THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: love

  • Theta

    Image by Todd Trapani @ unsplash

    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

  • 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

  • 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


  • Erosion


    I keep awake
    Watching the parched lightbulb
    (And the lightbulb perhaps watching me)
    With my hand on the warm doorknob;
    Leading halfway to hell,
    Till the caterpillar thoughts crawl out into the silence
    And cocoons of dreamless desires
    Flood the floor
    As dark pools of velvet;
    With skin like ash and skin like glue.
    Fingers of fire
    And butterfly blood
    Seals the sound of the oboe
    In the roots of time
    So the seeds of silk may flower
    And the fountainhead of pulse
    Breathe in the open every night
    To let the swan song of love;
    Traced on the tips of arched spine
    Leave the lips
    And take hold of the walls
    To make the voice of world
    Like beads of sweat; evaporate,
    And the colours of a carnal mind collapse
    Into nothingness
    Of everyday afterlife

  • Her Fire and Her Flesh

    Her eyes were on the fire
    Her fingers in the dough
    The smoke; it left her breathless
    Like the kerosene she poured into the stove
    The sweat dipped her lashes
    To her tears were all blind
    She was only a shadow on the wall
    Though being a woman one of a kind

    She had trapped Ganges in her hair
    And Pharaohs praised her lotus feet
    Her’s was Mumtaz’s Taj
    And to her belonged the Papal Seat
    But all that was her she had given
    In dowry for her father’s name,
    With the hope she would be treasured
    And not burnt alive for the same

    But soon a time shall come
    When a Sita will not walk
    A false Ordeal of Fire
    So blind people would not talk
    And soon a time shall come
    When a Draupadi will not accept
    The men and their game of dice
    Weighted against her self-respect
    And no longer any Eve shall answer
    For Adam’s own intent
    And let a Mother be always a Martyr
    And Father always a Saint

  • Shore Without the Sea

    I know no more of you
    Than the shore does of the sea
    A lifetime spent haunted
    By a murdered memory
    Of the ever alive distance
    Like the lights between two cities
    So far from flame the fire
    That there are two eternities

    My body, it wanders,
    With the wind that holds my hand
    Which whispers me to write
    About my love on seeds of sand
    So the wind may carry it along
    To you, wherever you are
    On the pillow of a wooden moon
    Or beneath the shadow of a dying star

    But my thoughts they do confess
    That my mind can now surrender
    Every dream I had of you
    So I may no longer remember
    How it was to be untrue
    Towards my life which I shaped in sorrow
    Wishful that my barren tonights
    Shall light our shared tommorow

    And I hope you can see me now
    (From across the desert you brought to break
    The castles I wrought in dreams
    To keep us forever awake)
    So you know I am free at last
    From the future that stems from past
    A sole light that sleeps off far
    Beyond the cracks of memory
    Of how I know no more of you
    Than the shore does of the sea

  • The Night

    The Night smiled and the world froze into a mirror:
    An eye without eyelids
    A face without feature
    But timeless in its taste
    Like truth without teacher,
    With flowers on her forehead
    And sweat upon her thigh
    The sea painted on her toenail
    And the sun a firefly
    Dancing just dancing
    On her gold lips as lullaby

    And oft she would curl up to sleep
    Unwanting to know the names
    Of those who suckled her milk
    Only to sell it for pixie dust
    And white rum to last a lifetime of
    Blood on her hands
    Flames in her hair
    Dreams stitched in her dresses
    Leaving her perpetually bare

    Pendulum minds
    Prone to tongue tennis and cold showers
    Stare out the window
    At the hips of dark roads
    Fading under street lamps
    Like sunset on a shore
    Shriveled drops of moonlight on their face
    And she watching the cold blue sky
    And those blind stars; invisible,
    Laughing in the background
    Like extras from silent films
    Happy to beheld
    The recurring eternity
    Of everyday life…

  • The Sailor

    There was dust upon his eyebrows
    And stars under his eye
    Each for one color of the rainbow
    Taped to the woolen sky
    I was swimming on a rose bridge
    And saw him drink the sea
    He was a dolphin from the desert
    Dressed as a honeybee

    So I fell for him forever
    Like lovers on rainy night
    And my heart was Christmas carol
    Raw as Eve’s apple bite
    Thus we drowned in whispering voices
    Pouring out our crystal skin
    There were wings upon our shoulders
    And a shared velvet fin

    But the man he was a sailor
    With a thirst for sea green ocean
    All I had was sky blue eyes
    And a sense of moonlight motion
    So I kissed his salt shaped lips
    And set his anchor free
    And I watched him drift asleep
    On a heavy wooden sea
    Now I am swimming on a rose bridge
    Alone on rainy night
    And I have apples around my ankles
    But no heart to leave a bite

  • One Winter of Embers

    One winter
    Two flowers bloomed
    Three days apart
    And of all those who saw
    None survived
    For one winter
    Two flowers bloomed
    Three days apart….

    P. S – In the living memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • The Beauty In Being Ugly

    Be ugly
    If being beautiful
    Is a common trait
    That way when all the mirrors in the world break. They shall look at you, as something new
    To search and find
    The beauty once lost to an opaque mind…