I should be drinking honey; to me this café’s no more than a hive, but in a parallel reality where bees grew wise and built for themselves a world of their own that too, like them, buzzed and whirred, producing more than just honey, feasting on more than just pollen, their taste more refined to the culinary delights of cow, lamb, chicken and pig, roasted on fires, stewed in pots; oh how they buzzed with thirsty glee when the fleshy odours swam beneath their wings… but halt now! What shall be their Queen? Shall they praise the tea leaves or the coffee bean? No. They’re not the creators. So, in place of potted plants stands a grand tropical cacao, the true queen of creation whose leafy majesty feeds on the most royal delicacy, the heart of man; a crude design of nature that never learnt to fly.

Thoughts, dreams, reality, blending together in a mindly amalgamation, like milk into tea and sugar in that, I drink them up, altogether, a ponderous brew whose sweetness bears a question, written in the dregs that puddle its shallows: What are you?

You believe freedom lies in being free, free from responsibility, from duty, and now you’ve but the naked canvas. Paint something. You can paint anything. And as the dry brush mocks you with its many bristles, you can but throw paint at the wall, blaming your art on gravity as it drips and slides to its knees, weeping through the gap beneath the door.

There, amidst the red, yellow and blue, you see your eyes, flooding the landing, cascading down the stairs to rest at the foot of an empty bed; covers thrown, pillow askew, but they cannot fold and shape into a lover.

Hold them as you may, the morning won’t bring you kisses.

I’ve time to kill, but what shall be my weapon? With my bare hands, I can fool time, turn back the clocks, break the watches, but time lives on without its cogs, without the sixty-pointed hands – three hands that bear but a finger a piece – and even with my ten mighty digits I cannot break the ever-counting face; forever advancing, my breath held, advancing, my teeth clenched, advancing, my fists locked in, my eyes screwed shut, tick-tock tick-tock

Would you release these memories from their chains and have them howl upon the powdered face of past? By all accounts, the stories yet refrained are grand with love and loss that’s come to pass, but heed the open wound and the beating heart; there will be blood, my dear, there will be blood. Catch every red and salty drop that parts from vein and eye, toward the growing flood, and swallow them with your gentle words; they cannot hope to save the long deceased. This time is mine to voice what’s yet been heard, to tell you, lest forever hold my peace, there was, there is, and shall forever be, another heart that haunts eternally.

When you kiss me, the soundtrack to my life fails and skips like words and heartbeats. Pinch me, quick! Fingers crossed I don’t wake up…