Tag: thought

Curtain Call

Image by Ahmed Nishant @unsplash

I am,
The face you never see,
On posters and billboards,
Half starved, naked,
Beyond beautiful, to be
Served on a silver platter,
For you to touch, twist and take,
Morsel after morsel.

I am,
The laughter you never hear,
Stirring lives,
Rubbed together in plastic embrace,
Made alive in the objectionable agony
In the chimera of chemicals
Praised at pawn shops
By asthmatic Archdiocese
To fall, to drip,
Lip by lip
Throat by sore throat
Through hollow chests
And wasted waists
Of fools painting tears
Upon torn faces.

I am,
The play you never see,
On streets below your tinted windows,
Staged for the world to witness,
For free, though
None stays to admire,
Too paltry, they say, too plain,
Too painful, coarse and vain,
This drama,
That reminds us of our own lives.

I am,
The speeches you never give,
From proud pedestals, and altars,
Like a speck of spit,
Luring the sea of men,
With words; carved and honed,
Too bright for us,
Of clouded eyes,
To warm these hearths of our own.

I am,
The truth you never know,
From beyond your walls,
And the sanctum of your own asylum
Where you pray
To the earthworms armed with earthquakes
To the dead; dead from too much death
To leper’s liberty
To chronic charity
Never to arise
From the ashes
Or seen through the uncertain curtains
Of your marble eyelashes.

I am,
Everything that makes
Nothing possible.

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

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…