THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: living

  • 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.

  • Shards of Symphony

    There has been a song in my head,
    Long since we met,
    And it had no lyrics of love,
    Just a music underway,
    I hum it when sad,
    When happy I whistled it twice,
    Only to find it everywhere, other day,
    With people like me; without a choice

    Ivory atoned in milk,
    Alabaster laid in salt,
    Your clothes, moonlight threaded,
    Upon skin without a fault.

    (I ramble of your beauty,
    When nothing is to be thought about)

    Remember the vase I gifted you once,
    Wrinkled porcelain,
    Thunder in glass,
    And you kept it hidden, under your warm clothes,
    Deep in the closet,
    Lest no mourner of life, of eternal charm,
    Plucks a fountain of flower,
    To abide, this graceful tomb;
    We adore and abide and anoint,
    With feelings, like watered paint, like warm breathe,
    Or something more forgettable.

    I found pieces of it the other day,
    Shards of symphony,
    Scattered voices,
    Gleaming, under the stairway,
    Spiting neon light;
    Forked tongue, poison.

    You had after all,
    Plucked one, a deep dark red,
    It’s fragrance; my fear of all things left unsaid.

    There is a reason roses have thorns,
    Everything comes at a price,
    Love is not a line in stone,
    Sometimes its roll of a dice.

    Now you tail windmills,
    And I can see your feet, nestled in grass,
    And your hand in your hair,
    Untying my knots,
    So the new wind, the new time,
    Can hold you aloft
    And make you feel at home
    As if that can suffice your bohemian soul
    That jukebox of rhythms
    You shuffle to make whole.

    Love to you was just a word to behold
    Words to you were feelings to be sold
    Feelings to you only a reason to be kind
    Reasons to you were reasons to nevermind.

    I shall remember, yes,
    When waiting for the flowers to bloom
    For a ship to set sail
    From the corner of my room
    That you, love,
    Never cared after all
    This was no poem or play
    You were writing on the wall
    But my life, this meagre, stuff made of snow
    A candle you alighted
    But forgot to blow
    And now the wishes they linger
    Like rats in the rain
    For leftover love
    Not poisoned with pain…
































  • 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…

  • 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

  • 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…

  • Sleepwalker

    All I can think about is dust and dusk
    And drowning in a shattered sea
    Made of glass
    Like a photograph of a falling man
    Who is never truly falling
    But eternally trapped
    With a suspended scream
    In an endless dream
    Like a dreamless wraith;
    Weightless and wordless
    As an orphan in death

    But sometimes the night is too strong for me to sleep
    And the dreams I have are too dark for me to keep
    So I become a cobweb on the far wall
    Or a three pin plug lost in a socket
    Some crumpled paper on the floor
    Or a faded face in an old heart shaped locket
    A catharsis of cause
    Building prisons to be free
    An empty ship sailing
    An emptier sea

    Where there is fog in the air
    And yet I stare
    Like a blind man blinking
    Without thinking at the sky
    Wondering in my own vacuum
    About the mute purpose of ‘Why’
    With voices at the edge of my vision
    And footsteps at the back of my mind
    I am dreaming of being asleep
    And afraid of losing what I cannot find

    Thus, in this black and white world
    In this sharp and smooth world
    In this loud and quiet world
    In this bitter and sweet world
    In this dull and fragrant world
    I shall remain awake
    Till a different tomorrow

  • Incandescent

    I was born out of the blue
    Like a star without a face
    And shall one day be falling too
    As dust without a trace
    In hope that when I am gone
    Those very few whom I knew
    Kept something of the light
    With which their wish came true…

  • Deadbeat

    I beg…
    To differ
    From all those who earn
    At the cost of letting their freedom burn
    Away…

  • The Aroma of Sadness


    I look at the wrong things and cry
    But tears are taboo, aren’t they?
    Like used razors or sandpaper towel
    Or the last page of a living novel
    And yet I do, not because I cannot avert my eyes
    From the still beauty
    Subdued by time
    But that I would witness
    In those aching final ages
    Filled with long and random sunlight
    My disappearance
    Into wet satin
    And gossamer ash
    Of original nothingness

    If fire could speak of pain
    And water too of how it feels to suffocate
    Beneath the weight
    Of drowning men
    They would
    But flesh cannot heal the sky
    Nor blood fill a river dry
    For all thoughtful fantasies are unwritten tragedies
    Beginning at birth
    And only deepening when you die

    So I weep for the ocean of sadness
    Clenched inside my throat
    I pray for the lambs sheltered
    In the veins of my battered boat
    And I yearn to leave the answers
    With my back against the dying day
    To rest amidst the sleeping shepherds
    For I have nothing more to say…

  • Orison

    Image by Bahador @Unsplash

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