THE HUMAN ANVIL

Category: Poetry

  • 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 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 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…

  • A Line On The Sand


    Amidst the dunes of Rajasthan
    I breathed as an ocean would;
    Endless and eternal

  • 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

  • Ascendance

    And slowly we all
    Shall fall asleep
    And know no more of each other
    Or of those who knows us no more

    But the stone shall remain stone
    The sea shall remain sea
    You shall remain you
    And I shall remain me

    Yet we, the us, that immutable thereof
    Of shared spaces
    Of pendulum breaths
    Of eclectic existence
    Will change
    Into dust
    Into wind
    Into silence
    And rescind
    Motion by motion
    Memory by memory
    Till all that is left
    Is only the sense of leaving

  • Alter

    Life is rain
    Then river
    And the sea
    First alone
    Then together
    Till there is nothing more to be

  • Birth

    How far can one walk
    Away from the night
    Without knowing
    That it was the dark which said
    “Let there be light”