What Does It Feel Like?
It feels like waking up in a house
renovated overnight-
It still feels like home but
more rooms to explore,
more windows to look out from,
more things to call home.
What once was spiderweb ceilings, pipeline leakings
now aroused Kamasan-style scapes over my head.
Perhapses, What ifs, were daydreams that merely touched
the roofs of my heads but look up-
It conjured them into starlight chandelier,
wall paintings upon heavens’ pendentives so dear.
The stairway used to be a waterfall I had to climb
red tides, crimson scars- not paint on my hands,
I wished colour would fall easily like my tear dams.
But as I reached the last step of the marbled staircase,
It revived the reverie of a lake I painted, flowing upon the floor
like Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny-
preserved lilies pressed between Earth’s history.
It mended the torn canvases of my bedroom.
Blisters as certain as stone, dark as black tourmaline,
It healed as sculptures of Ganesha- gold enlightenments
emerged from sandstones of my homeland’s rivers.
My past used to be something I tried to chisel new,
but now I carve wood wishes for a future as I pray to You.
Its’ Les Patineurs Valse echoes crescendos, I find
a piano standing in solitary in its room and
It melts
into the D flat of The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.
It warms cold cries into wintertime waltz and
Blooms
Sakuras embracing the Art Nouveau balcony
behind the instrument's repertoire gallery.
The library remembers oblivion-
The time someone told me of butterflies in a museum
is preserved in a poem in a Canterbury Bell hardcover
I like your smile when it speaks of things you love.
It eternalised cold handmade bracelets into
eulogies and unsent love letters with Iris flowers.
Lost memories from a time not remembered,
now exhumed in inked constellations reassembled.
That smell of curry is coming from downstairs.
They say it's a need
but the only thing I starved for was
Time
cooked extra rib cages,
lines bolder than
my sketches on crazily-creased
watercolours sketchbooks.
But It said food is medicine.
So sit down, here’s Tea for Two
I saved for you.
Outside are museums of gazebos and plumerias,
fingers tangled in Ivy-wrapped walls,
books upon a porch swing,
I took a look at the house.
Love
feels like waking up in a house
renovated overnight.
And I have never felt so much of it-
as I looked at the house
I renovated overnight.