Forlorn face
Hollow heart
Granite grace
And me
Together we
Are falling apart
Like shadow of the tree
And though they make a single sound
All leaves are not the same
The sky is blue
But never new
And memories;
They have no name
Category: prose
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Short-lived Lotuses
-
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 sightAnd 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 sameThere 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… -
Deadbeat
I beg…
To differ
From all those who earn
At the cost of letting their freedom burn
Away… -
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 -
A Line On The Sand
Amidst the dunes of Rajasthan
I breathed as an ocean would;
Endless and eternal -
Last of the Living
@Unsplash Hoach Le Dinh
I can hear the roots tear
Across the breast of resting soil
Like blind fingers, stretching the
Depths of darkness,
Those long forgotten by time
For the hours; they fly only above the ground
The black womb is all silence
And frozen thoughts:
Except those murmurs of memories
Left by faded footsteps
And shadows parched under the sun
Of people who could not turn, away.
I hear them too, their thoughts,
In the leaves yawning with the wind
And fruits falling with the same
It’s bittersweet syrup; tears and sweat of toil gone unremembered
A destiny dismembered
Like roots they yearn no reason
Nor do they desire
The crystal sunlight reserved for carving men
All that is needed for the flower to bloom
And the fruit to bubble without bursting
Is this truth soaked with pain
That they stand alive and upright
On the shoulders of hanging men -
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
