THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: life

  • A Lifetime


    If all the nights
    And all the days
    Of my life
    Condense
    In one epiphany without end
    Then friend hear well
    That the clock, when it strikes midnight,
    Will not be pointing at twelve

  • The Silence Along My Spine


    It is a dream I do not remember 
    But remember all the same
    Like those faces I desire 
    Without knowing their name
    As if in the grand scheme of things
    Wherein a million stories unfold 
    I am just a chapter 
    Of a young man who grew old

    These oceans which are open
    These skies which are blind
    These forests which aren’t silent 
    These mountains sans a mind
    Are mine to behold and break
    To bind and to find
    For the similes to be kept never similar 
    And metaphors ever one of a kind

    You can call my claims childish 
    Or let my words make you weep
    When you see the vacuum in my voice
    Hover upon my lower lip
    Where the broken wind balances 
    Those desires and despair 
    And life in its likeliest form 
    Is heartbeat at the end of a hair

    If only I could myself see and show 
    What I have lost in my pursuit to know 
    The allegories of living 
    Without wanting to grow
    Alas, I have my own 
    Reason to bear the blame:
    For to the man who shall leave no footprints 
    The dust is all the same

  • Filaments

    Have you been silent for so long
    That you wondered if you belong 
    With the people
    Who left
    Listening to all that could be heard
    Whilst wondering about each word
    As if the carcass of it’s meaning 
    Will somehow survive
    Those ages spent playing dead
    Trying to stay alive

  • Nothing to Dream

    Image by Atlas Green @unsplash

    If I could be free
    From the echoes of other people
    And be something more than
    A traffic light thought
    Winking in the dim halls of their tragic mind
    I would prefer being a butterfly
    Frozen in ice
    That way
    My beauty though long lost; euthanised,
    Will live still
    In regret
    That beautiful cancer
    Common to all men
    Drooling on sad lips of time
    Like honey gone bad;
    A tasteless parable for
    Once a good man now gone mad
    From the cold touch of metal people that I meet
    With their eyes upon my river back, my other face and feet
    With yellow leaves gathering
    In a dry rage to drown
    My steps towards the hilltop
    Within the noise of a dead town
    Asking me to surrender
    Asking me to still
    For being born amidst wrong angels
    To die right under heel

    On nights like paraffin
    When shadows too burn
    I curl into concrete
    And cease to ache
    To be deeply awake
    Of all the things I am not
    As sought by those carvers
    Shaping my form into chess pieces,
    Dull black and off white;
    A crooked king, a broken queen and two quixotic knights
    To be kept alive and conquered
    Or cast into the unheard
    Age of borrowed sentiment
    A proud brick in a ruinous monument
    Should I now pray
    To whetstones
    Wet with sweat wounds of men
    Pierced alive
    With the worms of their own wisdom
    Or within the confines of my
    Diluted divinity
    Fall prey
    To the sinful delight
    Of being right
    And fall asleep
    With this winter as witness
    And awake when the dying dream
    Is truly dead
    And the sound of turning wheels
    No longer praise
    Destinations remembered along forgotten ways…

  • The Men Behind Monuments

    Image by Jiyad Nassar @unsplash


    In this sudden stillness
    A final silence grows
    From beneath the dead branches
    Enveloping ants and Angels alike

    The dry mist of purpose
    That once haunted men
    Now haunts their monuments
    The mindless mortar
    Made and remade
    For each thought
    And every contour
    Which seeks in itself
    The forever form
    That everlasting aspiration
    Of becoming a being

    But the Promethean promises
    Are but promises
    Just as the silhouette stems from the shape
    So does the shape is rooted in the silhouette
    Like a circle trapped
    Within its own circumference
    Sans a seen beginning
    Sans any unseen end

    There is a witness
    For every arrival
    Till no one arrives anymore
    And then the fishes are left alone in the desert
    To drown in the mirage of memories
    The breathing carcass
    Reminiscent of living
    In an abandoned womb
    Never to awake
    Never to walk
    Like ages unspent
    Upon the faces of the rock

  • In the Light of the Darkness

    I believe the night to be beautiful
    And polite in its quiet understanding
    Of letting people be
    Alone with their monsters
    That others would never see
    For the dark cannot differ
    Between the shape and its shadow
    Nor cast colours by their causes
    Or ask more of friend and less of foe
    To night all belong
    Both the dreamer and its dreams
    The silence of frozen lakes
    And the songs of eternal streams
    But here in the deep
    Within the halls of man’s own mind
    The dark reigns ever awake
    In hope to one day find
    The answer all eyes seek
    Yet doubt to ever know;
    If the soul is but a seed
    That once then shall never grow…

  • 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…

  • The Ash Blanket

    Last night
    In dim light
    Of half closed fridge
    My pale skin
    Shone
    Like snow on fire
    And the blunt desire
    To bruise
    And break
    These filial bonds
    Of flesh and bones
    Rose, untainted
    Like waves on sea
    Like a dream disguised as a memory

    I was sleeping
    Under the cold warmth
    Of the ash blanket
    Till people appeared
    By my bedside
    Beings sulphurous
    Silhouettes of silver smoke
    Which spoke:
    ‘Come to us
    You child of gravity
    There is a world beyond the world
    Shaped by chaos and clarity
    A latticework of lyrics
    A synagogue sans any saint
    A cosmos acclaimed by cynics
    A painting without the paint’
    And I alive in tenuous thoughts
    Of nevermore and forever
    Could only see and be
    A shadow of a reflection
    Unborn thus free
    And so those excelsior people
    With ghost hands bore me away
    Astride the light they had saved
    Back from their leftover days

    What I saw thence I cannot say
    There is nothing to remember
    Between the first dawn of January
    And the last night of December
    But there are those half dreamt moments
    When I seem to know
    The truth breathed upon me:
    That Soul is what the light don’t show

    But last night
    In dim light
    Of half closed fridge
    My pale skin
    Shone
    Like snow on fire…

  • Daydreams Of a Day

    I wore a blanket for a cape
    For only in dreams I can escape
    The mortal wounds
    So lovingly applied
    As an afterthought of ache

    Oft nights when the world
    Is turning inside out
    Being snowflake proud of rainbow vomit and papier-mâché pyramids
    Growing in a mindless ocean of silver sweat
    I sit as stillness amidst the walls
    Like a spineless spider flat and small
    Aping what I think
    Is the rhythm I cannot find
    Do I mind? Do I mind?
    Stars falling like dandruff on blank shoulder of the night
    Do I mind? Do I mind?
    Knowing my common mind preaches that I am one of a kind

    The cactus upon the windowsil
    Looks down on the street and see
    Other trees meditating
    Like monks on a subway free
    Half dead and half high
    Having two views of one life
    An ever burning driftwood
    Entombed in blue ice
    I am that monk
    That beggar with bright face
    Having known no sunshine, I shine
    Having known no misery, I make mine
    From the refrigerated leftover of a burnt down town
    Crying over T-shirts and Blazers, Tank tops and gown

    The world with its thorned tendrils and tremors of love
    The world with its crow’s claws and feathers of a dove
    Knows the weight and cost of a coin unspent
    For this life; a tragedy, for this life; a parody
    Is best lived,unmeasured and as if each day is on rent

    I have seen geisha queens
    Dance on aspen nights
    Play with children made of fire
    And love men afraid of light
    I have known threadbare hearts
    Bare it all upon the floor
    And yet be trodden upon
    Like a foot mat at the door
    And so much more, so much more
    I have seen and chosen to ignore
    The what if and why not
    The why now and not before
    So much more, so much more, now no more anymore

  • 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