Shell of a man In Hell, as he can: Only think of the deeds, You did. When he trusted you most, You just played the host, And when the guests were all gone, You left.
It is four in the morning And I am cold in my blanket, With yesterday’s breakfast Still fresh in its mourning. The honey runs warm, But the bread is tough I stoke coals under my coat, And now my flesh says enough I melt, and I merge Am I the candle on the cake? Years have passed unmarked, I worry about the last second before being awake.
This pain wasn’t in my plan, you know, Nobody caters for such cataclysm, The eventual demise, That permanent procrastination In watching star-filled skies Reflecting in the unseeing eyes; the dead light Like diluted dynamite.
Why the world shifts, flutters, ebbs and flood, Why tears are closer to the heart than colour of the blood, I have no answers, just assumptions; Half drawn sketches Plucked from memory In this Gaussian garden Of life’s self-centredness.
Old age It knocked on my door Like neighbour. He had nowhere to go, And I had nowhere to be, So we sat down together; An empty mouth and a bad knee. He spoke of the past, And I smiled at his tone, Mimicking a million voices, To make me forget: I was alone.
Shell of a man In Hell, as he can: Only think of the deeds, You did. When he trusted you most, You just played the host, And when the guests were all gone, You left.
The poet in me, wants to write of pain, And the child inside is euphoric At the nigh nakedness At the bare it all bluntness For once, it won’t be alone Like a lotus left In the middle of the forest For once, it would be a dandelion Seeding away the agony In search of answers
Pain, I write, Willing for it to appear To bloom out Like wave, like lava Inescapable, obliterating And free me And my own Christ on the cross; Those wounds on my memory, So that I may get paralysed From the things heretofore unrealised, But all I found Were the dust motes Blowing from my breath
Pain, I thought As I smiled in the dark At the death of my spark In the hollow of my heart Was it empty from the start? It takes all my willpower To ignore the whispers from the wall And breathe in the ground So while floating I do not fall
Nobody knows a poet, you see For he is a never was And thus never will be; A saint, a servant, a shadow of the soul, All but the devil’s advocate And someone who stole Each morsel of truth From those immortal minds Who lived their lives Beyond the hives
Ashes in my ink I am the fire from the far A hope never igniting But guiding like a star An untouched absolution A dye that does not dissolve A rhythm sans rhyme An equation that does not solve But remains like a constant A fulcrum on the edge All the weight of the world Against the end of my page
Breathe baby Nights like tonight (When cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare
The stars wheel Don’t they? Like an umbrella on our head Once I knew Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Ursa Major But now when I look up The stars tremble Beneath the tears upon the rim of my eyes Dear lord, am I drowning? While reaching for the sky beneath my feet Like ink in water
A long while ago Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry that I could not travel both I turned back Away from the scintillating offerings From oft repeated quotes And ever appearing jargon I turned back from literature From Shakespeare’s sweet sonnets From Orwell’s orphic auguries From the cold contours of Plato’s caves From the new nothingness of Nietzsche I turned back To the primitive mind of mirages Of breathing seas And singing trees But if I were to begin my philosophy It would end with this sentence; The whole world is a theory Words using words to make sense of the words So I write with chalk on the paper And with pen on the blackboard To see if the meaning Is lost in the act of asking (It is)
So, breathe baby Nights like tonight (When the cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare And in the end here I have No melancholy to spare
I opened the bathroom door And in the dim and damning septic light Of the months old lightbulb My face, blurred and bludgeoned, By night’s nihilistic apparatus Smiled back through the broken mirror Hanging above the dripping, dead sink And I think, that is how it feels To wake up, in the middle of the night Hours after having a fight
I cupped the cold water Felt my fingers sting where the ring Has cut in my flesh Had I punched too hard at the bouquet? Were the petals bruised and bloodied? As if freshly plucked on a dewy morning By a miner’s hand Oh the anger in my throat Blue Eve around my Red Adam’s apple I knew if I let loose the bile of my belly And roar the bull’s breeding call My landlord will knock And the door would open A sliver, then a centimetre Till I am naked in the flooding light Of the gallery Absolutely awake And utterly ashamed To mutter an excuse And retire in solace
