I was a soldier in search of seashells On my way to a foreign land I was promised a piece of paradise But left with burying bayonet in the sand
There are omens and tokens and totems I carry in the colour of my skin Of leading strangers from ashes to Asphodel But leaving behind my own kin
And by this ocean of giving and forgetting I toss my morsel to the receding tide And build a mausoleum out on the seashore And pieces of my heart therein I hide
For the mountains I crossed on my way Told me that silence comes to those who seek Meaning at the end of an answer And not winning; because that’s for the weak
Now as I sit by lap of the waves And watch my bullet holes go larger around I align my irises to the horizon Till my heartbeats makes no more sound
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
