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

The Man Asleep


Life, look out
This man asleep
Is walking a dream
His pulse, afraid of inimical things, dance
At the incoherent din of the cattle bell,
For he knows only the time of tommorow
Prophesied by blind sages
Sages left by the world to marinate in old age
And he carries it; the cattle bell, it’s dead weight, it’s rue weight, like a talisman
Through the thick fog of promises
To the other side, where the light, yet unseen, seems to shine differently
For the sages who have looked on the winter
From far, would know something of the snow
Or so he hoped, with his face coddled within the blinkers
And crowned with a horseshoe

Life, look out
The man asleep
Knows not that he is sleeping
And so as waves he worship the shore
Unaware that he stands with men
Too afraid to blink at the sea
And soon he too would be watching the waters
Shiver with each breath of the seagull
Till his own wings wither and rot away
Leaving him; this epileptic Icarus
A common man among the common men
Left to watch each sunrise
And every sunset
From the shade of a dry sacamore
The hinterland of heart
That burned in winter
Knows both fire and ice is the same;
Perhaps, in the slow dance of the dying fire
He seeks the heat some more
Perhaps, his dreams are dreams of a dream
He dreamt he has dreamt before…

Pillars


I have seen Heroes
Shinning alone on the battlefield
Sword bare in bloodied hands
Hiding tears behind their shield
And the poets who wrote of courage
Knew not from those sunlit tower
That all wars are fought by them
Who has no ounce of power

I have seen Teachers
Cradling books in their velvet hand
Certain of the wisdom beneath the words
That the world fails to withstand
And the pupils who stay blind
And believe in it all
Are kept to learn the truth
Nailed as paintings upon the wall

I have seen Kings
Holding heaven in their earthly palms
Dive deep in the selfish seas
And make fist while breathing alms
And the people who praise the lord
For the health of the dear monarch
Knows not that the hand which feeds
Is the one that lays the nark

I have seen Saints
Swimming in the grey, tepid pool alone
And where hundreds had fallen
The saints could never drown
A miracle that belonged to them
Not by the blessings of the Throne
But because of the fact that the misery
Was not of their own

The Shadow Of Absent Things


I can smell the brown sugar
Melting in my tea pot
And I am rooted
Between two oak trees
Made immovable
By the stone lips oaring my depths
Reaching for the sky silhouetted against me
But the ache of it does not feel like tooth decay
Nor the pleasure makes me shiver and rain
Glass beads and spirit of grain
Into the hands of praying men

I can feel my skin
Breathing under your fingernails
Like snail on a hot tar road
While your voice in my ear
Whisper garbage
Something about me, my hair,
My face and the rest
Of me but not about
As if your eyes are nothing but mirror
Or old shoes spit polished this morning
And my heart wanders like flies on foodstuffs
Unable to digest
The truth of you touching me
In and beyond
Anymore

Steel on the tip of my tongue
Marble on the base of my back
I am pierced and pinned to the pedestal
A naked butterfly
At once transparent and tarnished
Bruised, battered and bludgeoned into being;
Beautiful sans beauty

So I stare like a light bulb numb in its holder:
The roof is blank
A grey slate
False sky
Absent mind
White chessboard
And the omniscient blind

Vestiges

Dear,
I know it is too late to write
It’s midnight here too, the sun is lying dead at the bottom of the ocean
With the dry lipstick caps
You left.
I rinsed their marks off the sink you know,
The bold maroon, the autumn orange and the pink of summer blossoms
I hope you are wearing something else now
A colour I could never know; otherwise all the bite marks you left
Like a river of pain
From the nape of my neck to the small of my back
Dividing me; amongst myself
Would be futile.

See! No you cannot, but I am, seeing
The stars, do you know they are long gone
And the light that we are looking at
Is no more true than those promises we made
In bed, everyday
Looking at each other
Melting under the red haze of love
Or else I would not be alone
Straddled between both lampshades
Stretched midst two lights
And the same, same darkness
Shifting me out of sight

And yet, oh yet I miss
You with your half asleep smile
Carefully constructed
To be dreamlike
I miss the time when we were us
Shared shadows in the day
And in night our silhouettes
I miss your half baked cake
And bitter burnt coffee
With me humming the song
You love at three; in the morning
Watching just watching
Nothing at all
But the same thing
Always the same

There was a time when I used to write for you
When I should have written about,
But I was naive; eggshell white,
A crystal goblet balanced upon the edge of a two-legged table
Drunk with my own wine
And I know the fault was mine
As ever the fault was mine
Flowers wilted and the fault was mine
Winter came and the fault was mine
Nothing remained
Everything changed
It began again
And the fault was mine
And so I am no more
Than a corpse carrying out a chore
Dreaming of a world before
It broke upon my door
Oh yes well before
I even built the door…

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.