life – THE HUMAN ANVIL

Orison

Life has always been one dream
Dreamt together by many
And those Awakened will find
No single mind
Keeping count of any blasphemy

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

Death, Dear Friend

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

Theta

I have danced
Many a dances
Without a song in my mind
And I saw many a chances
Yet pretended to be blind
There were reasons
For these decisions
But those reasons were not mine
I was a stone, sought for statues
But born on an incline
And so I fell down the narrow
Walls, without a ledge
Trapped between tombstones
Out of time, for an age
And now I await in the dungeons
With my heart on the ground
In search of an echo
That can be heard without a sound

Metamorphosis

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

Tenants

We both are tenants
Trapped within the rubik cube love
Shaped by our shoulders
Resting against each other
And there is no escape;
For our landlocked lips
Shifting like dry grass
Under the music of sorrel wind
Other than lying on different shores
Waiting for the same tide
To ferry us away
Towards a sunset and a sunrise
Splitting our world; two indifferent ways.

You count the stars between your fingers
And I vanish, like a thin piece of ice
A spectre, yet unfound, in the jigsaw world
Left alone to wander the newspaper streets
Those daily retreats of hourly love
Bought with midnight mascara and silk stockings
Rubbed raw between the eyes and thighs
Of mad men and maddening women
Looking for a cheap trip to the paradise

I hear the tea cup tinkle
And know you have taken a sip
Of the warm clove water
Left upon the doorstep
By the lonely wood worshipper
Whistling for words
And I am content that you did your prayer
Much like my daily dead affair
To show how much for each we care
By being willfully unaware

Thus there is food upon the table
And smile upon our faces
And though the roof is leaking
And the floor is unswept
And there are holes in our clothes
And scarce money in our pockets left
We know we shall scrounge through
Past the ups and downs and ifs and buts
Of everyday euthanization
By lying wide awake
Half dead with escapist desire
In some strangers arms
And murmuring through their skin
The leftover vows
We kept for ourselves
By scribbling away the love
Not meant for each other

Reflections

All the letters I wrote
Came back to me
They were poems I had written
And addressed to poetry

Answers?

To each word vibrating with voice
I say you have no choice
But to be uttered
And then be left in the void
To dissolve
Into the common silence
Of myriad things miming
Life’s unwritten serenity

The Art of an Artery

I see yet know nothing
I know but can see nothing
Perhaps because I close my eyes during the day
And in night I keep them open
Or perhaps the day dawns when I close my eyes
And night falls when I do open
Thus, I am riven, cleaved clean
And both parts of me are lost to the void
Where they each calls for one another
And each fails to answer the other
So that the half words spilling through the corner of cold blue lips
Become eddies;
Wind painting on water
And the colourless quiet
Is divided equally to all drowning men

This darkness of thought
Tunnels connecting the passage of time
Yawn endlessly
For who would turn and fall asleep
When all answers of today are again questioned tomorrow

We come and go, we come and go
With what desire of knowing
We may never know

Splashes of white and black
Stars streaked with paint brushes
On the decaying horizon
Universe diluted and powdered into pills
To be taken twice with warm water
Before the self-hypnosis servings:
‘Ode to me, ode to me
The orphan child of galaxy’
A child who sees, who see:
Spiders crying upon the wall
And ants dying without a funeral
With the human belief of being surreal
Something more than Picasso’s parody of each man watered down into the same shape
As mercury, slithering inside our throats,
We paint the dreamland agony on our own
A martyr decapitated by needle
Love loaded with gunpowder kiss
Lucky draw for cursory chemotherapy
Armchair dissection; with thoughts clinging to the end of the scalpel
Manufactured magnanimity with expired life lessons
Vending machines for vison; a dime’s dream for a day
Granite gods, chiselled, chewing on sand and white vapor of wisdom
And we the people, popcorn patrons, watching this apocalypse through donated eyes
In a fostered future where, famished children pose before the camera
For takeaway Pulitzer
And the humanitarian prize.

Walls with wombs
Gestating hatred
Watch us, the metallic vultures, as we hover
With our telescope tuned for hypocrisy
Our heavy hearts, aching with empathy, from behind the Kevlar vests

If only the bombs being dropped were bread
There would be no war left to win

Two mirrors
Broken
Thousand miles apart
Watch each other and weep

There is a shell of silence about us
And all those who can see cannot show
And all those who cannot see would not know
How the world is a fish tank
Submerged in an ocean
And our giant leaps
Reaching for stars
Are paralyzed thoughts
Trapped in an endless motion

So, take me to the quiet room
With windows overlooking green fields
And empty blackboard,
Where blank books of history
Are taught by children;
I shall be a student of lifelong happenstance
Waiting for the recess bell to ring
And sunlight to flood out
Into the playground
And make
Ghosts out of living men

The texture of wind
Is not felt by the fingers
Nor the weight of the shadow
By the ground
The time is not seen
On the skin of the sky
Nor is the source heard
Within the sound