THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: thought

  • Curtain Call

    Image by Ahmed Nishant @unsplash

    I am,
    The face you never see,
    On posters and billboards,
    Half starved, naked,
    Beyond beautiful, to be
    Served on a silver platter,
    For you to touch, twist and take,
    Morsel after morsel.

    I am,
    The laughter you never hear,
    Stirring lives,
    Rubbed together in plastic embrace,
    Made alive in the objectionable agony
    In the chimera of chemicals
    Praised at pawn shops
    By asthmatic Archdiocese
    To fall, to drip,
    Lip by lip
    Throat by sore throat
    Through hollow chests
    And wasted waists
    Of fools painting tears
    Upon torn faces.

    I am,
    The play you never see,
    On streets below your tinted windows,
    Staged for the world to witness,
    For free, though
    None stays to admire,
    Too paltry, they say, too plain,
    Too painful, coarse and vain,
    This drama,
    That reminds us of our own lives.

    I am,
    The speeches you never give,
    From proud pedestals, and altars,
    Like a speck of spit,
    Luring the sea of men,
    With words; carved and honed,
    Too bright for us,
    Of clouded eyes,
    To warm these hearths of our own.

    I am,
    The truth you never know,
    From beyond your walls,
    And the sanctum of your own asylum
    Where you pray
    To the earthworms armed with earthquakes
    To the dead; dead from too much death
    To leper’s liberty
    To chronic charity
    Never to arise
    From the ashes
    Or seen through the uncertain curtains
    Of your marble eyelashes.

    I am,
    Everything that makes
    Nothing possible.

  • The Men Behind Monuments

    Image by Jiyad Nassar @unsplash


    In this sudden stillness
    A final silence grows
    From beneath the dead branches
    Enveloping ants and Angels alike

    The dry mist of purpose
    That once haunted men
    Now haunts their monuments
    The mindless mortar
    Made and remade
    For each thought
    And every contour
    Which seeks in itself
    The forever form
    That everlasting aspiration
    Of becoming a being

    But the Promethean promises
    Are but promises
    Just as the silhouette stems from the shape
    So does the shape is rooted in the silhouette
    Like a circle trapped
    Within its own circumference
    Sans a seen beginning
    Sans any unseen end

    There is a witness
    For every arrival
    Till no one arrives anymore
    And then the fishes are left alone in the desert
    To drown in the mirage of memories
    The breathing carcass
    Reminiscent of living
    In an abandoned womb
    Never to awake
    Never to walk
    Like ages unspent
    Upon the faces of the rock

  • Remains of the Rain

    Image by Mehrsad Rajabi@unsplash


    I saw my children standing in the rain
    Their faces lined with age and late reason
    Watched the abandoned bicycles
    And broken seesaws
    Being pulled down by the weight of raindrops
    Their hands, long and thin, like dead seaweed in the summer wind
    Their legs green and gold, like new leaves suddenly old
    Seemed painted
    In the moist color of quiet
    The abandoned delight
    Having dissolved
    In the lament of the rain
    They turn; the motion a sad song
    An unfinished lullaby
    To look at me with eyes
    Half awake but never asleep
    As if I with my window earned wisdom
    Would know
    Why all things grow
    Only to die
    If life in the very virtue of living
    Is a lie
    But they know the answer
    As well as me
    It is better to forget than to believe what we see
    In the everyday aftermath
    Of the daily demise
    Of choices left to chances
    And promises made before goodbyes
    For in the end all paths
    Shall return where they began
    Even the oceans with all their eternity
    Are but remains of the rain…

  • The Eclectic

    I swim in the sand
    And in rivers of flying doves I lie
    Gazing at my private sky;
    Left to roam in chrysalis
    Upon the wounded edges of my eyelids
    A morphed metaphor for measure,
    Who found the infinity
    To be naught
    The palpable universe
    Alas planted within a thought