The I in Why?

I do not desire
To lie naked in a rattrap life
And lubricate my verse with victorian words;
Filled with awe inspiring acts
Led by mundane lust
Of Angels and Men alike
Nor do deep desires murder me
Nerve by nerve
Peeling away my eggshell skin
To illuminate the onion within;
A coiled rainbow, boiled white
Neither am I a shadow
Fallen far from crowded feet
Awaiting on indifferent paths
For a heavenly retreat
If at all I were to bare myself and be
One thing that should suffice how I see
Myself, in this crystal world
Of self reflection and askewed insight
I would be a thoughtful statue
Sitting alone in a far off land
With infinity in my head
And nothing in my hand

Part-time Philosophies

The ocean does not speak of sadness
For sadness has no voice that can say
That being empty is like being filled forever
An infinite without a way
And when I with my eyes look out
At a world where each face has a place
I wonder who really wins
If it’s in a circle that everyone does race
True it is tragic that in the end
There is no magic that holds all the cards
For his is the glory of the game
Who plays his joker as ace when it’s hard
And I know in this mesmerizing madness
For the follicle of that forever fame
People play their pieces for practice
Unaware that they will never be the same
And so do I yearn to sit
By the shore where horizons do cease
And thank the seed of silence
For this life that I had on a lease

Branches in my Backyard


I once had branches
That burned in my backyard
A pyre sans desire
A fire drowned by its fire
And at night
In the dark
When ghost grew like fruits
From the shadow of its seeds
From the ashes of its roots
One could hear
In the cast out whispers that they kept
Broken words bandaged
Pain yet un-wept
And they said, they said
In the black waves of bright flames
We are faces without faces
Nameless within our names
And if night be a star in the ocean
And infinity an eternal motion
If silence be the words without sound
And self a state never to be found
Then the world with it’s weight held in a grain
And poets with their pens dipped in pain
The weathered visages with their vermillion words
And the horizon a home for forgotten birds
Is there to be seen, is there to be shown
And not to be alone or utterly unknown

O the desire to be
Loved by all
And the ache of letting go
When it is harder to fall
Because of the world with it’s quiet words left to rot
On transparent eyelashes
Of eyes that dream, of eyes that dare
Of eyes that hold, of eyes that care
Should I wish upon myself an early demise
Would the darkness in it’s view find it wise
Why then sometimes I want to be
The silence that shapes the sea
Why then sometimes I want to be
Someone whom none can see

Despair, beware
I am a sky without cause
My pain, insane
Do not ache for applause
Stare in the mirror
O horror of my mind
What you see is what you are
Be gentle if not kind
And whisper unto the wind
These fables of your own
For you are no Pietá
But a statue turned to stone

My Woman


He carried a corpse on his shoulder
A straw man made of stone
And walked the nowhere path
A footstep in a crowd; alone
He had feathers on his broken back
Which wept on silent nights
And he wished for a shooting star
Having never had one in sight
The man was armed with silence
And buried tears in each eye
Had no heart of which to speak of
And dared not ask why
So he searched his own shadow
That wet the mosaic floor
And wondered if his life
Even mattered anymore
For he was a mortal man
Who died in his own dreams
And come night only his pillow
Answered back his screams
He thought of leaving it all
And be dust and be free
He thought of casting his anchor
In the middle of the barren sea
For him the changing world
Was a wave that ever repeats
And he questioned unto the chaos
Why do I rhyme when nothing fits?

Her face was a prison of prisms
Her eyes twin melodies of mind
Her skin shone like vanishing velvet
Her kiss was one of a kind
But she was no fabled princess
Wandering lost at his open door
Nor was she a cast away goddess
He had once prayed to before
She was a woman in making
And held her heart in her own hand
She knew the world as her oyster
And she a pearl in the prophetic sand
She saw the world with its visage brimming
With light bulbs and bright lies
So she searched for the one who stood
With bruises like midnight skies
He was a naked man
Unclothed; without a name
Who counted a single star
Thinking that all were same
To her he was a child unfed
Left to roam as a newborn in wild
Once without a home
Through fate utterly exiled

He saw her hand in the ocean
And the world closed around his eyes
As he drowned in the water that whispered
Breathe now or the dream dies
He felt her fingers upon his shoulder
And he answered back in kind
Till their lips sealed shut a secret
Which no soul could ever find
And they danced in the depths like dolphins
Two kindred hearts as one
Who wished so much for the stars
That they grew their own sun
So that when the leaves now rustle
And the colours do not make sense
They can watch the silence get slower
And the rainbow go back in rain

Black Be The Color

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.









Curtain Call

Image by Ahmed Nishant @unsplash

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 am,
Everything that makes
Nothing possible.

Diaspora

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.

Until I am no more.

Now I am no more.