THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

A conversation I have, between my girl on my bench

Blacked in coolness which is not blue, coolness

Felt in a black-and white kid of Chaplin,

she stands her face

On my lap, almost keeping up, any but if she does have about it

To my eyes it is numb. ‘I like doing something’, says she as though

she had to tell me for me to remember. She was right,

I did not know nostalgia meant nothing, though what I only did now,

is just enjoy its feeling.

‘Okay’,

my eye closed, my hands on the moon she wore and palm on her breast.

I did remember she loved the sex of a loved one

Touching her, even if it is the hands of a woman once pretending

To be the girl same.

‘But I cannot confirm’, she tells me

“I know”, my eyelids shiver, I acknowledged something

I do not accept…I have known time

makes me know lesser

about it gone, though all of time bears a word same,

the girl promised herself

a stubborn difference she will perceive, of every point

she sees similar

inside its border, and different amongst the borders.

But the borders look black! They share a transition. And a girl with a

memory always remembers those, does she never?

My girl does not see my questions. But she sees buried

Claim I have over my memory, she haunts the value, vividly,

In her conscience, the value she will have when she will pass the

142 big blocked points of time she is yet even to segregate.

‘What do you know.

You have never felt the things like that right now.’

I could have told her I felt her pain, and I could have told her something I remember baby, but I knew. ‘Yes, I don’t know’

‘So fucking calm and happy, how does it feel to me to see

you be

one thing at a time?’

‘You know baby, you are out of it, you are furious..’ , and so is me,

writing this being a durdled mix of both of you, knowing not one

place I can ever try to laze out to wording. Yet, I wonder if I can

accept my feelings in convention fashionably with calm tears

and

revere my conflict relentlessly all

at the same point in time,

and all

not in words or in state, or in instinct

or in a combination,

but in pure feeling gressing itself out in ways which would

eliminate any componency of the above three and more,

any importance of my lines being typed or written, my clothes damp or dry, or

the showering of thoughtlessness when I try to dampen my laptop in thought and type on my clothing

in desire.

“What the hell does furious mean?” What a cry, I had to move my palms to her abdominals to stop them from dimpling. “Nothing to you baby,

but something to me”, I feel the need to

realize I cry for her and

she does not cry for herself,

I feel the need to know, that the both of us realize things every so often,

but we seem different, and my teacher would call me more matured.

So I think my teacher is wrong, isn’t it, the girl?

“You know I do not know what it means, but you still say, when I ask you how I feel.”