Category: prose

Intentions

Will my silence be enough
To let you know I am no more
Will you shake your head and smile
And be as you were before
Will it be my laughter that you remember
Decades later on a summer noon
Will you ask why I never came back
Or lament why I returned so soon
Will my face be what you seek
When thinking of things past
Will you forget the first day we met
Was the day that we met last
Will these hands that once were mine
Remain forever alone in memory
Will you extend yours just to share
Their shadow so I could be We
Will my words ever be able to describe
This ache that now I feel
Will you break my heart each time
You want your own to heal…

Maiden

Camouflaged in the night
Like outline of shredded trees
I walked beyond the cliff with caterpillar footsteps
Where Four Horses of Wind
Stood grazing in the grove
While the maiden with reins
Having fallen in love
With my absence, now looking up
Laughed; the sound like hooves running in her throat,
So I sat there in the center of the dying daffodils,
On the eve; as rootless and trodden as any
And listened to what the world has to say
But sadly there were far too many;
People talking about themselves, like children running circles around pillars asking: Why do silent halls echo? And closed eyes cannot see?
As if I am a mirror to be mastered by their practiced soliloquy:
No more, no more, my hollow mind; no more,
For I weep for the thistle town burning by the shore
Black windows watching the white horizon
Coming closer for an embrace
When the sun is cold in the night
While the sea shapes the souls of sand
The maiden sits beside me
And whisper
That the stars are dust from her hand
O I see now, I see
Myself on a mountain lying
Alone upon the apogee
To fall asleep with the sky
As a pillow beneath my neck
And the ocean extending her arms
For me to quietly take
Before I go, before I am gone
With the maiden of the night
Before I know that the colours of rainbow
Are seven sins of white…

Pigments of Pain

I listen to the clatter
Rolling coins
Gasping through cracks
Of fractured philosophy
In this modern world writ with
Make believe merchandise
Life lived through litmus paper
Chemical imbalance
Anarchy in equation
Feather dust in vacuum weighing same as the sun
Candles upon cake, wax trees,
Forest of flames, ages incinerate:
Gullible times, marzipan issues souring into
Phrases describing sunlight through trees unlike sunlight through trees
Anything but the obvious, the immutable
Sieved eyes and beetle brain
Taking over photosynthesis
Bottled chimera, disco dreams
Autumn in lungs
Coughing art; blood on canvas, dotted design
Cerise constellation simplified by
Binary prophets
Dripping tap, blocked sink, dim streetlight, ivy on the roof, dust on the doormat, average grades, loose socks, society on chemo, Syrian seizures, Africa and Ebola, avalanche on Everest,
Anthill, beehive, New York, Mumbai
Sunrise at six, Sunset at seven
Coconuts, candles and carpets for heaven
Rubber tires on tarmac
Plastic skin
LED hearts
Tears on screen
Protein pronouns, varicose verbs
Multinational menagerie of Lego world
Digitally distilled with castrated cause
Packeted products: for all flaws
Barcoded breaths
Beginners beware
This land of the dead is alive on prayer.

Anatomy of an Answer

The sound of your senses
Breaks over me
And I drink your waterfall words
With it’s torrent of charcoal images
To the last drop
So others may never know
How you, of cinnamon soul, sell poisoned dreams
Manicured with epidermal perfection
The rag doll fantasy
Of jazz love
To strangers in quiet bars;
Those people unaware of the everyday almanac
The self-help lies written on bruised pages
By every Adonis who felt
Being closer to you
Would suffice

But I watch as you walk on water
Just so to show you can
And laugh
At all those speechless spectators
Now followers of your riptide wisdom
Pledged to play their heartstrings
So you may dance upon their demise
Dressed in funeral face
And be beautiful
Like a child on Christmas
Suffocating
With joy

The wind it whistles
Swallows and sells
Your perfume; twigs of spring broken underfoot
Ashes in the air; this midnight snow,
And still figures, lifeless statues, staring in envy at
The echo of our footsteps
We walk, in discord, my toe timed to your heel
Crude judgement
Capricious
To mock the pedestal born
So frozen in time that a grey hair
Succumbs only once in a millennia

You see, I see
The lights red and yellow
Bleeding fireflies
Resting upon rooftops
In mechanical merriment
Happy at the thought of being happy
And you now know you cannot see more than you know
And thus you cry
At the anomaly of your eye
And I do not have a handkerchief
To spare
For I care no more of your other face
Or the one within
That exists only to dream
The desires
So I leave you at the crossroads
Knowing sooner or later
An Adonis shall pass
Dressed in angel dust
God forbidden

Her Other Half

We talk like strangers
Unwilling to laugh
Unable to cry
Like two shells remembering
The sound of a sea
Buried deep
Somewhere
In fissures of our bone…
Yours too my love?
Or of mine alone?

I was wrong to dream, wasn’t I?
Wrong to feel
Wrong to hope
A fool who thought her happiness starts
At the end of his joke
O Pagliacci, Pagliacci
Thou story of my life
Why didn’t you laugh and say:
It’s the heart which pierced the knife

Bye now, it’s late
And I have old wounds to tear
Like promises to make love
Or I wish you were here
The night is still young
Do not waste it on me
You had my life once
But you never stopped to see

Some Lotus Are All Roses

I have spent half my life
Looking how I was wanted to be seen
Powdered to the tip of my nose
Accurately thin
With anklets on my feet
That laughed alone in night
And a locket round my neck
Buried out of sight
I had flowers on my frocks
When I was a lotus bud soft pink
And roses in my hair locks
When I was allowed to think
As if my beauty was just a face
Without a wish or voice
As if being born the way I was
Had something to do with choice
If only I could have told them then
The thoughts I had in my mind
Of my mantelpiece existence
Of being beautiful but kept blind
Alone as my own mirror
Echoing solitude
Days spent dressed for the world to wonder
And nights being ashamed to be nude