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