DON'T PANIC / LET GO

1 I ride in trains for whole nights trying to find myself

2. I call you from incognito pay-phones

Because I love to hear your silences

3. I look out at the ocean

But forget to notice how beautiful it is

Only that it is as inscrutably blue and silent and cold and tempestuous as your eyes

4. I feel the past clinging on to my fingers like gum

Yesterday stretches; yawns and is awake.
Here I am, again in the waiting room.
It’s not going to rain

5. I drink myself insensible every night

I wake up in sweats every morning

But you keep on going by

In my dreams

And I can't ever sleep

6. I behave stoically in the face of grief,

Knowing that the clouds above me,

The ground beneath my feet

And the air in my lungs

Are totally disinterested

In how I feel

7. I destroy as much evidence of your existence

As I could find

Until in the end,

All I am left with,

Are the red and white carnations of 2003

I’ll always have those

Dried up in dusty diaries

8. I suddenly remember your face and it flashes before me:

Your microscopic cut, just above your right eyebrow

Then, I realize that I never asked you about it

I looked into your eyes so many times

And yet I never asked you

Is it possible, that I just didn’t see you?

For I took your gaze for granted

But now, I miss it like hell

9. I plan to go to the Himalayas and become a recluse.

I wonder in Romanov nights-‘Whatever happened to you?’

I become constitutionally incapable of making eye contact

I fall in love with every woman I meet

I try to commit suicide by holding my breath

I lose 8 1/2 kilograms

I cry occasionally

I stop making movies

I believe everything will be all right

10. I write mechanically, without feeling

My poems; very scholarly, very droll

Page after page in silence

I wet my finger to turn the pages

Giving myself enough time between them,

To reach down to hold and stroke myself

While thinking of you,

Out of boredom, not titillation;

And if only, to delude myself into believing

That it was just wanton lust