I already had a couple of drinks
I managed to maintain some eye-contact
And listened to a few of your words
But my heart just wasn't in it
While my thought were dangerously straying.

You were wearing fitted jeans
And an open-collar shirt to boot
I vaguely remember you were also upset about something
You wanted me to understand
So I smiled and nodded
All the way concentrating hard not to stare
or drool, rather.

Yes, what with the jeans, and the shirt
and your hair that was just so
and your hands, distractingly close
always moving
I may have somewhat missed
whatever you were saying.
May that be why
we never have any deep conversations anymore?

How to tame and care for strays

You make me think of puppies
so much so that I get this urge to ruffle your hair
and it's kind of unexpected
since I'm not one for casual touching
unlike you.

You do that all the time, the casual touching thing
You give me hugs, you even massaged my shoulders once
It's a bit weird, and I don't know how to react to it.
My personal space normally spans a mile
And I get nervous when people breach it.
That's why I stiffen up and bristle
Like a cornered stray cat
I might've even hissed at you
If you didn't have that puppy thing going.

Well, talking on the phone is not my thing, either
So much so that the first time you called me
you had to try again and again and got the voice mail
Until I finally felt bad and picked it up
Now  I even smile and greet you by name.

I think I may be getting used to your brand of attention
Although I still don't know what to make of it.
Keep it up and I may start craving it.

What I'm trying to say
is that it's unfair of you to be going away
when you have me (almost) tamed like that...

It's all about the coffee

Oh honey, it's not about you
It was such a beautiful day outside
And I switched to iced coffee.

I would hold the mug in my hands,
it's warmth seeping through my fingers
And dream about a thousand things
Smiling about the now
Not remembering the then.
But it was sunny outside
So no mug, just plastic
And the ice has no warmth to give
No excuses.

Aren't you cute with your puppy eyes?
And we don't have anything to talk about
Waiting in line for our coffee.

What do you see in me?
I'm fun, bubbly, excitable, exciting?
Interesting, yes.
But you know there's more to it
I don't nurse the darkness inside any more
It may have fled even, maybe
While I was too busy living.
But you give me ideas
Behind the steam of freshly made coffee
they thrive.

Or they would have
But no steam, just sobering ice
So we walk our separate ways.

Wake up

Dream about the rain
About cloudy skies
About the exact shade of
the grey-blue of his eyes.

Dream about the rain
Find the pattern, the turning point
Rusty gears turning in the rain
On grass new and old, the rain.

Dream about the rain
Drops of water, sliding down his face
Filtering through eyelashes,
Flowing faster along the nose
lingering on the lips.
Follow the path with your eyes, with fingertips?
No, don't do it, you wouldn't, never.
Just dream about it.

Dream about the rain
Until it comes and goes
Then, the sun
Reflecting upon a smile
Wonder which one brightens up the room more
Life's easier under the rain
Wake up.

Of secrets and frogs

I can't talk about what I want to talk about
So I will talk about the frogs instead.
I bought them at the art fair the other day
They are both made of wood, delicate and light
They have spikes on their backs and sticks in their mouths
If you take the stick out and run it through the spikes
They make real frog sounds.

I can't talk about what I want to talk about
But I will tell you about the frogs
Yes, I have two of them, one bigger and smoother
That one stays at home, and has a louder voice
It's shiny too, seems like a lot of work went into it.
The other, I brought to work, sounds very chipper
It's tiny and cute and pretty simple.

-I can tell you more about the frogs
And go on and on until I exhaust all metaphors
But you already know how the story goes.
Yet I'm no princess and don't really know
What to do with not one but two frogs.-

I can tell you all the things that make me happy
And they are aplenty, no doubt
Since I'm a girl of simple tastes
And it takes little to cheer me up
But some of the things that make me happy
Should not be making me happy at all
And then I have this sudden urge
To talk about nothing but frogs...

Too high to fall, too low to fly

Turned up to eleven

That's how I feel these days

Unbound energy, happiness bursting out of my seams

And down it goes, I'm a jumpy ball of stress and anxiety

Then a profound tiredness, deep in my bones, overwhelming me.

Turned up to eleven

My charm level is trough the roof, everyone is affected

But this restlessness won't leave me alone, nothing is enough

I'm constantly on, desperate, needy, 

I can no longer find any peace and quiet on my own.

Turned up to eleven

I need to go for a long walk

Take a cold shower, maybe ten

Stay in bed with company till the neighbors complain

Something, anything, to calm me down again.

Turned up to eleven

Something is not right in my head

Like a bomb ready to go off, 

Lightning ready to strike

Am I really going to burn a hole in this life of mine?

The subtlety of spring

Waiting for a sign, waiting for a smile
waiting for the bus to arrive.
I hope that he is not
waiting for me to make up my mind.

His whole face lights up when he smiles
It's hard to not to take it personally
As the once frozen river gets antsy
Under the warmth of the sun
My imagination starts running free.

Waiting for a sign, waiting for an opening
waiting long enough
not to look like a fool again.

I don't know the shape of his lips,
His eyes are always distracting me.
His eyes are always distracting me
from listening to what he is really saying.

Waiting for a sign, waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for a smile directed only to me.
Waiting and feeling both bright pink excited
and deeply blue at the same time.

The ebb and flow of the daily life
This is one way to not to get bored at work
Another one is writing a poem instead...

Inner monologue

I have lost my audience, it seems
With no one to talk to, the inside of my head became a bit weird a place
I created a universe in there, borrowing a bit from books I like,
Making up the rest, so I have somewhere to go when daydreaming
-Too bad it's no help when I'm actually asleep
No use of having a vivid imagination
if your subconscious is pretty boring.-
So here I was, comfortably thinking that nothing from the real life
would inspire me any more
A pretty face came along and changed everything.

