Immolate

I hold myself
Where it hurts me more;
I prefer the pain of now
To the pain before... 

Diaspora

I have seen the diaspora,
Seen it’s bulbous head set against Saturn’s sky,
Felt it’s pulse,
Dreaming of chalk and charcoal,
Seen it’s veins, deeper nerves,
Coursing through promises
Like an undulating snake.

Men revise,
Their adolescent mournings, teenage dreams made of,
Pink flesh laid to rest,
Against the grain of this world.
A world long forgotten by the habit of forgetting,
The shell of mirror,
Slow as sinking stone,
For lives lived, living,
With unpolluted prose,
Precise, pragmatic.

I have seen the diaspora,
The laughter of death,
That parallel passage,
Guided by fate.

The fault never lied with dark,
To light must fall the blame,
For showing that of all,
None are truly the same.

Half the pleasure,
Lies in having nothing,
And losing it all.

Here in shaped stillness,
I ache for a shattering.

Until I am no more.

Now I am no more.

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…

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

Fairytale

Permit me to say a few,
Words of my choice,
Before the whispers that they all echo,
Replace my own voice.

Ye tremble truly,
Come day, come night,
And lay woe on passing feet,
Who knows you as a leaf to scribble,
And leave in wind to never meet.

In dreams you rule the dawn and dusk,
Alive, you pick no pebble,
You turn to stone when the time is ripe,
Afraid of being unable,
This place, it’s a wilderness,
And the wild are lurking low,
Here all shapes are drawn as one,
Here your foe is friend and friend a foe.

You aim to swim from shore to shore,
And bare the ocean upon thy palm,
Eye tempests for it’s hollowness,
Dive deep in her bloodless calm,
But the ship you choose,
Have no mast, nor sail,
There be no oars to row,
Deep in desert thy anchor sinks,
And the wind; she seldom blow.

The hands you lay,
Against the sky,
With the hope that they will hold,
Will you shatter too, like others before,
When those pillars of pride grow old.
For if so then they will come for you,
Wherever you may roam,
And put thou in a cage, and say,
Now you have a home.

For this fairy world,
This wilderness,
Tries one at every turn,
Here reigns he who knows the truth;
To shine one has to burn.

( To those of us who dream but never do.)

Damask

Her bright cheeks,
Were stately cold,
My hand young,
Hers far too old,
Raven hair mine,
Matched my gown,
A snow pierced mantle,
Covered her crown,
I was night,
She was day at dawn,
I saw all,
She looked blind as fawn,
We held hand,
And we walked our way,
I left for the past,
She came for today.

Magnum

Deep into this journey,
Long after the deep susurration of life,
And the sense of longing,
Of natal desire,
Is dried and shorn as bark and wool,
And bright as the nectar corals,
Burnt with tired timber,
Does the dull truth of things,
Worm in.

Baleful eyes, kissed with Kohl yet
Empty inside,
Burrowed by the undoing of this ethereal Magnum,
This caustic world,
With it’s walls of freedom, aching,
Breaking against blindness,
Seek,
Weep,
And speak, no more than what the silence taught them in form of tears.

A panacea,
To all immutable happenstance. Measured, immeasurable,
Paraded or parodied,
Through one life iterated, in many lives over,
Rags and rags, covering a bareness,
That reflects in no light,
But unfurls in each darkness,
Like moon upon lotus lips,
Of philosophers and Pharaohs,
Of travellers and treasurers,
Of hunters and hoarders.

Unceasingly mitigated,
Yet never really moving,
Until stillness itself stills,
And all forms, wither into one,
And all one’s merge into none.

Panacea,
The answer to no question.

Stardust

Far too long ago,
I stood on a bridge,
In crowded solitude,
Counting stardust; those city lights,
Ignorant that it belonged,
Each for a man and his dream,
Limping endlessly, by alleys,
Of censored minds.

The Colonnades

The wind tastes of stale season,
Filaments of it dry from disuse,
Twist and turn, twist and turn,
Into morsels for those,
Who have nothing less,
And wish nothing more.

Wait inside,
Let the walls fall down,
For wide in the open,
There is no one around,
Only a yawning road leading away,
Into a darkness done in artistic way,
From whence spills laughter; lost voices sorrow,
Wishful pretenders of a belated tommorow.

Wayside rises Colonnades; meaningless, grotesque,
Attempts at perfection,
Pillars of pain,
Heaved by hands, long buried under. Wonder-less, vacant eyes,
Still life, still life,
Breathing in the earth,
The moisture, the metal
The irony, the mirth.

Their raised fists, now barnacled;
In iron forged upon
A green glade, now barren,
Weaned and watered, once;
By the hands long buried,
Under wayside colonnades.

So the ghosts have gathered,
For a better afterlife,
Pale mouths, witnesses, sing
And march in naked apparel,
For a debt long unpaid,
By those visionary,
By the blind men,
Who dreamt of the colonnades.