THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: pain

  • Slow down Sisyphus

    Dear Diary

    Half the time, I just exist—like husks of wheat. I move along with the wind, without a thought, a care, or ambition. I do what I have been told. I pray, I preach, I learn, and I teach. I exist for the benefit of others, like a common condiment.

    The thing is—I could be much more. Much, much more. Like saffron or vanilla.

    But there is a sadness inside me that pulls me close, a sadness that makes melancholia look adorable—romantic in ways that rejoices my being. I wonder if there are pieces of plastic latched to my soul, making me incomplete.

    Outside my window, the rain speaks. I hear the conversation between the trees, the pathway, the creaking seesaw, the blades of grass, and the drowning ants.

    Should I, too, put in a word about my world?About how I have surrendered to my surroundings? How my ego has mounted a paper boat and is now heading towards the eternal eddies of societal suicide?

    There is a knock.

    The floor feels soft without my slippers. Numb feet makes quite a carpet. The latch has brown patches on it—rust, spread out like a map of Europe.

    I remember first hearing about Turkish Delight in Narnia—how the girl opens the door of a cupboard and is transported to a land of enchantment. Well, mine takes me face-to-face with a plethora of files: red, blue, and green.

    I wish I were colourblind.

    But that thought is for another time. Presently, I am enamoured with my own incompetence. The door closes and the stench of garbage wafts in, with a peculiar rhythm to it—an echoing arrhythmia. It takes me four rapid blinks to come to terms with the fact that it is indeed my heart, fluttering like a stapled butterfly.

    God is muted silence. For silence can be heard. But God? He cannot be. He has left the pastures to the wolves, and the forests to the sheep.

    Rejoice, children! (I dared to laugh)

    Is this not what every heart desires in the end? To change? To be something other than what one is born with?

    Yes—the first act of violence that any man commits is against himself.

    First, he desires to shed. Next, he desires to show. And finally, he desires to be sold.

    We are slaves, one and all—slaves to life and love, to vision and division, to season and decision, to thought, to carelessness, to songs, to books, to faces, to sex, to laughter, to text, to limelight, to corners, to whiskey, to cigarettes, to auguries, to cabarets, to sugar, to fantasies, to all things other than reality—

    We are, each one of us, a self-sustaining slave.

    I face the mirror. And the mirror turns away.

    The End

  • The Other Side of A Window


    I searched for a word
    To help me answer; Who am I?
    But all I found was the sound
    Of seconds ticking by….

  • Intentions

    Will my silence be enough
    To let you know I am no more
    Will you shake your head and smile
    And be as you were before
    Will it be my laughter that you remember
    Decades later on a summer noon
    Will you ask why I never came back
    Or lament why I returned so soon
    Will my face be what you seek
    When thinking of things past
    Will you forget the first day we met
    Was the day that we met last
    Will these hands that once were mine
    Remain forever alone in memory
    Will you extend yours just to share
    Their shadow so I could be We
    Will my words ever be able to describe
    This ache that now I feel
    Will you break my heart each time
    You want your own to heal…

  • Raiment

    Image by Francesca Zama @unsplash

    Naked pictures painted on the world map, a global ache this systematic subjugation, arraigned with signatures and rubber stamps and blue and black ink with red smeared hands from…

    Ants committing suicide for sugar cubes, mountains sundered for a grain of sand, weighing a ton by common belief of a wishful world running in a race without an end around a toilet flush
    I hear music in the smoking firmament, the guttural snort and fart of the engine like Mozart’s Requiem for Modern Times; graveyards filled with scraps, dusty medals pinned upon pigeon chests, chest with springs and cogs inside, all mechanisms of a meager mind,

    Breathed upon by gunpowder gods never crucified, but kept alive, unchained unlike Prometheus or castrated unlike Cronus, with 9mm eyes watching over the supposed universe,
    Lives televised, a miniscule mime renting life per hour, human carcass threaded, talking puppets mimicking everyday shambles with double exclamation and undying opinions; graffiti upon bathroom walls, the enlightenment of our age; our Bible, our Koran, our Commandments, our Veda,