I cannot shave without tasting something of the foam It’s bitter This taste on my lips Like a thirst long not satiated Lips, last kissed Perhaps a decade ago In an alley behind an alley Where a beautiful nymph in rotten rags Had found my face handsome than those walls Closing in around us “You look much better than the bricks” She said I smiled, hiding the mortar in my molars As the rain pattered down like tar Peeling away rust from the pipes Drenching us Head to toes Like a wet painting
It has been three hours But my beard still showed Dancing around my face like a Rorschach’s blot I felt my fingers feel my skin Smooth it was Like warm pages of a new novel A novel about this modern day Don Quixote Who spent hours shaving the black spot left on the mirror My blade had blood on it And the sink sprouted red roots I watched as they dissolved And slipped down the drain It was only when the last drop was gone That I did felt the pain
I stood still till the sunlight streamed in From the half open window Like an intruder Creeping along the floor Till the corner of the door Illumined And left me cold Years old So I turned, back to my bed Where nightmares awaited Under the blanket In a dark sequin gown For dark was my friend For dark is the end And beyond that I feel nothing And nothing I comprehend
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to music
I had a tendency to blink back tears To stitch myself beforehand Like a social vaccine so to say To stay rooted And choose no way For then the balance; it would break And I would have something at stake And I was afraid of being left broken Someone’s memory Another’s token So here was how I spent my hours With cold heart And long hot showers Making promises on blank, blind papers I wrote of stones that floated on vapours; Those dreams that were ruins from the start Still left so for they were born torn apart And the people they came to claim That all I could say was my own name Unaware, that all I had was my own mind That was seldom, if ever kind Thus melancholy is my poison of choice And sad smiles my go to guise For then I can claim to be Everything that isn’t me
Now the colours of life have dried And I feel like the fog of midwinter Spread across sleeping fields And quiet rivers running Like a toddler on a trail Without wisdom or any worry And no notion where to sail But as I look back at the way I have treaded I know it’s the same where now I am headed To my beginning To the end I am nosediving so I can ascend Through the little hells I have clawed in my bones From the promises I made to the unknowns Like those flowers I grew around my grave Knowing the wreaths won’t be there to save Me, from the parody called pain Watching my headstone go dry in the rain
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to silence
“I dream of dying daffodils On a wave of my broken, favourite hills Where I as child had once laid claim When I knew myself by my name”
“But these ages have not been kind to me I was fettered but asked to spell as free Promised monuments; I was given a moment To count salt that slept in the bed of sea”
“Oh, how I wept and leapt like Sisyphus’s stone Known to all just by being unknown I was placed all high but without a head I survived it all by playing dead”
“And thus now we come to an end This poem breaks where all stories bend As no more of life will come my way I give away that, for which I pray”
I found the whiskey sages Dancing in the dim Their eyes on the music And carved teeth on crystal rim They wore leather gloves and spandex They carried bullets in their heads They spoke of liberty and lunacy And took daydreams to their beds
I found the wounded women Walking down the aisle Their face a plastic painting Melting for a smile They held too many secrets Their eyes were far too bright For a world that loved the dark Who wished let there be no light
I found the neon soldiers Trapped beneath a grenade pin Soon to be a sea of roses For it is the war that always win They guarded children in the basement They were taught to stand and fight They were told the recoil’s same Even if the barrel’s wrong or right
I found my fallen pieces Flowing down the ice cold river My skin the colour of water Burning with an old fever: I had seen the cards beforehand And called out the eternal bluff With so many lives to play One life is not enough
I see strangers with my face Wave at me from afar They line the luminous city With knowledge in their hand While I am fishing for sequin sardines Left upon the land In my mind the caltrops stops Every thought that grew from ground For Promethean parentheses My open mind is unsound I shift and sway, I shift and sway Holding on to sweet yesterday For the World’s decree Is that dreams are free But to breathe life in them I have to pay
Pauper with papers I write of thousand priceless things I have feathers made of vapours But that does not make them wings So I turn around and retreat When it’s time for me fly For who would lend a lap When it’s time for me to die I have my fingers in the sand And I am searching for lost time Would I be shown mercy in the end If I solved my own crime?
