THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: poet

  • 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…

  • Taste of Sunlight

    Image by Riccardo Mion on unsplash


    My bed is in the corner
    Of an empty room
    The irony is self imposed
    But not without reason
    I have heard that darkness
    Gathers more in the deep
    And perhaps it shall help me sleep
    Faster than dying by lying wide awake
    Counting seconds, falling and rising
    With time’s unreceding tide.

    The curtain hanging by my bedside
    Often flutters in the night
    And it’s breath though purposeless
    Fills me with envy
    By it’s act of pure motion
    Sans a shred of emotion
    How can I be more than me
    When everything I seek I deny to see?

    Dreams; they die, my own are no exception
    Even when I have them
    Caged behind a glass case
    Cuddled in red velvet
    Caressed by Mozart’s Sonatas
    The flowers shall wilt, roots die and fruits decay
    Nature by nature of unrequitance
    Shall swallow none but one’s own
    For birds do not nest on trees unsown
    And those that I watch from the moonlit window
    They shimmer and shine
    Like gold and wine
    Broken; yes and crooked and white
    But they know unlike me the taste of sunlight.

  • The Half Past

    It was half past ten
    In the broken clock
    Light flooded from the bathroom
    Vintage; as if streaming from another time;
    A past not yet undone by dialysis,
    I laid ankle deep in silk
    The shawl around my neck and feet
    Splitting me in two tragedies;
    Naked and none, while
    The feathers of my pillow whispered in their broken flight: “Do not close your eyes or all that you fear shall come alive”
    There was something in those words
    That left me speechless
    And so I slept
    Wide awake
    Breathing only for breathing’s sake.

  • The Pulse of A Petal

    I dissolve in the potpourri
    A green leaf amidst dead petal
    Lost men flock the streetcar
    And only I fight for the aisle
    Knowing far too well that the bespectacled windows
    Shall turn some blind in a while
    For the tapestry towns
    Stitched with dancing lights
    Is not for them to claim
    Who lick the darkness between two tungsten tongues
    And know no aftertaste to blame
    But the raindrop feet on cobbled streets
    Paper skin behind display glass
    Torn faces through the Venetian Blinds
    A world watered in a vase
    Are all akin
    To a bargained win
    For those with mundane affair
    Of humble hands with seawater veins
    Wading waves of deep despair
    But I of charlatan choice
    Of parched lips moisturised with the mud
    I know far too well of flowerpots
    And the fate of dreaming bud
    So I dissolve in the potpourri
    A green leaf amidst dead petal
    Growing gardens beneath empty graves
    Waiting for the dust to settle

  • Opaque

    I dream of a man dreaming:
    Only to awake and find
    A mirror in my hand