Tag: trending

Nescience

I wait at the newspaper stand
Reading, the morning is grey
Ash tinted
Like an old man’s asthma

Buds of people are sprouting
From windows and eggshell alleyways
Dressed in yesterday’s dreams
And tommorow’s promises
Faces creased, bespectacled
With white hairs a halo
From the century long sunlight
Age ever ached to swallow

A ballad pours from the the barbershop
The old stereo is crooning about
Footsteps falling on azure fields
And carts on country roads
I can smell the aftershave
At once bitter and sweet
The razor once again vacant
Without the borrowed heartbeat

There is a fallacy here
Between the words and vision
I read and see
The stories seem vibrant but life colour-free
Perhaps it is the weight of being
That makes it so
For all of us do wither
But only some of us grow

The children have gathered on the footpath
A bell in some temple tolls
The priests are praying for bliss
And in laughter a football rolls
I watch, I watch
The world divided in unison
Each hour be day or night
Being a part of every season

So I pay my fair share
It’s time for me to leave
And be one amongst the masses
Who in eternity believe
Of everyday man and their everyday deeds
In the cycle of fruit from the flower and flower from the seeds
If only one would question; Does the roots if ever know?
Of the world that blooms outside from their breaths buried below

Marmalade

Pieces of sunlight on my shirt
Golden flakes caught unawares in snow
I wear the world
As a witness upon my eyebrow

Pendulum thoughts, mine,
Rising to always fall, falling to ever rise
A deaf dance; this one legged tango
Should I mourn
The forgotten remembrance
Of irony bound in common things
Like water buried in a coconut or born in one who knows what it means to be a child
Without being none
I, myself, was born skinless
In a seed of wild fern
Wordless they named me; those voices in my head,
Till I spoke and my friends began to fade
One after another
Like orange in marmalade

The wind upon the canvas do not dry the paint
Nor a fire miles away
Help me find my feet
Of all the pain in the world; it’s the loss that alone tastes sweet
With syrup on my bruise
And sugar on my wound
I limp away
From weeping windows and waking walls
For I heard my cupboard say the other day
Wear less and be more
Was that a dream, a dream
Like Dali high on sour cream?
I wish only to know
Can my hand reach out to my heart and squeeze
The last drops of Carpe Diem to please
My soul; that cotton candy wrapped in light and luck
Made In Bed after a night of soft….

Dear Diary
I am exhausted
Ginsberg and Sexton, Whitman and Poe
Conrad, Tolstoy, Orwell and Thoreau
I read about them all
Copperfield and Twist
And Einstein’s Relativity and Marie Antoinette’s false feast
Should I sleep now
Will the night ask me no more
Questions and answers
Legends and lores

There is a spider on the bed
(Yes, it’s a thought in my head)
Should I scream or be quiet
(There is nothing to be said)
So twinkle twinkle little star
There are bottles in the hotel bar
And many miles to drink before I sleep
Till the laughter stops and it soothes to weep…

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

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 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


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