The Song of Silent Cicadas


“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”

Abrasion

My life is a loose translation 
Barely read, rarely understood
And sits, with an air of years spent
Suspended between two strokes
Of a broken down pendulum
Ages have passed undivided
A single line, perpetually drawn
Getting thin and thinner
Till the Parallax Error
Caters for my silence
At the center of my heart
And I am able to remember
The taste of my first breath
The warmth of my first touch
The colour of my first view
All amounting to nothing much

I submit to the auguries made about me
By people who claim to know
When the leaves of a tree in the autumn would fall
And when the sun would melt the snow

Fire in the birdcage
Would the wings be able to save?
Can feathers and the flame
Be the same
Can the ashes for once be brave?

I humour the dinner table
My hands carefully caressing
The cold, silver cutlery
And my words
Churning in my mouth with the morsels
Breaking down
With every bite, with every conversation
Leaves a taste
Something lingering upon the tongue
They watch me as I listen
They listen as I watch
The thin sound, going around
A tiptoeing whisper
Toeing a line;
I am known to these strangers
I am shared and savoured
Wound licked with salt
I am a pariah and thus favoured

Long into the night
I stare at my soul
Standing by the window
Stitching itself whole
And the night breeze is painting
And the dark woods; they dream
Only the blind sky is witness
As I thread down my scream

Ashes and Eyelashes

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?


The I in Why?

I do not desire
To lie naked in a rattrap life
And lubricate my verse with victorian words;
Filled with awe inspiring acts
Led by mundane lust
Of Angels and Men alike
Nor do deep desires murder me
Nerve by nerve
Peeling away my eggshell skin
To illuminate the onion within;
A coiled rainbow, boiled white
Neither am I a shadow
Fallen far from crowded feet
Awaiting on indifferent paths
For a heavenly retreat
If at all I were to bare myself and be
One thing that should suffice how I see
Myself, in this crystal world
Of self reflection and askewed insight
I would be a thoughtful statue
Sitting alone in a far off land
With infinity in my head
And nothing in my hand

Diaspora

I have seen the diaspora,
Seen it’s bulbous head set against Saturn’s sky,
Felt it’s pulse,
Dreaming of chalk and charcoal,
Seen it’s veins, deeper nerves,
Coursing through promises
Like an undulating snake.

Men revise,
Their adolescent mournings, teenage dreams made of,
Pink flesh laid to rest,
Against the grain of this world.
A world long forgotten by the habit of forgetting,
The shell of mirror,
Slow as sinking stone,
For lives lived, living,
With unpolluted prose,
Precise, pragmatic.

I have seen the diaspora,
The laughter of death,
That parallel passage,
Guided by fate.

The fault never lied with dark,
To light must fall the blame,
For showing that of all,
None are truly the same.

Half the pleasure,
Lies in having nothing,
And losing it all.

Here in shaped stillness,
I ache for a shattering.

Until I am no more.

Now I am no more.