THE HUMAN ANVIL

Category: Poems

Art, emotion, life

  • The Aroma of Sadness


    I look at the wrong things and cry
    But tears are taboo, aren’t they?
    Like used razors or sandpaper towel
    Or the last page of a living novel
    And yet I do, not because I cannot avert my eyes
    From the still beauty
    Subdued by time
    But that I would witness
    In those aching final ages
    Filled with long and random sunlight
    My disappearance
    Into wet satin
    And gossamer ash
    Of original nothingness

    If fire could speak of pain
    And water too of how it feels to suffocate
    Beneath the weight
    Of drowning men
    They would
    But flesh cannot heal the sky
    Nor blood fill a river dry
    For all thoughtful fantasies are unwritten tragedies
    Beginning at birth
    And only deepening when you die

    So I weep for the ocean of sadness
    Clenched inside my throat
    I pray for the lambs sheltered
    In the veins of my battered boat
    And I yearn to leave the answers
    With my back against the dying day
    To rest amidst the sleeping shepherds
    For I have nothing more to say…

  • Orison

    Image by Bahador @Unsplash

    Life has always been one dream
    Dreamt together by many
    And those Awakened will find
    No single mind
    Keeping count of any blasphemy

  • Death, Dear Friend

    Image by Dave Hoefler @ Unsplash

    Death, do not cry
    I know; you are no one’s friend
    But that does not make you; a foe
    Like all who have been and are being swept away
    Like a clove leaf upon a current
    You too are destined by design
    To sow and grow; sorrow
    That abandoned thistle tree
    Which all passes and pretends not to see

    Death, do not cry
    When your choices go wrong
    There are so many voices asking
    To add another verse to their swan song
    But you know as do I
    That music is sweet only for so long
    And it starts with no cymbals and shall end with no gong

    Death, do not cry
    People do care about you a lot
    You may not always be the fountainhead
    But you are almost always an afterthought
    And we may not think of you as we breathe
    Or when we play the games of Holy Land
    But we do rehearse our union every night
    Though not all of us understand

    Death, do not cry
    We shall meet for once and forever
    But before that I must ask an honest, humble favor:
    Of all the places for us to meet
    And greet, if you could visit me when I am fast asleep
    Then there shall be nothing for me to weep
    As I skip; the curtain call of my every emotion
    And be like a nameless raindrop falling into an aimless ocean

  • Ambit


    Outside my window
    A caterpillar crawls
    And I watch as it gains
    Inch by inch
    An eternity
    On me

  • The Two Way Truth


    There is no scorpion under the rock
    Unless the rock is lifted

  • Hineni

    One day
    I too, will roam with you
    On lovely brazen days
    Upon lonely wooded ways
    In the ovule of some random park
    Sighing deep and dark
    At the silence pooling by our feet
    And listen to the each other’s heartbeat;
    Fill the gaps left by our own
    A dial tone of desires
    Ringing in our bones
    And so we shall sleep
    On the dappled forest floor
    Closer than an atom
    Yet aching for some more
    Till the light leave us soft
    And breathing through our hair;
    The wind lost in the moments
    That our lips could not spare

  • Metamorphosis

    Image by Josh Hild @ unsplash


    If the music does not leave your lips,
    And the poems freeze on your fingertips,
    Know; the silence you have mocked for long,
    To you now it too belongs

  • Tenants

    We both are tenants
    Trapped within the rubik cube love
    Shaped by our shoulders
    Resting against each other
    And there is no escape;
    For our landlocked lips
    Shifting like dry grass
    Under the music of sorrel wind
    Other than lying on different shores
    Waiting for the same tide
    To ferry us away
    Towards a sunset and a sunrise
    Splitting our world; two indifferent ways.

    You count the stars between your fingers
    And I vanish, like a thin piece of ice
    A spectre, yet unfound, in the jigsaw world
    Left alone to wander the newspaper streets
    Those daily retreats of hourly love
    Bought with midnight mascara and silk stockings
    Rubbed raw between the eyes and thighs
    Of mad men and maddening women
    Looking for a cheap trip to the paradise

    I hear the tea cup tinkle
    And know you have taken a sip
    Of the warm clove water
    Left upon the doorstep
    By the lonely wood worshipper
    Whistling for words
    And I am content that you did your prayer
    Much like my daily dead affair
    To show how much for each we care
    By being willfully unaware

    Thus there is food upon the table
    And smile upon our faces
    And though the roof is leaking
    And the floor is unswept
    And there are holes in our clothes
    And scarce money in our pockets left
    We know we shall scrounge through
    Past the ups and downs and ifs and buts
    Of everyday euthanization
    By lying wide awake
    Half dead with escapist desire
    In some strangers arms
    And murmuring through their skin
    The leftover vows
    We kept for ourselves
    By scribbling away the love
    Not meant for each other

  • Answers?

    To each word vibrating with voice
    I say you have no choice
    But to be uttered
    And then be left in the void
    To dissolve
    Into the common silence
    Of myriad things miming
    Life’s unwritten serenity

  • 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