Category: poem

  • An Answer to the Abyss

    This moment
    It is endless
    There is nothing more to be
    It is the past you predicted
    And future you didn’t see…

  • Nescience

    I wait at the newspaper stand
    Reading, the morning is grey
    Ash tinted
    Like an old man’s asthma

    Buds of people are sprouting
    From windows and eggshell alleyways
    Dressed in yesterday’s dreams
    And tommorow’s promises
    Faces creased, bespectacled
    With white hairs a halo
    From the century long sunlight
    Age ever ached to swallow

    A ballad pours from the the barbershop
    The old stereo is crooning about
    Footsteps falling on azure fields
    And carts on country roads
    I can smell the aftershave
    At once bitter and sweet
    The razor once again vacant
    Without the borrowed heartbeat

    There is a fallacy here
    Between the words and vision
    I read and see
    The stories seem vibrant but life colour-free
    Perhaps it is the weight of being
    That makes it so
    For all of us do wither
    But only some of us grow

    The children have gathered on the footpath
    A bell in some temple tolls
    The priests are praying for bliss
    And in laughter a football rolls
    I watch, I watch
    The world divided in unison
    Each hour be day or night
    Being a part of every season

    So I pay my fair share
    It’s time for me to leave
    And be one amongst the masses
    Who in eternity believe
    Of everyday man and their everyday deeds
    In the cycle of fruit from the flower and flower from the seeds
    If only one would question; Does the roots if ever know?
    Of the world that blooms outside from their breaths buried below

  • Lyra


    What heaven and earth shall answer me
    What fire and brimstone shall answer me
    What thunder and tempest shall answer me
    When all I ask in a whisper
    Is the source of their silence

  • Raiment

    Image by Francesca Zama @unsplash

    Naked pictures painted on the world map, a global ache this systematic subjugation, arraigned with signatures and rubber stamps and blue and black ink with red smeared hands from…

    Ants committing suicide for sugar cubes, mountains sundered for a grain of sand, weighing a ton by common belief of a wishful world running in a race without an end around a toilet flush
    I hear music in the smoking firmament, the guttural snort and fart of the engine like Mozart’s Requiem for Modern Times; graveyards filled with scraps, dusty medals pinned upon pigeon chests, chest with springs and cogs inside, all mechanisms of a meager mind,

    Breathed upon by gunpowder gods never crucified, but kept alive, unchained unlike Prometheus or castrated unlike Cronus, with 9mm eyes watching over the supposed universe,
    Lives televised, a miniscule mime renting life per hour, human carcass threaded, talking puppets mimicking everyday shambles with double exclamation and undying opinions; graffiti upon bathroom walls, the enlightenment of our age; our Bible, our Koran, our Commandments, our Veda,

    An ocean of umbilical madness, Medusas of mind, writhing in the depths of drowned time, left helpless at the bottom, garbage cans, lobster traps, Ahab’s ambition, little mermaid’s fin, all part of the abyss, woven tales of Atlantis

    Beggars upon sidewalk, watching the neon lights blink at the mannequins dressed and fed better than them, breathing in glass case while the Caesar supine on steps as flat piece of bread looks on: Et tu, Et tu, until a coin clatters in the bowl and Rome falls, democracy dissolved under the acid rain of paint thinner,

    Red sky running, blind horse racing against the rider till the tollbooth where hands on hips the old man walks the zebra crossing, unmindful of the airplanes lined at the red light, waiting one and all to fly away, without passengers or Blackbox, to a land where runways end

    Phantoms fasting upon a fingernail, the sound of anarchy, electric guitar with strings of lightning, rainbow flooding the floor, and the people waving, a mingled marsh undecipherable, a canvas coated with paint, avant-garde asylum overflowing with stone heads

    Rows of velvet cushion upon glass, red carpet laid upon mud, hyenas laughing in the hallway in high heels and mothball tuxedos from pawn shop, faceless fornication behind the screen, lips locked together in war, breathes dying with alcohol,

    And outside the Ghost of Christmas Past selling mint in the rain, poets pass him and politicians, all made of papers full of question marks and Venn diagram that depicts everything said and done, the saying it has the bigger circle and the deeds it had none,

    The Van Gogh World waking, rivers of gas flowing under matchstick houses waiting for madmen, toothpick buildings dancing for children playing whack-a-mole, Las Vegas without lights like teeth of a key; all cards of the fleeting reality playing pinochle with constant uncertainty,

    Dismal days these, age of enlightenment, recoilless Renaissance, people paying people to understand people paying people, round around the circumference of Drachma with Copernicus we fly, we fly, taking one day kryptonian crash course, and pretend to die with cries towards the sky; O father thou art in heaven, look down now and weep, for seven days you worked, and on the eighth it all went to dust, you knew it and yet you left it so, now weeds gather in your garden, and even Lucifer stays away and pray free from this drama; Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama

  • Seismic Soul

    To speak
    Without being heard
    With words like wind
    Asleep in windchimes,
    To be far away, breathing in a distant past dyed sepia and smelling of crushed leaves:
    The aroma of time dried through the ages,
    To taste a fruit away from the tongue
    And let it linger in a seedless ecstasy
    On each pair of lips
    In every burnished breath between the lungs
    To weave sunlight
    In the skin of dewdrops
    And bare a rainbow upon the floor
    Brought home to a full circle
    To smile at the madness of it all
    And mean it in the mirror of mind
    Grassroots enveloping
    Memories I cannot find
    Now leads me to believe
    That life with all its thorns and petals
    Is more in the act of living
    Than waiting for it to settle

