Scheherazade

You are unattainable again, tonight. 

Like you were sometime ago. 

When I would read your poetry

over and over. 

Try to look for you in your words. 

Deciphering your codes, your secrets. 

Pretending that everything you wrote

was a riddle for me. 

You wrote about your men and your city. 

Your life and your death. 

Your realm. 

And the silent futility of it all in which

you strangely seemed to revel in. 

I didn't even remember how you looked like back then. 

Just your hair. 

And your hands, your tiny little hands

as they sifted through the sand.

Soft delicate fingers caressing with care. 

And then you wrote for me. 

Scribbled verses about me on a tissue, 

using my back as a support, 

with the pencil you stole from me, remember? 

And I was so jealous of your words. 

For they came to you like old friends. 

My words fooled me.

My words gave up. 

You loved me like you were born to love me. 

I just gave you a thousand and one nights worth of stories. 

You were supposed to be my muse. 

That was the arrangement. 

But you, with your mysterious ways, took me in.

And I became yours.  

 

A better way to lie.

We're miserably failing, you and I.
Our shoes lying morosely in the sand with their mouths wide open.
Poem doesn't come the way it used to.
Now we have to grunt every sentence out.
Push it out like a morning shit without a cigarette.
Too young and too scared and already,
way too tired to be grown-ups.
The sea eats up the beach inch by inch.
Consumes all the empty beer bottles
and the torn fishnets and the condoms.
Then burps.
A nearby dog wakes up from his sandy nest.
We're too scared to write.
Too sleepy to be honest.
Too hungry.
All the time.
(I am already bored, in the middle of writing this poem.
For what's the point. Its not a good poem.
Its a bunch of shit.
There is no rhythm. There is no conscience.
No yearning, no ambition.
No swear words. Not even thinly veiled truths.
Nothing to salvage.
Maybe if I end it with a pretty image...)
A warm night falls on us. The shoes are gone.
The sea ate them. The bastard.
The dog comes over, sniffs at my toes.
Then pisses into the sea
and goes away.