THE HUMAN ANVIL

Tag: woman

  • The Ash Blanket

    Last night
    In dim light
    Of half closed fridge
    My pale skin
    Shone
    Like snow on fire
    And the blunt desire
    To bruise
    And break
    These filial bonds
    Of flesh and bones
    Rose, untainted
    Like waves on sea
    Like a dream disguised as a memory

    I was sleeping
    Under the cold warmth
    Of the ash blanket
    Till people appeared
    By my bedside
    Beings sulphurous
    Silhouettes of silver smoke
    Which spoke:
    ‘Come to us
    You child of gravity
    There is a world beyond the world
    Shaped by chaos and clarity
    A latticework of lyrics
    A synagogue sans any saint
    A cosmos acclaimed by cynics
    A painting without the paint’
    And I alive in tenuous thoughts
    Of nevermore and forever
    Could only see and be
    A shadow of a reflection
    Unborn thus free
    And so those excelsior people
    With ghost hands bore me away
    Astride the light they had saved
    Back from their leftover days

    What I saw thence I cannot say
    There is nothing to remember
    Between the first dawn of January
    And the last night of December
    But there are those half dreamt moments
    When I seem to know
    The truth breathed upon me:
    That Soul is what the light don’t show

    But last night
    In dim light
    Of half closed fridge
    My pale skin
    Shone
    Like snow on fire…

  • 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…

  • Tenants

    We both are tenants
    Trapped within the rubik cube love
    Shaped by our shoulders
    Resting against each other
    And there is no escape;
    For our landlocked lips
    Shifting like dry grass
    Under the music of sorrel wind
    Other than lying on different shores
    Waiting for the same tide
    To ferry us away
    Towards a sunset and a sunrise
    Splitting our world; two indifferent ways.

    You count the stars between your fingers
    And I vanish, like a thin piece of ice
    A spectre, yet unfound, in the jigsaw world
    Left alone to wander the newspaper streets
    Those daily retreats of hourly love
    Bought with midnight mascara and silk stockings
    Rubbed raw between the eyes and thighs
    Of mad men and maddening women
    Looking for a cheap trip to the paradise

    I hear the tea cup tinkle
    And know you have taken a sip
    Of the warm clove water
    Left upon the doorstep
    By the lonely wood worshipper
    Whistling for words
    And I am content that you did your prayer
    Much like my daily dead affair
    To show how much for each we care
    By being willfully unaware

    Thus there is food upon the table
    And smile upon our faces
    And though the roof is leaking
    And the floor is unswept
    And there are holes in our clothes
    And scarce money in our pockets left
    We know we shall scrounge through
    Past the ups and downs and ifs and buts
    Of everyday euthanization
    By lying wide awake
    Half dead with escapist desire
    In some strangers arms
    And murmuring through their skin
    The leftover vows
    We kept for ourselves
    By scribbling away the love
    Not meant for each other

  • 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


  • Erosion


    I keep awake
    Watching the parched lightbulb
    (And the lightbulb perhaps watching me)
    With my hand on the warm doorknob;
    Leading halfway to hell,
    Till the caterpillar thoughts crawl out into the silence
    And cocoons of dreamless desires
    Flood the floor
    As dark pools of velvet;
    With skin like ash and skin like glue.
    Fingers of fire
    And butterfly blood
    Seals the sound of the oboe
    In the roots of time
    So the seeds of silk may flower
    And the fountainhead of pulse
    Breathe in the open every night
    To let the swan song of love;
    Traced on the tips of arched spine
    Leave the lips
    And take hold of the walls
    To make the voice of world
    Like beads of sweat; evaporate,
    And the colours of a carnal mind collapse
    Into nothingness
    Of everyday afterlife

  • 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

  • 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

  • The Pedigree of a Patriot


    There is no such thing
    As a country, my friend
    The sooner you know it the better
    All hands are on deck
    But not for your sake
    And to live free is to be a traitor

  • Shore Without the Sea

    I know no more of you
    Than the shore does of the sea
    A lifetime spent haunted
    By a murdered memory
    Of the ever alive distance
    Like the lights between two cities
    So far from flame the fire
    That there are two eternities

    My body, it wanders,
    With the wind that holds my hand
    Which whispers me to write
    About my love on seeds of sand
    So the wind may carry it along
    To you, wherever you are
    On the pillow of a wooden moon
    Or beneath the shadow of a dying star

    But my thoughts they do confess
    That my mind can now surrender
    Every dream I had of you
    So I may no longer remember
    How it was to be untrue
    Towards my life which I shaped in sorrow
    Wishful that my barren tonights
    Shall light our shared tommorow

    And I hope you can see me now
    (From across the desert you brought to break
    The castles I wrought in dreams
    To keep us forever awake)
    So you know I am free at last
    From the future that stems from past
    A sole light that sleeps off far
    Beyond the cracks of memory
    Of how I know no more of you
    Than the shore does of the sea

  • Goddess

    And I buried the sky
    Deep in my womb
    And there were stars in my eyes
    The moon south of my waist
    And the sun spilled forth white
    From the cusp of my chest
    So my children could glow
    So my children could dream
    And not be sheeps led on sermon
    Taught to bleat and not to scream
    At the world for not being fair
    And keep a woman unaware
    Of her hips and her hair
    Drawn only if in pair
    And shown smiling everywhere
    To please and to care
    And never do truly dare
    Be a child of the flower
    Wild under bower
    With roots of our own
    Chosen by us to be sown
    In our graveyards and glade
    For a fragrance that would never fade
    From the words once unsaid
    Now shared unafraid
    In all homes and every hearth
    Before being born and after birth
    A song, O this song
    To be remembered for long
    We were there, we are here
    No longer in fear:
    Of the Bible and it’s fable
    Seven sins under the table
    Forced to pay for it all
    Every Adam and his fall,
    Without why, when and how
    We are one and we are now
    Equal in this fight
    Of Us and Our Way
    Once Witches of the Night
    Now the Goddess of the Day