I write till my blisters bleed

We live like algorithms, growing out of each other. You write
With characters, with a language that has not mothered me. They reek
Of staleness tucked between old books, your pot of yoghurt, and the
Square of late afternoon focused on burning your arm.

I write with a language that crawls out undigested from your tongue,
Pronounced like an eraser smudge. From you and to you, these mean
Nothing. There is an ache to know that with my best words I cannot love you
And you, in return, can only enfold me when I am least articulate.

We bend over books across thirty years and you did not suspect
A thing. You in your world, me in mine, parallels, in the aisles just
Next to each other’s shelves. Turn the page. I am disgusted
By my spitting image of you. Unoriginal, the twin dangling, red and inflamed.

Each centimetre of my poetry is chasing yours: it is unfair that you have
Decades of a head start. I am chasing that train you have departed in,
But only following these overgrown tracks and a phantom of the whistle.
I write after you, take after you, already lost the despair

Of a child chasing a leaving car. I eat up the tracks and go faster
Till my shoes and shields are worn thin with holes. Baring my honest heart,
I had hoped it would make me faster. Shed the umbilical weight.
I keep writing.