  • The Man Asleep


    Life, look out
    This man asleep
    Is walking a dream
    His pulse, afraid of inimical things, dance
    At the incoherent din of the cattle bell,
    For he knows only the time of tommorow
    Prophesied by blind sages
    Sages left by the world to marinate in old age
    And he carries it; the cattle bell, it’s dead weight, it’s rue weight, like a talisman
    Through the thick fog of promises
    To the other side, where the light, yet unseen, seems to shine differently
    For the sages who have looked on the winter
    From far, would know something of the snow
    Or so he hoped, with his face coddled within the blinkers
    And crowned with a horseshoe

    Life, look out
    The man asleep
    Knows not that he is sleeping
    And so as waves he worship the shore
    Unaware that he stands with men
    Too afraid to blink at the sea
    And soon he too would be watching the waters
    Shiver with each breath of the seagull
    Till his own wings wither and rot away
    Leaving him; this epileptic Icarus
    A common man among the common men
    Left to watch each sunrise
    And every sunset
    From the shade of a dry sacamore
    The hinterland of heart
    That burned in winter
    Knows both fire and ice is the same;
    Perhaps, in the slow dance of the dying fire
    He seeks the heat some more
    Perhaps, his dreams are dreams of a dream
    He dreamt he has dreamt before…

  • The Man in the Book

    Sebastián León Prado @Unsplash

    Some day I want to be
    The man in the book
    Who knew what he wanted
    And loved what he took
    With no one to question
    And no answer to give
    With no thoughts on living
    And only to live
    Some day I want to be
    The man in the book

  • The Shadow Of Absent Things


    I can smell the brown sugar
    Melting in my tea pot
    And I am rooted
    Between two oak trees
    Made immovable
    By the stone lips oaring my depths
    Reaching for the sky silhouetted against me
    But the ache of it does not feel like tooth decay
    Nor the pleasure makes me shiver and rain
    Glass beads and spirit of grain
    Into the hands of praying men

    I can feel my skin
    Breathing under your fingernails
    Like snail on a hot tar road
    While your voice in my ear
    Whisper garbage
    Something about me, my hair,
    My face and the rest
    Of me but not about
    As if your eyes are nothing but mirror
    Or old shoes spit polished this morning
    And my heart wanders like flies on foodstuffs
    Unable to digest
    The truth of you touching me
    In and beyond
    Anymore

    Steel on the tip of my tongue
    Marble on the base of my back
    I am pierced and pinned to the pedestal
    A naked butterfly
    At once transparent and tarnished
    Bruised, battered and bludgeoned into being;
    Beautiful sans beauty

    So I stare like a light bulb numb in its holder:
    The roof is blank
    A grey slate
    False sky
    Absent mind
    White chessboard
    And the omniscient blind

  • Vestiges

    Dear,
    I know it is too late to write
    It’s midnight here too, the sun is lying dead at the bottom of the ocean
    With the dry lipstick caps
    You left.
    I rinsed their marks off the sink you know,
    The bold maroon, the autumn orange and the pink of summer blossoms
    I hope you are wearing something else now
    A colour I could never know; otherwise all the bite marks you left
    Like a river of pain
    From the nape of my neck to the small of my back
    Dividing me; amongst myself
    Would be futile.

    See! No you cannot, but I am, seeing
    The stars, do you know they are long gone
    And the light that we are looking at
    Is no more true than those promises we made
    In bed, everyday
    Looking at each other
    Melting under the red haze of love
    Or else I would not be alone
    Straddled between both lampshades
    Stretched midst two lights
    And the same, same darkness
    Shifting me out of sight

    And yet, oh yet I miss
    You with your half asleep smile
    Carefully constructed
    To be dreamlike
    I miss the time when we were us
    Shared shadows in the day
    And in night our silhouettes
    I miss your half baked cake
    And bitter burnt coffee
    With me humming the song
    You love at three; in the morning
    Watching just watching
    Nothing at all
    But the same thing
    Always the same

    There was a time when I used to write for you
    When I should have written about,
    But I was naive; eggshell white,
    A crystal goblet balanced upon the edge of a two-legged table
    Drunk with my own wine
    And I know the fault was mine
    As ever the fault was mine
    Flowers wilted and the fault was mine
    Winter came and the fault was mine
    Nothing remained
    Everything changed
    It began again
    And the fault was mine
    And so I am no more
    Than a corpse carrying out a chore
    Dreaming of a world before
    It broke upon my door
    Oh yes well before
    I even built the door…

  • The Lost Sense of Bewilderment

    Jayson Hinrichsen @ unsplash

    I wonder if life would have been the same
    If I had but a different name
    As common as the monsoon rain
    Somewhere between John and Jane

    I wonder who would have called me close
    Gifted whiskey or a blood red rose
    Shared laughter with a list of woes
    And left me where the west wind blows

    I wonder if I would have been happy more
    Being a seashell on a shallow shore
    Drunk with madness like never before
    Following the echo of my silent roar

    I wonder if I would have lived long
    Sang a chorus in some choir song
    Before in life it all went wrong
    For now I am but not where I belong…