THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: being

  • Seismic Soul

    To speak
    Without being heard
    With words like wind
    Asleep in windchimes,
    To be far away, breathing in a distant past dyed sepia and smelling of crushed leaves:
    The aroma of time dried through the ages,
    To taste a fruit away from the tongue
    And let it linger in a seedless ecstasy
    On each pair of lips
    In every burnished breath between the lungs
    To weave sunlight
    In the skin of dewdrops
    And bare a rainbow upon the floor
    Brought home to a full circle
    To smile at the madness of it all
    And mean it in the mirror of mind
    Grassroots enveloping
    Memories I cannot find
    Now leads me to believe
    That life with all its thorns and petals
    Is more in the act of living
    Than waiting for it to settle

  • Short-lived Lotuses

    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

  • 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…

  • 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

  • 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

  • Metamorphosis

    Image by Josh Hild @ unsplash


    If the music does not leave your lips,
    And the poems freeze on your fingertips,
    Know; the silence you have mocked for long,
    To you now it too belongs

  • 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

  • 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