Tag: age

Nothing to Dream

Image by Atlas Green @unsplash

If I could be free
From the echoes of other people
And be something more than
A traffic light thought
Winking in the dim halls of their tragic mind
I would prefer being a butterfly
Frozen in ice
That way
My beauty though long lost; euthanised,
Will live still
In regret
That beautiful cancer
Common to all men
Drooling on sad lips of time
Like honey gone bad;
A tasteless parable for
Once a good man now gone mad
From the cold touch of metal people that I meet
With their eyes upon my river back, my other face and feet
With yellow leaves gathering
In a dry rage to drown
My steps towards the hilltop
Within the noise of a dead town
Asking me to surrender
Asking me to still
For being born amidst wrong angels
To die right under heel

On nights like paraffin
When shadows too burn
I curl into concrete
And cease to ache
To be deeply awake
Of all the things I am not
As sought by those carvers
Shaping my form into chess pieces,
Dull black and off white;
A crooked king, a broken queen and two quixotic knights
To be kept alive and conquered
Or cast into the unheard
Age of borrowed sentiment
A proud brick in a ruinous monument
Should I now pray
To whetstones
Wet with sweat wounds of men
Pierced alive
With the worms of their own wisdom
Or within the confines of my
Diluted divinity
Fall prey
To the sinful delight
Of being right
And fall asleep
With this winter as witness
And awake when the dying dream
Is truly dead
And the sound of turning wheels
No longer praise
Destinations remembered along forgotten ways…

Seismic Soul

To speak
Without being heard
With words like wind
Asleep in windchimes,
To be far away, breathing in a distant past dyed sepia and smelling of crushed leaves:
The aroma of time dried through the ages,
To taste a fruit away from the tongue
And let it linger in a seedless ecstasy
On each pair of lips
In every burnished breath between the lungs
To weave sunlight
In the skin of dewdrops
And bare a rainbow upon the floor
Brought home to a full circle
To smile at the madness of it all
And mean it in the mirror of mind
Grassroots enveloping
Memories I cannot find
Now leads me to believe
That life with all its thorns and petals
Is more in the act of living
Than waiting for it to settle

The Lost Sense of Bewilderment

Jayson Hinrichsen @ unsplash

I wonder if life would have been the same
If I had but a different name
As common as the monsoon rain
Somewhere between John and Jane

I wonder who would have called me close
Gifted whiskey or a blood red rose
Shared laughter with a list of woes
And left me where the west wind blows

I wonder if I would have been happy more
Being a seashell on a shallow shore
Drunk with madness like never before
Following the echo of my silent roar

I wonder if I would have lived long
Sang a chorus in some choir song
Before in life it all went wrong
For now I am but not where I belong…

Streetside Socrates

Flesh and light
Bone and stone
Are same, similar; a synonym
Of everything

I gazed into the night
Fragmented by the city lights
Knifing the dreams dead in their tracks

Scalped thoughts
Hanging from the cumerbund
Of the comedian
Laugh with the wind

There is no framework for fame
Nietzsche is not a name
And all that I know of shame
Came from the fingers that blame;
Et tu?
Fuck you
Bad words don’t exist
At all
For thoughts know not their origin
But only the sin
Of being
The way they are

Broken mirrors
Cannot mend the man
And broken man
Never has a mirror

Everything is going to disappear soon
And the leftover void shall know
There is nothing known as nothingness
For even in silence the silence shall grow

Last of the Living

@Unsplash Hoach Le Dinh


I can hear the roots tear
Across the breast of resting soil
Like blind fingers, stretching the
Depths of darkness,
Those long forgotten by time
For the hours; they fly only above the ground
The black womb is all silence
And frozen thoughts:
Except those murmurs of memories
Left by faded footsteps
And shadows parched under the sun
Of people who could not turn, away.
I hear them too, their thoughts,
In the leaves yawning with the wind
And fruits falling with the same
It’s bittersweet syrup; tears and sweat of toil gone unremembered
A destiny dismembered
Like roots they yearn no reason
Nor do they desire
The crystal sunlight reserved for carving men
All that is needed for the flower to bloom
And the fruit to bubble without bursting
Is this truth soaked with pain
That they stand alive and upright
On the shoulders of hanging men

Ascendance

And slowly we all
Shall fall asleep
And know no more of each other
Or of those who knows us no more

But the stone shall remain stone
The sea shall remain sea
You shall remain you
And I shall remain me

Yet we, the us, that immutable thereof
Of shared spaces
Of pendulum breaths
Of eclectic existence
Will change
Into dust
Into wind
Into silence
And rescind
Motion by motion
Memory by memory
Till all that is left
Is only the sense of leaving

Of Bones Beneath the Branches

There were cypress beyond the city wall
With cones like eyes upon them
And I tended each for long until I felt
They saw far too much of me
And showed far too little of themself
(Those leaves with their whispers and those roots with their secrets)
So I did not water come the summer, I did not water come the winter;
And the leaves, they yellowed and fell,
And frost took the roots
Slipping needles of ice into their breaths
Till decades were laid silent
Like sand beneath the ocean.
I walk beyond the wall now and then
Dressed in nothing but the evening
And stand under the cypress
And watch the antler twigs sway
Hiding nothing now but melancholy motion
The sense of sleep
And I wonder at the difference, if any, between our shared nakedness