In this empty room
With a splinter of cracked light
I can watch the rise and fall of loyalties
throbbing between the recesses of darkness
From my window, the crescendo of hoarfrost
driving all things underground.
It was against indigo ceilings
And the critique of clouds
That my solitude seemed damned
They pity the dead
I pity the living whose roots are twisted
With fables and lore, strangling on hesitation
From the hallows…
Hades weaving control when there is none
You long to feel that sense of triumph
after you’ve climbed through that forbidden window
onto a clay roof of a brownstone flat
to dangle your feet over the edge
pull petals or seeds apart and drop them below
undetected

words © malai carrara
photo by lilyana karadjova

Do you remember she who
has paid the master in wait and wants
Her eyes aimed wild
And all the assurances at the foot of her feet
Have you taken the time to notice
There is a fire that lives inside her mouth
Bearing the heat of an untold tomorrow
And that the words have slightly burned around the edges
How do you forgo what is never spoken
or cross over from where you were never going
Pull away the veils and move beyond
the long procession of lost souls
who resemble dark clouds dragged across the moon?

~ words © 2012 malai carrara

Photography copyright © Nausher Banaji
all rights retained by photographer.www.Nausher.com

i am worn and the longing 
vines me tighter and tighter
I would sooner have your arms wrapped around me than the mindful want of them
But sogno beckons me
I would wait for you if you asked me
And I could tell you that in waiting
I would command my eyes open
Until you were near enough to touch
And only then
I may find my place
Where our breath moves in same
And I finally feel all my pieces

words © Malai Carrara 2012
Photography copyright © Nausher Banaji
all rights retained by photographer.

He often spoke of a girl and a monk
And the river he carried her over
He beckons to dismiss my mind
How many times do we pass our silence
And brush away our illusions
Tonight there would be no dismissing
I never want to forget
Tonight I returned to the flat rock
on which I once sat.
I carried my self, my thoughts, my thumps
With bards and willows as my audience
Waiting for reconciliation
Waiting for the others ~ 


© malai carrara 2012

Photography copyright © Nausher Banaji
all rights retained by photographer.

All afternoon the makers of anniversary cards
Have been snipping and stitching into 
The flatness of paper with needles
Making patterns, a pattern, the patter of children of children 
Hardly remembering what it was like to be without care

This house was waiting for us
Prototypes of perennials and plum tree blossoms
Lined with selected 20mm washed rock
and mulch covered geo textile
Anything to hold back the wild grasses

Husband and wife, sister and husband nod their heads
Approvingly about the new glass tea making gadget
which squeezes the tea from the bottom of the pot
“Don’t you think it’s lovely?” she asks
While I circle the rim of my cup - circles

No sooner did we pull the fork from our mouths did they
Hurry to remove all the plates – swift and invisible.
They had vanished - then thinking
How fun it would have been to exchange comedy and debate
Like we do in homes I know

Retreating to the traditional room for living
there was no comedy, no debate and frankly, no living.
As army ants they scurried, their weight in work
Stacking fragments of their past in a heap
And children of children dug holes in the garden with spoons

words © malai carrara 2012
Photography by Lisa meyer

The air freezes with flecks of the intolerable One breath to taste ambivalence One spoonful of breakfast cereal One depression in the remote control Even now as the room assembles with habits Of indifference and passivity I ask my spirits to hush, be still They must not make a sound For they would never understand how our solitary conversations comfort me.


words © malai carrara 2012 photographer unknown to me

What condition is this
To feel fragile and hollow
To feel pain and to feel happiness?
I’ve come all this way
And you have nothing to say

Nights do not speak in moonbeats
It sends wind to carve
Through the surrender of years
To pull back the false prosceniums
Of thick velvet suffocate

Just a small smudge on
the stained window of deferrals
is tomorrow's only request.
A crack of light spill-through
Even fractured will let go old grief

Perhaps this is why I have come
To tell you in breath
the loneliness becomes light
and I’ll see you again
but not today

words © Malai Carrara 2012

Photography copyright © Nausher Banaji
all rights retained by photographer.

the half-dark vernacular scrawled in sacred text
each blackened word biting the tail of the next
eclipsed to wander with ghosts this is my only desire
to coax prophecies forbidden my minds primal pyre

words © Malai 2012 (inspired by domansky)

Photography copyright © Nausher Banaji all rights retained by photographer.

It was half past typical - it was time
I watched him slip on his coat
And walk out into the alley without tears
And thought - Nothing touches him
he floats above all things
like fog weaving through the details
of curiosities and anguish
I am now beginning to know
In this night wary and shadowy betrayal
What it means to be a ghost
imagined and vague
His tapping fingers never really touching my skin
My spillover solitude never finding his focus

Words © malai carrara 2012
image by yuri pritisk

An afternoon of rain ushered
a choir of secrets
tiny flecks of solitude
adorn the earthen floor in a motley coverlet
of last autumn and new wool flower
in a web of silk tying there and here
like a moth I’m caught.
Perhaps I will spin away
The way a bead would spin on an abacus
always counting what you have
on that abacus
One new scarf, two facial wrinkles,
three loud chuckles.
I listen for you in birch bark murmurs
Watching its skin curl back
Like thin sheets of music
And the flakes cascade to pillow
I somehow recall how you sipped
My peppermint mocha but were too polite
To tell me it was not to your liking
I wish i had told you
I love being lost in sips of time
In thoughts with no fixed address
ambling in concert with the echoes of each

words © 2011 malai carrara
image by sandra strazdaite