    An ocean of umbilical madness, Medusas of mind, writhing in the depths of drowned time, left helpless at the bottom, garbage cans, lobster traps, Ahab’s ambition, little mermaid’s fin, all part of the abyss, woven tales of Atlantis

    Beggars upon sidewalk, watching the neon lights blink at the mannequins dressed and fed better than them, breathing in glass case while the Caesar supine on steps as flat piece of bread looks on: Et tu, Et tu, until a coin clatters in the bowl and Rome falls, democracy dissolved under the acid rain of paint thinner,

    Red sky running, blind horse racing against the rider till the tollbooth where hands on hips the old man walks the zebra crossing, unmindful of the airplanes lined at the red light, waiting one and all to fly away, without passengers or Blackbox, to a land where runways end

    Phantoms fasting upon a fingernail, the sound of anarchy, electric guitar with strings of lightning, rainbow flooding the floor, and the people waving, a mingled marsh undecipherable, a canvas coated with paint, avant-garde asylum overflowing with stone heads

    Rows of velvet cushion upon glass, red carpet laid upon mud, hyenas laughing in the hallway in high heels and mothball tuxedos from pawn shop, faceless fornication behind the screen, lips locked together in war, breathes dying with alcohol,

    And outside the Ghost of Christmas Past selling mint in the rain, poets pass him and politicians, all made of papers full of question marks and Venn diagram that depicts everything said and done, the saying it has the bigger circle and the deeds it had none,

    The Van Gogh World waking, rivers of gas flowing under matchstick houses waiting for madmen, toothpick buildings dancing for children playing whack-a-mole, Las Vegas without lights like teeth of a key; all cards of the fleeting reality playing pinochle with constant uncertainty,

    Dismal days these, age of enlightenment, recoilless Renaissance, people paying people to understand people paying people, round around the circumference of Drachma with Copernicus we fly, we fly, taking one day kryptonian crash course, and pretend to die with cries towards the sky; O father thou art in heaven, look down now and weep, for seven days you worked, and on the eighth it all went to dust, you knew it and yet you left it so, now weeds gather in your garden, and even Lucifer stays away and pray free from this drama; Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama

  • Iris

    Do not let me die
    In a hall with white walls
    Near windows overlooking
    The world’s asylum
    Filled with paper praying people
    Watering themselves
    Towards an early spring

  • Merciful Maladies

    There
    Upon the white winter brow
    Of an aged world
    I stand, like a cliff
    A black wound, unstitched,
    Filed with crowfoot and claws,
    Where my face without flesh
    Lingers in iodine
    So that under one pain I could forget
    The origin of another

  • Life In Ripples

    You poise by the preface,
    Starlike; extravagant,
    Tilting waist,
    Measuring love of men,
    Who dipped in your fragrance,
    Sway like honey heavy flowers,
    Drunk against sunlight,
    Leaping emerald across boroughs,
    Spilled with spring.

    Lilac dreams, enchanting,
    You wave away tapered, transient,
    All lifelike features, that taste of earthly leisure,
    Absent.
    For you dream of Angels,
    Angular symposium of embroidered life,
    And divine imitation,
    Though you know it not.
    For far too pleasure shatter beneath your feet,
    And the sound, what feels like cloudburst to us,
    To you is but a gust of wind that lifts,
    The violet hem of your dress.

    Yet one day,
    Your face shall melt,
    Into a weed filled pool,
    With a weeping fountain in the middle,
    For all too pass by and forget,
    Even when the blue rain, would clasp,
    And hold you, immortal,
    No nymph nor Naiad,
    Or man, mermaid,
    Shall know your depths, ever.

    But every other night,
    When solace would have left you speechless,
    And the silence; a silver mirror,
    A shadow shall shape in your womb,
    Desirous, delicate,
    Cascading down, sweet and sour,
    Like a citrus kiss of longing,
    And you will be alone, no longer,
    But one with the moon,
    Dancing on his tunes,
    In trance like ripples.