Spiced Syrup (a poem)

Break the stalks inside, the ones called Sure

Safe

Tomorrow

and Home.

Wrap their peeled strings like white flowers around the ankles

Press the old bells into each heel

Keep the tokens close and draw your short fingers over the bowls and bobbles of hard skin

Glueing you to your shoes.

Suck the sweetness from around your teeth

Black tea like spiced syrup.

Remind the heart to breathe.

They do not need to tell me,

It is assumed: swallow it.

Swallow, like sunlight to a window

That’s all it is

A long swim down to where the world presses a hundred foreign palms against my ears

Fitting the mouth around an angled, dirt-covered, noisy way of seeing.

It should not hurt more than a dull burning in the outer blanket of your body

Where the heat stakes its rusty claim.

Not more than a water wheel for a stomach, setting an embargo on sinks

(just to be safe)

And screeching as it turns: a long whine for salted almonds and chocolate.

Not more than the fever boiling in the back of your tongue,

An uninhabited carnival in bright colors painting itself onto the edges of the bone

Making cardamon blue and tamarind green and bicycle red the new, communal utensils,

A personal set of broken pencils.

It is not empty, never empty,

It is full of sleep,

thick with the hours, the smells of burning banana leaves, and the stiffness of the bed,

It is full in the absence of seat-belts and helmets

It is full of the Tamil a tired ear pretends to translate—like confused Siri on voice recognition

And it is full to brimming, boiling over sometimes, with alone.