Pigments of Pain

I listen to the clatter
Rolling coins
Gasping through cracks
Of fractured philosophy
In this modern world writ with
Make believe merchandise
Life lived through litmus paper
Chemical imbalance
Anarchy in equation
Feather dust in vacuum weighing same as the sun
Candles upon cake, wax trees,
Forest of flames, ages incinerate:
Gullible times, marzipan issues souring into
Phrases describing sunlight through trees unlike sunlight through trees
Anything but the obvious, the immutable
Sieved eyes and beetle brain
Taking over photosynthesis
Bottled chimera, disco dreams
Autumn in lungs
Coughing art; blood on canvas, dotted design
Cerise constellation simplified by
Binary prophets
Dripping tap, blocked sink, dim streetlight, ivy on the roof, dust on the doormat, average grades, loose socks, society on chemo, Syrian seizures, Africa and Ebola, avalanche on Everest,
Anthill, beehive, New York, Mumbai
Sunrise at six, Sunset at seven
Coconuts, candles and carpets for heaven
Rubber tires on tarmac
Plastic skin
LED hearts
Tears on screen
Protein pronouns, varicose verbs
Multinational menagerie of Lego world
Digitally distilled with castrated cause
Packeted products: for all flaws
Barcoded breaths
Beginners beware
This land of the dead is alive on prayer.

Flowers Don’t Sing

I know you don’t have to listen
To all that I have to say
And to be true I am just talking
To myself everyday
It’s sad, I know:
To see myself smile
And even the reflection
To return it
Only once in a while…

Nescience

I wait at the newspaper stand
Reading, the morning is grey
Ash tinted
Like an old man’s asthma

Buds of people are sprouting
From windows and eggshell alleyways
Dressed in yesterday’s dreams
And tommorow’s promises
Faces creased, bespectacled
With white hairs a halo
From the century long sunlight
Age ever ached to swallow

A ballad pours from the the barbershop
The old stereo is crooning about
Footsteps falling on azure fields
And carts on country roads
I can smell the aftershave
At once bitter and sweet
The razor once again vacant
Without the borrowed heartbeat

There is a fallacy here
Between the words and vision
I read and see
The stories seem vibrant but life colour-free
Perhaps it is the weight of being
That makes it so
For all of us do wither
But only some of us grow

The children have gathered on the footpath
A bell in some temple tolls
The priests are praying for bliss
And in laughter a football rolls
I watch, I watch
The world divided in unison
Each hour be day or night
Being a part of every season

So I pay my fair share
It’s time for me to leave
And be one amongst the masses
Who in eternity believe
Of everyday man and their everyday deeds
In the cycle of fruit from the flower and flower from the seeds
If only one would question; Does the roots if ever know?
Of the world that blooms outside from their breaths buried below

The Man in the Book

Sebastián León Prado @Unsplash

Some day I want to be
The man in the book
Who knew what he wanted
And loved what he took
With no one to question
And no answer to give
With no thoughts on living
And only to live
Some day I want to be
The man in the book

The Shadow Of Absent Things

I can smell the brown sugar
Melting in my tea pot
And I am rooted
Between two oak trees
Made immovable
By the stone lips oaring my depths
Reaching for the sky silhouetted against me
But the ache of it does not feel like tooth decay
Nor the pleasure makes me shiver and rain
Glass beads and spirit of grain
Into the hands of praying men

I can feel my skin
Breathing under your fingernails
Like snail on a hot tar road
While your voice in my ear
Whisper garbage
Something about me, my hair,
My face and the rest
Of me but not about
As if your eyes are nothing but mirror
Or old shoes spit polished this morning
And my heart wanders like flies on foodstuffs
Unable to digest
The truth of you touching me
In and beyond
Anymore

Steel on the tip of my tongue
Marble on the base of my back
I am pierced and pinned to the pedestal
A naked butterfly
At once transparent and tarnished
Bruised, battered and bludgeoned into being;
Beautiful sans beauty

So I stare like a light bulb numb in its holder:
The roof is blank
A grey slate
False sky
Absent mind
White chessboard
And the omniscient blind

Metamorphosis

Image by Josh Hild @ unsplash

If the music does not leave your lips,
And the poems freeze on your fingertips,
Know; the silence you have mocked for long,
To you now it too belongs

Reflections

All the letters I wrote
Came back to me
They were poems I had written
And addressed to poetry

The Serenade Surrendered

I know what it means to be
A man without a memory
What I see: I see
What I feel: I feel
In the moment of me
I keep a forever concealed

The Soft World Shenanigans

Dry roads humping shredded towns
Ghostlicked with cactus eyes quietly watching
Deeper dreams
For answers within answers
For silence within screams
I see, I see
Footsteps upon gravel
And red lips on ice
Dissolve
In purple chimney smoke,
Behind the farts of dust- rimmed truck,
Where the grey haired goats grazing in saltpits wonder
Why the fairies don’t give a fuck
Clippety clop, clippety clop
Horse hooves on silent sand
Burnt toast, stale butter, wooden knife in my hand
I see, I see
Tears and bright ties
Choking velvet throats
Those colouring the white lies
Like spit on anchored boats
Bell jars in cotton
Woodpecker in denim
Breathing tinfoil fantasies
Of midnight mind raining, whispers upon paper:
‘Wheatfields underwater
Ether in eclair
Cornflakes made of daylight
And tulips in dark hair’
I see, I see
Last thoughts of dying beasts
Merge with me
So that I roar and I bleat
Being eaten as I eat
My own war-torn monkhood
My altarboy retreat
So I see, So I see
Dry roads humping shredded towns
Ghostlicked with cactus eyes quietly watching
Deeper dreams
For answers within answers
For silence within screams

The Onus of an Asylum

When they with no fingers
Point at the blind
For not calling out the deaf
Falling behind
The mute they shall say
That this is the way:
We paralysed people
Walk everyday