THE HUMAN ANVIL

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  • 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.

  • Hineni

    One day
    I too, will roam with you
    On lovely brazen days
    Upon lonely wooded ways
    In the ovule of some random park
    Sighing deep and dark
    At the silence pooling by our feet
    And listen to the each other’s heartbeat;
    Fill the gaps left by our own
    A dial tone of desires
    Ringing in our bones
    And so we shall sleep
    On the dappled forest floor
    Closer than an atom
    Yet aching for some more
    Till the light leave us soft
    And breathing through our hair;
    The wind lost in the moments
    That our lips could not spare

  • 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


  • The End of an Arrival

    Oh this corpse of mine
    Has settled now
    And cannot move anymore
    Let the waves of time
    Drown it deep
    In seas without a shore

  • The Wheel

    Forget the world
    Forget it ever existed for you
    And then watch one morning
    As the red sky slowly turns to blue
    For then you would know
    How true is the world
    And old her everyday design
    That began one day
    And remembered to stay
    Without you keeping the time

  • 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