Should I fade tonight
Into the cimmerian streets
Amidst the broken ballerinas
Tiptoeing upon the glass?
No, I am no dancer
Nor keeper of songs
But a faded adjective
Banal and long
Lost in the premise
Between the cause and the comma,
Dressed as a chatelaine
For the world and its drama
Never to be forgotten
Forever in this game
Of the way the words changes
And yet the meaning remains same.
No man is unknown or all alone
In this age of pixelated passions;
We carry in our backpack
The same brand of anarchy, where
Our promises are echoes of the promises of past
Whilst the question is one: Why the answers never last
But wither away, dust, under each misled gaze
The One way remembered, a hundred different ways
Till after a while
It all returns to this:
Forked roads, Old home, second chances and first kiss
I stare at the sun
And yet think of the shadow
Sharing my feet;
A pale performer, all fading in fire,
The last friend to answer
And first foe to greet
When the sunflowers gather
Around my grave
Let the roots run deep
If only to save
Those eyes of mine; far from free,
Closed forever
Yet willing to see.
Seek no more houses O Child
All walls are things of sorrow
Let us be orphans
A homeless light;
Neither a gift nor a cause to borrow
But a fire that awakes
On unmoored ships in the middle of the sea
And a dappled world asleep neath
Moonlight through canopy
They say to make a man;
Break him first
And only then the broken pieces
Ever becomes poetry
Alas no poet worth his salt
Has ever felt sorrow
For his feelings
Are bound to words
Which he passes down the morrow
So others could see it too
Like dry puddles of rains long past;
The shape; a shadow faded
Into brittle skin
And wounded wind
And a disguise that weighs too vast
There is no shame in being silent
As the world marches on;
To step aside the rails
And lay down in the fields
Be buried in sands of wheat
Or an ocean of daffodils
Or catch clouds in their azure kingdom
And lift wind with lifeless arms
Touch sky with tender lips
And grow stars in burnt down farms;
But nothing will, come of this quite,
No wrong that remains, shall turn right
Alone, here, in chambers
The ashes would glow
Broken pieces in an unbroken flow.
To know that a forever
Exists before me too
And to believe that a forever
Shall come after me anew
Is perhaps a gift I gave myself
Sans writing my name
( Or else I would not so wonder
At the moment of this surrender)
That my past, and what passes is the same.
Why they lament
In the cemetery;
Who have buried
Bodies in their backyard?
O how the mortal mind mock
It’s own sense of symmetry.
Where in this world
Of baffled faces; pouring oil in eyes to alight a change
Must I a man of hollow cast
Should await;
To remain unchanged
For unlike Othello I listen
To old monks murmuring beyond the riverbank
Their hands joined to a common flame
And blind eyes closed to light
So all could see the same
But my hands are not stained with grease
Nor my feet grown in the shape of keys
For doors yonder where the sunlight’s thick
And a greener pasture the old monks seek
I am here amidst the fallen hands
In its wilderness once termed divine
What thought a meager man could grate
That an oracle wouldn’t deem a sign
Of a tragedy of our own device
Build by fallen hands, without a voice
To be interred cold beneath a veil
This seminal thought, that none may feel
Where in this world
Of baffled faces; pouring oil in eyes to alight a change
Must I a man of hollow cast
Should await;
To remain unchanged
My old hands were like butterfly
Once beautiful and delicate
A million grains of imprisoned skies as
One thousand thoughts; intricate,
But what now they remember
Is only the crushing weight,
Of cold steel left to rust
And rough edges of granite slate
Till one day they tremble
Like withered wings to feel no pain
And fall asleep sans memory
In a cocoon, to be a moth again
THE HUMAN ANVIL 