THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: growth

  • 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.

  • Rowing Till The Riverbed

    Let me fall now, no
    Let me fade away instead
    I am tired of being ever alone
    Of being always afraid

    I was a fool to grapple with the dark, you know,
    A fool to light my heart on fire
    A fool to eat the wounded ashes
    To taste the honey of that sweet desire

    I was blind with my eyes open
    Blind to the water rising around my waist
    Blind to see that I with my words
    Was no different than the rest

    So here I am now, here,
    A face amongst other faces:
    All fools condemned henceforth
    To die; by hanging on her tresses

    I should have known it, I should have
    For it was no secret after all
    That there was magic in her voice
    And that it was a siren’s call

    It was this damned dream, you see,
    To be together in the end
    So surreal that I forgot
    It was all make-believe, a pretend

    I am going now, I am gone
    There are other lovers in the line
    They ask me if she is a goddess
    And I answer: Yes, if the Devil’s Divine…

  • Remains of the Rain

    Image by Mehrsad Rajabi@unsplash


    I saw my children standing in the rain
    Their faces lined with age and late reason
    Watched the abandoned bicycles
    And broken seesaws
    Being pulled down by the weight of raindrops
    Their hands, long and thin, like dead seaweed in the summer wind
    Their legs green and gold, like new leaves suddenly old
    Seemed painted
    In the moist color of quiet
    The abandoned delight
    Having dissolved
    In the lament of the rain
    They turn; the motion a sad song
    An unfinished lullaby
    To look at me with eyes
    Half awake but never asleep
    As if I with my window earned wisdom
    Would know
    Why all things grow
    Only to die
    If life in the very virtue of living
    Is a lie
    But they know the answer
    As well as me
    It is better to forget than to believe what we see
    In the everyday aftermath
    Of the daily demise
    Of choices left to chances
    And promises made before goodbyes
    For in the end all paths
    Shall return where they began
    Even the oceans with all their eternity
    Are but remains of the rain…

  • Nescience

    I wait at the newspaper stand
    Reading, the morning is grey
    Ash tinted
    Like an old man’s asthma

    Buds of people are sprouting
    From windows and eggshell alleyways
    Dressed in yesterday’s dreams
    And tommorow’s promises
    Faces creased, bespectacled
    With white hairs a halo
    From the century long sunlight
    Age ever ached to swallow

    A ballad pours from the the barbershop
    The old stereo is crooning about
    Footsteps falling on azure fields
    And carts on country roads
    I can smell the aftershave
    At once bitter and sweet
    The razor once again vacant
    Without the borrowed heartbeat

    There is a fallacy here
    Between the words and vision
    I read and see
    The stories seem vibrant but life colour-free
    Perhaps it is the weight of being
    That makes it so
    For all of us do wither
    But only some of us grow

    The children have gathered on the footpath
    A bell in some temple tolls
    The priests are praying for bliss
    And in laughter a football rolls
    I watch, I watch
    The world divided in unison
    Each hour be day or night
    Being a part of every season

    So I pay my fair share
    It’s time for me to leave
    And be one amongst the masses
    Who in eternity believe
    Of everyday man and their everyday deeds
    In the cycle of fruit from the flower and flower from the seeds
    If only one would question; Does the roots if ever know?
    Of the world that blooms outside from their breaths buried below

  • 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.

  • 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