“I dream of dying daffodils On a wave of my broken, favourite hills Where I as child had once laid claim When I knew myself by my name”
“But these ages have not been kind to me I was fettered but asked to spell as free Promised monuments; I was given a moment To count salt that slept in the bed of sea”
“Oh, how I wept and leapt like Sisyphus’s stone Known to all just by being unknown I was placed all high but without a head I survived it all by playing dead”
“And thus now we come to an end This poem breaks where all stories bend As no more of life will come my way I give away that, for which I pray”
I stood open Like a coat with its collars out Watching the eddies engulf Small horizons Spread across the drowning fields of dark passion Ivory bodies; Burning like lightbulbs Float without feeling their flesh Turn into tentacles Those roots with mind And headless intent Searching depths Forbidden to the common kind
There is a sense of self Without understanding Which echoes from mouth to mouth Of every mortal marching in tandem With the balance between their breaths Or how else would dreams in death defy Their short lived immortality And return to the shared seed That individual’s agony; Of being the answer to another’s need
Parched thoughts Eyelids whispering The story of skin upon skin In histories unwritten Monuments crumbling Under the weight of that original sin Of having known Right from the wrong In veins; dyed blue Pulse of a heart that do not belong To the common questions Left to muse In the silence of philosophy
I can feel my own eyes Watching themselves In reflection Unable to adjust To the depths Reaching out of the abyss for the sky I swallow the tempest So my clothes can stay dry Beneath bare feet and stilettos The ghettos are the same If my mind is Medusa The world is Poseidon to blame But the wheel it shall Be ever on the roll For every man down There is another to make it whole
She lay on the bed like an open book And in the dim yellow light In the diaphanous albumin desire To surrender and to conquer I dreamt that I could read her Line after line Passage after passage Page after page Till nothing more remained Other than the bookmarked memories Those handwritten notes In the folded corners To revisit and renew our love That obsolete imitation Of imperfect life's pursuit for perfection
Mercury in my mind I hold solace in my sleep If shallow is my heart Why would my feelings run deep?
She was written anonymous In a language I couldn't read I was a gardener in need of shade But knew not the type of seed So I waited with bated breaths With my hand close to her spine Should I turn the first page of her tresses Or lay her open and in my hands supine In my listless mind I would picture her As a shape I could never comprehend So I went for the last pages To see if I could know her in the end But the ending was the same as beginning She was holding herself too close As if the hand that wrote her never bothered To find if she was a lily or a rose
Do not open your heart For you would have to borrow it’s beats And the lending would stop If another heart she meets
Night after night I searched for her sorrow Against the scale of her past I weighed her tomorrow Numbering her pages I stained my fingers deep blue But her corners remained same Nebulous and new I went through the hyphens The colons and commas I passed through every comedy All tragedies, each drama Till lo and behold I could feel on my lips The words of her next chapters As if by my fingertips But O was I wrong And I was so wrong For it was her voice Singing my song And her pages they were Black from my hand Having unwritten her story In a rage to understand Mine was the fault For I should have known I was just a plagiarist Writing her as my own
I can feel my skin Drip on the floor Like the ink in my bottle I hold words no more
I wish I could be the colour blue Not sapphire or cerulean But something old And something new As if waves of the ocean Are carrying pieces of the sky Moonlight and stardust Dipped in indigo dye A deeper azure A cobalt that will fade Part turquoise, part teal Your shade, your shade…
The walls aren’t painted And there are orange pips on the table Arranged like a ten o’clock shadow Of an ornament left in a glass case And I dare not disturb Her architecture The tainted texture That peers out, as symbols, as summations Meaningless veracities, punctuated by punctuations.
I cough And the dust coughs with me For the echo is swallowed By the floorboards Beneath our feet So I dance, I tiptoe I jump and I let go To remain suspended An unlighted chandelier Burning butanol or some such nonsense In my pockets
My garden has gone grey The flowers; asthmatic Now wheeze in the wind Wrinkled and waiting For the next iteration of spring A seasonal afterlife That feels no soul smile and say; I will let you live If you follow my way
Curious is the world’s design They who smile never know why And they who claim that they do Knows in their heart that it’s a lie Is happiness something That can never be found Like corners of a map Of a world that goes round
If only I had Eyes that could see all Every thread of a thought From even streams and the stone I think I know What I would have known That this all, this enigma This play supposed to go on Is not worded by us We who think we have won For each life afterall in the end is the same Closed eyes, broken breaths And lost dreams with no name.
I am, The face you never see, On posters and billboards, Half starved, naked, Beyond beautiful, to be Served on a silver platter, For you to touch, twist and take, Morsel after morsel.
I am, The laughter you never hear, Stirring lives, Rubbed together in plastic embrace, Made alive in the objectionable agony In the chimera of chemicals Praised at pawn shops By asthmatic Archdiocese To fall, to drip, Lip by lip Throat by sore throat Through hollow chests And wasted waists Of fools painting tears Upon torn faces.
I am, The play you never see, On streets below your tinted windows, Staged for the world to witness, For free, though None stays to admire, Too paltry, they say, too plain, Too painful, coarse and vain, This drama, That reminds us of our own lives.
I am, The speeches you never give, From proud pedestals, and altars, Like a speck of spit, Luring the sea of men, With words; carved and honed, Too bright for us, Of clouded eyes, To warm these hearths of our own.
I am, The truth you never know, From beyond your walls, And the sanctum of your own asylum Where you pray To the earthworms armed with earthquakes To the dead; dead from too much death To leper’s liberty To chronic charity Never to arise From the ashes Or seen through the uncertain curtains Of your marble eyelashes.
I have seen the diaspora, Seen it’s bulbous head set against Saturn’s sky, Felt it’s pulse, Dreaming of chalk and charcoal, Seen it’s veins, deeper nerves, Coursing through promises Like an undulating snake.
Men revise, Their adolescent mournings, teenage dreams made of, Pink flesh laid to rest, Against the grain of this world. A world long forgotten by the habit of forgetting, The shell of mirror, Slow as sinking stone, For lives lived, living, With unpolluted prose, Precise, pragmatic.
I have seen the diaspora, The laughter of death, That parallel passage, Guided by fate.
The fault never lied with dark, To light must fall the blame, For showing that of all, None are truly the same.
Half the pleasure, Lies in having nothing, And losing it all.
Here in shaped stillness, I ache for a shattering.
If my face now makes you weep Let my voice then put you to sleep So tomorrow when you awake Like a flower on someone’s grave Know there lies underneath He who asked you once to save
