Tag: Poems

All poems

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.

Maiden

Camouflaged in the night
Like outline of shredded trees
I walked beyond the cliff with caterpillar footsteps
Where Four Horses of Wind
Stood grazing in the grove
While the maiden with reins
Having fallen in love
With my absence, now looking up
Laughed; the sound like hooves running in her throat,
So I sat there in the center of the dying daffodils,
On the eve; as rootless and trodden as any
And listened to what the world has to say
But sadly there were far too many;
People talking about themselves, like children running circles around pillars asking: Why do silent halls echo? And closed eyes cannot see?
As if I am a mirror to be mastered by their practiced soliloquy:
No more, no more, my hollow mind; no more,
For I weep for the thistle town burning by the shore
Black windows watching the white horizon
Coming closer for an embrace
When the sun is cold in the night
While the sea shapes the souls of sand
The maiden sits beside me
And whisper
That the stars are dust from her hand
O I see now, I see
Myself on a mountain lying
Alone upon the apogee
To fall asleep with the sky
As a pillow beneath my neck
And the ocean extending her arms
For me to quietly take
Before I go, before I am gone
With the maiden of the night
Before I know that the colours of rainbow
Are seven sins of white…

Her Other Half

We talk like strangers
Unwilling to laugh
Unable to cry
Like two shells remembering
The sound of a sea
Buried deep
Somewhere
In fissures of our bone…
Yours too my love?
Or of mine alone?

I was wrong to dream, wasn’t I?
Wrong to feel
Wrong to hope
A fool who thought her happiness starts
At the end of his joke
O Pagliacci, Pagliacci
Thou story of my life
Why didn’t you laugh and say:
It’s the heart which pierced the knife

Bye now, it’s late
And I have old wounds to tear
Like promises to make love
Or I wish you were here
The night is still young
Do not waste it on me
You had my life once
But you never stopped to see

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…

In The Heart Of What We Know

The Sea reminds me
Of falling in love
With a shadow
Of a Dove
Who, having slept in flight
At the stroke of midnight
Awoke falling for
Dewdrops of sunlight

But the Sea is sadness
And her roots are all songs
Left by sailors
Too eager to sail
Alone into oblivion
In a hope to live a tale
Written by some abandoned watchtower
Laughing beside the dock

And the Dove, crystalline in her virgin whiteness
Covets the Shore;
With his silence a song
Played by the sand
Unaware that only the lost
Will be found
In the seed of his sound

Thus they remain knitted
The Dove, Sea and Shore
In search of another
Forevermore
So blind in their yearning
Of the love they cannot find
That none waits to see
The one left behind

The Men Behind Monuments

Image by Jiyad Nassar @unsplash


In this sudden stillness
A final silence grows
From beneath the dead branches
Enveloping ants and Angels alike

The dry mist of purpose
That once haunted men
Now haunts their monuments
The mindless mortar
Made and remade
For each thought
And every contour
Which seeks in itself
The forever form
That everlasting aspiration
Of becoming a being

But the Promethean promises
Are but promises
Just as the silhouette stems from the shape
So does the shape is rooted in the silhouette
Like a circle trapped
Within its own circumference
Sans a seen beginning
Sans any unseen end

There is a witness
For every arrival
Till no one arrives anymore
And then the fishes are left alone in the desert
To drown in the mirage of memories
The breathing carcass
Reminiscent of living
In an abandoned womb
Never to awake
Never to walk
Like ages unspent
Upon the faces of the rock