Category: poem

The Art of an Artery


I see yet know nothing
I know but can see nothing
Perhaps because I close my eyes during the day
And in night I keep them open
Or perhaps the day dawns when I close my eyes
And night falls when I do open
Thus, I am riven, cleaved clean
And both parts of me are lost to the void
Where they each calls for one another
And each fails to answer the other
So that the half words spilling through the corner of cold blue lips
Become eddies;
Wind painting on water
And the colourless quiet
Is divided equally to all drowning men

This darkness of thought
Tunnels connecting the passage of time
Yawn endlessly
For who would turn and fall asleep
When all answers of today are again questioned tomorrow

We come and go, we come and go
With what desire of knowing
We may never know

Splashes of white and black
Stars streaked with paint brushes
On the decaying horizon
Universe diluted and powdered into pills
To be taken twice with warm water
Before the self-hypnosis servings:
‘Ode to me, ode to me
The orphan child of galaxy’
A child who sees, who see:
Spiders crying upon the wall
And ants dying without a funeral
With the human belief of being surreal
Something more than Picasso’s parody of each man watered down into the same shape
As mercury, slithering inside our throats,
We paint the dreamland agony on our own
A martyr decapitated by needle
Love loaded with gunpowder kiss
Lucky draw for cursory chemotherapy
Armchair dissection; with thoughts clinging to the end of the scalpel
Manufactured magnanimity with expired life lessons
Vending machines for vison; a dime’s dream for a day
Granite gods, chiselled, chewing on sand and white vapor of wisdom
And we the people, popcorn patrons, watching this apocalypse through donated eyes
In a fostered future where, famished children pose before the camera
For takeaway Pulitzer
And the humanitarian prize.

Walls with wombs
Gestating hatred
Watch us, the metallic vultures, as we hover
With our telescope tuned for hypocrisy
Our heavy hearts, aching with empathy, from behind the Kevlar vests


If only the bombs being dropped were bread
There would be no war left to win

Two mirrors
Broken
Thousand miles apart
Watch each other and weep

There is a shell of silence about us
And all those who can see cannot show
And all those who cannot see would not know
How the world is a fish tank
Submerged in an ocean
And our giant leaps
Reaching for stars
Are paralyzed thoughts
Trapped in an endless motion

So, take me to the quiet room
With windows overlooking green fields
And empty blackboard,
Where blank books of history
Are taught by children;
I shall be a student of lifelong happenstance
Waiting for the recess bell to ring
And sunlight to flood out
Into the playground
And make
Ghosts out of living men

The texture of wind
Is not felt by the fingers
Nor the weight of the shadow
By the ground
The time is not seen
On the skin of the sky
Nor is the source heard
Within the sound


Erosion


I keep awake
Watching the parched lightbulb
(And the lightbulb perhaps watching me)
With my hand on the warm doorknob;
Leading halfway to hell,
Till the caterpillar thoughts crawl out into the silence
And cocoons of dreamless desires
Flood the floor
As dark pools of velvet;
With skin like ash and skin like glue.
Fingers of fire
And butterfly blood
Seals the sound of the oboe
In the roots of time
So the seeds of silk may flower
And the fountainhead of pulse
Breathe in the open every night
To let the swan song of love;
Traced on the tips of arched spine
Leave the lips
And take hold of the walls
To make the voice of world
Like beads of sweat; evaporate,
And the colours of a carnal mind collapse
Into nothingness
Of everyday afterlife

Offal

I

Here in the dim lit room
Held together with velcro
I await for an awakening
There is a gaggle of gods about me
And I hear the mice being murdered in rafters
While my stereo melds a melody
An edible static like
Ants in my mouth
And bees on my tongue
So I spit the honey and drink the stings
And I drown the birds and cage the wings
To breathe, to breathe
The liquid light
From the cigarette between my gasoline lips
In amorous delight

II

The flame of my flesh and this napthalene world
Resting upon a rusted needlepoint
Take heed of the dust motes
Suspended in time
For they are you
And they are me
Awaiting
With nothing to see
In the far too near eternity

III

I see stars in my bedroom
And prophets under my eye
Rainbows growing from my skin
As I fall into the sky
And there is a hymn in my ears
That aches “Praise to thee”
And I am drowning in my tears
Eating a faded tapestry

Her Fire and Her Flesh

Her eyes were on the fire
Her fingers in the dough
The smoke; it left her breathless
Like the kerosene she poured into the stove
The sweat dipped her lashes
To her tears were all blind
She was only a shadow on the wall
Though being a woman one of a kind

She had trapped Ganges in her hair
And Pharaohs praised her lotus feet
Her’s was Mumtaz’s Taj
And to her belonged the Papal Seat
But all that was her she had given
In dowry for her father’s name,
With the hope she would be treasured
And not burnt alive for the same

But soon a time shall come
When a Sita will not walk
A false Ordeal of Fire
So blind people would not talk
And soon a time shall come
When a Draupadi will not accept
The men and their game of dice
Weighted against her self-respect
And no longer any Eve shall answer
For Adam’s own intent
And let a Mother be always a Martyr
And Father always a Saint

Shore Without the Sea

I know no more of you
Than the shore does of the sea
A lifetime spent haunted
By a murdered memory
Of the ever alive distance
Like the lights between two cities
So far from flame the fire
That there are two eternities

My body, it wanders,
With the wind that holds my hand
Which whispers me to write
About my love on seeds of sand
So the wind may carry it along
To you, wherever you are
On the pillow of a wooden moon
Or beneath the shadow of a dying star

But my thoughts they do confess
That my mind can now surrender
Every dream I had of you
So I may no longer remember
How it was to be untrue
Towards my life which I shaped in sorrow
Wishful that my barren tonights
Shall light our shared tommorow

And I hope you can see me now
(From across the desert you brought to break
The castles I wrought in dreams
To keep us forever awake)
So you know I am free at last
From the future that stems from past
A sole light that sleeps off far
Beyond the cracks of memory
Of how I know no more of you
Than the shore does of the sea