The Nuances of My Nights

            A poet knows
The name of all places
And directions to none
- Not a Poet


I write because it hurts
And if I scream they will know my pain
I don’t want to scream
Don’t want to shatter the serene mirror
That holds together
All false reflections
The world holds dear
For the blame of it
Would lie on me
And I have enough confessions to pardon
In my soliloquy

I slept late yesterday
There was a tempest inside me
And my mind was anchored loose
I was swayed, buffeted
And at once painted still
As if my soul
Was the albatross
From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
And I thought:
Every murder is a suicide in a way
Isn’t it?
To surrender the right of your life to someone else
Without a fight
There are many types of murders
Of trust, flesh and mind
Common massacres
Gruesome
One of a kind…
It’s getting dark

I should have had dinner
But the lights were too bright
And candles too dim
The plate felt soft
And the spoon too thin
Or was it me
Who felt brittle and blind
With so many dreams to dream
And so few days to do
(Now that was a lie
For I cherish my own incompetence
Like a child does it’s once favourite but now broken toy)

I am afraid I have found
The edge of my reason
And the world beyond (And would you believe it?)
Is a mirror…
It seems me and this mirror
We are obsessed with each other
In finding faults
In pointing out to one another
Our own shrinking horizons
Until one of us agrees
The threshold of our limitations

I slept late yesterday
(No, I already said that
Pardon, it’s the mirror reflecting my memories
God I am tired)

Good night

Razzmatazz

Dry twigs wrestle the wind 
Shadows burn on the ground
Here I stand in the center
And the world turns around
With yellow leaves laughing
White sand dyed brown
In Nameless nothingness
I named a pronoun
All of me
All of me
At the bottom of this sea
Sand dunes shrunk to seashell
Like past framed into memory

I watch dazed morning
Walk drunk upon the shore
Where my footsteps on the sand
Leave footprints no more
As if all of my life
Was a mirage from the start
A mirror holding together
A man falling apart

All of me
All of me
At the bottom of this sea
In the sky a sun wrinkled
And stars breaking free
Am I drowning
Am I drowning
Should I breathe this darkness and lay
As a dead man in a dying womb being fed everyday
The same old desires
The same old silver songs
The same old praise and promises
That nothing would go wrong

And only if only
I could no longer be here
Be a past that never happened
And a future always near
But never coming together
With the rhythm of our heart
An end that is unending
A beginning that never did start
You and me, you and me
The Sand and the sea
Away forever
Our little infinity

The edges of the world
Like pages from a play
A Recurring razzmatazz
Occurring everyday
The blue’s beats
Jarring jazz
And ballads on the way
Razzmatazz, razzmatazz
As Liquored lovers say
“You be thought and I the mind
To reminisce and remind
That love is not litmus
To be tested everyday
Let it flower, let it grow
Be careful what you sow
For the soil takes it all
Your flight and your fall
And it’s the way of the crowd
To take as truth what is loud
While our love is all silence
Strong sans the violence
So take care of the petals
They are flesh and not metal
And do not look for reflection
Till the water; it has settled”

Dry twigs wrestle the wind
Shadows burn on the ground
Here I stand at the edge
And the world is not round
Black leaves moan
Under heels; trodden down
In Nameless nothingness
I named a pronoun
All of me
All of me
At the bottom of this sea
Falling nowhere
With two skies above me
All of me
All of me
At the bottom of this sea
Fading in the distance
Once man now memory

The I in Why?

I do not desire
To lie naked in a rattrap life
And lubricate my verse with victorian words;
Filled with awe inspiring acts
Led by mundane lust
Of Angels and Men alike
Nor do deep desires murder me
Nerve by nerve
Peeling away my eggshell skin
To illuminate the onion within;
A coiled rainbow, boiled white
Neither am I a shadow
Fallen far from crowded feet
Awaiting on indifferent paths
For a heavenly retreat
If at all I were to bare myself and be
One thing that should suffice how I see
Myself, in this crystal world
Of self reflection and askewed insight
I would be a thoughtful statue
Sitting alone in a far off land
With infinity in my head
And nothing in my hand

Branches in my Backyard


I once had branches
That burned in my backyard
A pyre sans desire
A fire drowned by its fire
And at night
In the dark
When ghost grew like fruits
From the shadow of its seeds
From the ashes of its roots
One could hear
In the cast out whispers that they kept
Broken words bandaged
Pain yet un-wept
And they said, they said
In the black waves of bright flames
We are faces without faces
Nameless within our names
And if night be a star in the ocean
And infinity an eternal motion
If silence be the words without sound
And self a state never to be found
Then the world with it’s weight held in a grain
And poets with their pens dipped in pain
The weathered visages with their vermillion words
And the horizon a home for forgotten birds
Is there to be seen, is there to be shown
And not to be alone or utterly unknown

O the desire to be
Loved by all
And the ache of letting go
When it is harder to fall
Because of the world with it’s quiet words left to rot
On transparent eyelashes
Of eyes that dream, of eyes that dare
Of eyes that hold, of eyes that care
Should I wish upon myself an early demise
Would the darkness in it’s view find it wise
Why then sometimes I want to be
The silence that shapes the sea
Why then sometimes I want to be
Someone whom none can see

Despair, beware
I am a sky without cause
My pain, insane
Do not ache for applause
Stare in the mirror
O horror of my mind
What you see is what you are
Be gentle if not kind
And whisper unto the wind
These fables of your own
For you are no Pietá
But a statue turned to stone

In the Light of the Darkness

I believe the night to be beautiful
And polite in its quiet understanding
Of letting people be
Alone with their monsters
That others would never see
For the dark cannot differ
Between the shape and its shadow
Nor cast colours by their causes
Or ask more of friend and less of foe
To night all belong
Both the dreamer and its dreams
The silence of frozen lakes
And the songs of eternal streams
But here in the deep
Within the halls of man’s own mind
The dark reigns ever awake
In hope to one day find
The answer all eyes seek
Yet doubt to ever know;
If the soul is but a seed
That once then shall never grow…

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…

Sleepwalker

All I can think about is dust and dusk
And drowning in a shattered sea
Made of glass
Like a photograph of a falling man
Who is never truly falling
But eternally trapped
With a suspended scream
In an endless dream
Like a dreamless wraith;
Weightless and wordless
As an orphan in death

But sometimes the night is too strong for me to sleep
And the dreams I have are too dark for me to keep
So I become a cobweb on the far wall
Or a three pin plug lost in a socket
Some crumpled paper on the floor
Or a faded face in an old heart shaped locket
A catharsis of cause
Building prisons to be free
An empty ship sailing
An emptier sea

Where there is fog in the air
And yet I stare
Like a blind man blinking
Without thinking at the sky
Wondering in my own vacuum
About the mute purpose of ‘Why’
With voices at the edge of my vision
And footsteps at the back of my mind
I am dreaming of being asleep
And afraid of losing what I cannot find

Thus, in this black and white world
In this sharp and smooth world
In this loud and quiet world
In this bitter and sweet world
In this dull and fragrant world
I shall remain awake
Till a different tomorrow

Akin

Let me go
And I shall be
Something akin
To a memory
My flesh it burns
My bones they weigh
The nights are tough
And it’s hard these days
For my soul it wanes
Like wax neath flame
And I know the pain
To always feel the same
Thus there is no way
Where I can sow
A seed of pearl
For a sea to grow
So I shall pass
Through the veil of sand
Alone with eternity
Hand in hand…