Everybody will judge you, at some point or another
For things you did or did not do
Isn't it better to not tell anyone anything?
But then you end up like me
Trying to disguise confessions as stories
And stories as memories.

A pretty face, yes, there we were
I have one of those, too, if you're wondering
And I find my own kind of pretty quite enticing
I have this awesome new haircut, you should see
Can't stop looking at it.
He does have this pretty face
And a narrow waist and long legs, too
I think my haircut must've conjured him into being.

I've taken to reading stories with strong female leads
Not that I identify more with them
All those badass chicks with their endless stamina and brass balls
Where do they get all that energy from?
But I'm doing my part to uphold the female pride, I guess
And usually there is a plethora of pretty men in there, too
Fuel for my imagination.

Sometimes I wonder who reads what I write
Except for the google crawler bots of course,
Little spiders going all over the place, cataloging everything in sight
I could code a spider for myself
And become a more efficient stalker than I already am
Learning all about what he likes and what he is like
What charming conversations would we have after that.

...

I've had this blog for about ten years now
A lot of things changed since when I first started
But looking back I can see
the one thing that is pretty much constant
Is the sources I get my inspiration from.

rambling online

Public lives, private lives
These days everyone seems to have two
You have an image you put out there
Share it on facebook, on twitter, foursquare
I've been here and there, everywhere
With people, on my own, on the move
It's just like everyone is running all the time
And when they are standing still
It's just because they're sharing things online.

Complaints, exclamations, quotes
Life changing revelations, pictures of food
We think we know what's going on in everybody's lives
In everybody's heads
But what does a snapshot of a wine glass tell
about my character
Anything but I like to be associated with pictures of wine glasses?

The image we put forward
Tells not who we are, but who we want to be
Who we want to look like, who we want others to believe we are
A performing monkey, for everyone who cares to see
Private lives, public lives
Exposure is not always a good thing
People get cancer from that...

Apocalypse and Ice-cream

Just now he called me his pistacchio ice-cream.

The white lid of the Ikea trash can is sitting next to me
It's my weapon of choice, in case the zombie apocalypse happens.
There are so many things one can do with a large metal lid.
It has a nice firm handle on it for starters.
I could bang it on the wall, that would surely scare off something
Or just amuse myself, or I could use it as an umbrella
Or a plate, I could even cook on it, then put off the fire.
It would make an excellent shield, if needed.

I'm optimistic about the zombie apocalypse
As long as I have my big white trash can lid.

And I'm optimistic about life
As long as he keeps calling me names.

This is not a poem

"You need surgery, immediately"
You'd think the world would go up in flames
You'd be a crying mess, scared
No, all you think about is
"I'm probably not going to be able to meet my friend tonight"
Followed by "I'm going to miss my flight"
And "oh, no, another week stuck in here, away from home"

"It's going to be a major one, we'll cut you open
and remove a chunk of your liver"
Sure, whatever. Another week away from the one I love
Another week of keeping up appearances
Smile, nod, smile, be nice, always be nice
Be nice when all you want to do is scream obscenities
And hit everyone on the head, repeatedly.

"It will hurt so much, part of your brain will short-circuit,
and all you'll be able to process is the pain and how it doesn't stop"
OK, they won't tell you this
They won't tell you that the cut will be 25 cm long, and ugly, either
Or that you won't be able to cough or even laugh for a long while
But you'll see for yourself, soon enough
Still, everyone will have bigger problems
Everyone will be suffering oh-so-much more
Cheering others up, letting them think they cheer you up
Why won't they just leave you alone
Oh, yes, you don't want to be alone
And the only one you want to be alone with,
can't stay for long...

"See how quickly it was all over? Almost as if it never happened!"
Of course. Except for the pain. And the scar. And the fear. And the pain.
At the end, you'll be so tired that you won't be able to sleep
Crying at night so no-one sees
You don't want anyone to worry about you
That would mean you'd be indebted
Another hundred years of having to make others feel better
Part of it is just in your head, but feels real enough
Getting more tired by the hour
Smile and nod, everything's alright
Just let me make it to the plane,
and through the journey, and through the waiting, and through the taxi ride.

"Finally we're back home!"
You're sleeping well for the first time in ages
Falling asleep in front of the TV already
Going to bed, sleeping all the way till morning
You made love, you ordered take-out
You opened the bags, spilled their guts around, fetching just a few things
House is a mess, who cares, you're back home, together, alone
You're still wanted, and cared for, even with the scar
No need to nod and smile, just the way you are
And normalcy resumes...

On words

Words don't come easy to me.

But numbers and formulas, all so familiar

Codes and symbols, each full of meaning, not a single byte too much

or too little

That's another story.

A precise haven in a world where we worship the superfluous

And surrounded by the chaos of the redundant.

I find myself wondering if, among all this mess,

is there really need for yet another poem, yet another blabbering

Meant solely as an outlet, without conveying anything vital?

Then again, words come easy to me

Getting lost in the rhythm of the repeated sound, formed in the mind, shaped by the fingers,

and given life by a set of eyes, and sometimes empowered with the flick of the tongue and lips.

But still completely independent of everything involved that is biological,

Standing alone, flaunting it's metaphorical existence,

A mirror to whoever it encounters, and that after serving as a relief to its creator.

And yet, words don't come easy to me

With each sentence completed, it's another step away from provable facts

And explanations become in order, self evidency runs away crying

The elegance and completeness of a single formula melts away

And words, in scores, scurry to fill the harrowing gap, haphazardly.

And yet there are words for the things we haven't yet devised a mathematical expression for

Like the emptiness in ones heart, when reminded of past mistakes,

Or the joy the same overflows with, upon discovering the possibility

of describing another stubborn concept

using only symbols and math...