THE HUMAN ANVIL

Category: writings

  • 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 sight

    And 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 same

    There 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

  • Taste of Sunlight

    Image by Riccardo Mion on unsplash


    My bed is in the corner
    Of an empty room
    The irony is self imposed
    But not without reason
    I have heard that darkness
    Gathers more in the deep
    And perhaps it shall help me sleep
    Faster than dying by lying wide awake
    Counting seconds, falling and rising
    With time’s unreceding tide.

    The curtain hanging by my bedside
    Often flutters in the night
    And it’s breath though purposeless
    Fills me with envy
    By it’s act of pure motion
    Sans a shred of emotion
    How can I be more than me
    When everything I seek I deny to see?

    Dreams; they die, my own are no exception
    Even when I have them
    Caged behind a glass case
    Cuddled in red velvet
    Caressed by Mozart’s Sonatas
    The flowers shall wilt, roots die and fruits decay
    Nature by nature of unrequitance
    Shall swallow none but one’s own
    For birds do not nest on trees unsown
    And those that I watch from the moonlit window
    They shimmer and shine
    Like gold and wine
    Broken; yes and crooked and white
    But they know unlike me the taste of sunlight.

  • A Line On The Sand


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

  • Streetside Socrates

    Flesh and light
    Bone and stone
    Are same, similar; a synonym
    Of everything

    I gazed into the night
    Fragmented by the city lights
    Knifing the dreams dead in their tracks

    Scalped thoughts
    Hanging from the cumerbund
    Of the comedian
    Laugh with the wind

    There is no framework for fame
    Nietzsche is not a name
    And all that I know of shame
    Came from the fingers that blame;
    Et tu?
    Fuck you
    Bad words don’t exist
    At all
    For thoughts know not their origin
    But only the sin
    Of being
    The way they are

    Broken mirrors
    Cannot mend the man
    And broken man
    Never has a mirror

    Everything is going to disappear soon
    And the leftover void shall know
    There is nothing known as nothingness
    For even in silence the silence shall grow

  • Death, Dear Friend

    Image by Dave Hoefler @ Unsplash

    Death, do not cry
    I know; you are no one’s friend
    But that does not make you; a foe
    Like all who have been and are being swept away
    Like a clove leaf upon a current
    You too are destined by design
    To sow and grow; sorrow
    That abandoned thistle tree
    Which all passes and pretends not to see

    Death, do not cry
    When your choices go wrong
    There are so many voices asking
    To add another verse to their swan song
    But you know as do I
    That music is sweet only for so long
    And it starts with no cymbals and shall end with no gong

    Death, do not cry
    People do care about you a lot
    You may not always be the fountainhead
    But you are almost always an afterthought
    And we may not think of you as we breathe
    Or when we play the games of Holy Land
    But we do rehearse our union every night
    Though not all of us understand

    Death, do not cry
    We shall meet for once and forever
    But before that I must ask an honest, humble favor:
    Of all the places for us to meet
    And greet, if you could visit me when I am fast asleep
    Then there shall be nothing for me to weep
    As I skip; the curtain call of my every emotion
    And be like a nameless raindrop falling into an aimless ocean

  • 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