Some Lotus Are All Roses

I have spent half my life
Looking how I was wanted to be seen
Powdered to the tip of my nose
Accurately thin
With anklets on my feet
That laughed alone in night
And a locket round my neck
Buried out of sight
I had flowers on my frocks
When I was a lotus bud soft pink
And roses in my hair locks
When I was allowed to think
As if my beauty was just a face
Without a wish or voice
As if being born the way I was
Had something to do with choice
If only I could have told them then
The thoughts I had in my mind
Of my mantelpiece existence
Of being beautiful but kept blind
Alone as my own mirror
Echoing solitude
Days spent dressed for the world to wonder
And nights being ashamed to be nude

In The Heart Of What We Know

The Sea reminds me
Of falling in love
With a shadow
Of a Dove
Who, having slept in flight
At the stroke of midnight
Awoke falling for
Dewdrops of sunlight

But the Sea is sadness
And her roots are all songs
Left by sailors
Too eager to sail
Alone into oblivion
In a hope to live a tale
Written by some abandoned watchtower
Laughing beside the dock

And the Dove, crystalline in her virgin whiteness
Covets the Shore;
With his silence a song
Played by the sand
Unaware that only the lost
Will be found
In the seed of his sound

Thus they remain knitted
The Dove, Sea and Shore
In search of another
Forevermore
So blind in their yearning
Of the love they cannot find
That none waits to see
The one left behind

Mosaics

Image by Drew Collins @unsplash

I wish to speak with myself
The conversation
Neither a monologue nor a soliloquy
But I am afraid I would not allow
My own confessions
This heart knows far too much
Of envy and hate
And much too less
Of chance and fate; those dark mistresses
Pulling and pushing
The tide of each rebirth
Should I excuse myself within reason then
And let the age that passes through each of us
Sunder me to atoms
Annihilating; once and for all
Each kingly cause
And gangrene dream
Festering upon the thin skin of mind;
For the soul in the end is nothing more
Than a shadow aware of it’s own existence.
Or should I in opus thoughts claim
The Midas Touch
And let the pleasure and pain
Every loss and gain, ravage me alive
Into my own version of heaven and hell
Beyond resistance and repercussions
Or time and it’s tale
And dare to be free
For once all of me?
Alas the soul cannot know
Of which the mind did not sow
Thus I remain here
Within this blindness which seek
The mirror left behind;
And await my reflection to speak.

The Men Behind Monuments

Image by Jiyad Nassar @unsplash

In this sudden stillness
A final silence grows
From beneath the dead branches
Enveloping ants and Angels alike

The dry mist of purpose
That once haunted men
Now haunts their monuments
The mindless mortar
Made and remade
For each thought
And every contour
Which seeks in itself
The forever form
That everlasting aspiration
Of becoming a being

But the Promethean promises
Are but promises
Just as the silhouette stems from the shape
So does the shape is rooted in the silhouette
Like a circle trapped
Within its own circumference
Sans a seen beginning
Sans any unseen end

There is a witness
For every arrival
Till no one arrives anymore
And then the fishes are left alone in the desert
To drown in the mirage of memories
The breathing carcass
Reminiscent of living
In an abandoned womb
Never to awake
Never to walk
Like ages unspent
Upon the faces of the rock

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

Incandescent

I was born out of the blue
Like a star without a face
And shall one day be falling too
As dust without a trace
In hope that when I am gone
Those very few whom I knew
Kept something of the light
With which their wish came true…

Hubris

I am just another
Diluted human being
Strained with whetstone thoughts
And rhinestone dream
Tracing the echo of my footsteps
In silent halls
Sans any walls
Was I born to burn
And cling to life
Like cigarette ash
Dying and dying
One breath at a time?
I can hear the puppets talk
At night
Their voice
Made of wood and string
Mirrors of what the violin sing
My tragedy and ivory
A comedy and ebony
My face is falling apart
Like wallpaper
And what’s beneath is no longer me
It’s a different shade
This bruise beneath the bandage
I am alone
And awake
And I know
That I ache
Somewhere deep inside
Where those things hide
Which I keep
So not to weep
At every pain that passes
Like needle through my arm
For I am just another
Diluted human being
Strained with whetstone thoughts
And rhinestone dream

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…