THE HUMAN ANVIL

Category: verse

  • 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


  • Erosion


    I keep awake
    Watching the parched lightbulb
    (And the lightbulb perhaps watching me)
    With my hand on the warm doorknob;
    Leading halfway to hell,
    Till the caterpillar thoughts crawl out into the silence
    And cocoons of dreamless desires
    Flood the floor
    As dark pools of velvet;
    With skin like ash and skin like glue.
    Fingers of fire
    And butterfly blood
    Seals the sound of the oboe
    In the roots of time
    So the seeds of silk may flower
    And the fountainhead of pulse
    Breathe in the open every night
    To let the swan song of love;
    Traced on the tips of arched spine
    Leave the lips
    And take hold of the walls
    To make the voice of world
    Like beads of sweat; evaporate,
    And the colours of a carnal mind collapse
    Into nothingness
    Of everyday afterlife

  • The End of an Arrival

    Oh this corpse of mine
    Has settled now
    And cannot move anymore
    Let the waves of time
    Drown it deep
    In seas without a shore

  • The Wheel

    Forget the world
    Forget it ever existed for you
    And then watch one morning
    As the red sky slowly turns to blue
    For then you would know
    How true is the world
    And old her everyday design
    That began one day
    And remembered to stay
    Without you keeping the time

  • Offal

    I

    Here in the dim lit room
    Held together with velcro
    I await for an awakening
    There is a gaggle of gods about me
    And I hear the mice being murdered in rafters
    While my stereo melds a melody
    An edible static like
    Ants in my mouth
    And bees on my tongue
    So I spit the honey and drink the stings
    And I drown the birds and cage the wings
    To breathe, to breathe
    The liquid light
    From the cigarette between my gasoline lips
    In amorous delight

    II

    The flame of my flesh and this napthalene world
    Resting upon a rusted needlepoint
    Take heed of the dust motes
    Suspended in time
    For they are you
    And they are me
    Awaiting
    With nothing to see
    In the far too near eternity

    III

    I see stars in my bedroom
    And prophets under my eye
    Rainbows growing from my skin
    As I fall into the sky
    And there is a hymn in my ears
    That aches “Praise to thee”
    And I am drowning in my tears
    Eating a faded tapestry

  • The Serenade Surrendered


    I know what it means to be
    A man without a memory
    What I see: I see
    What I feel: I feel
    In the moment of me
    I keep a forever concealed