Forgetting Our Anniversary

I try to forget the date but I know

you remember its rain just as coolly
as I do and your eyes are better
at lying than mine will ever be, better
at denying the hour I waited outside
the railway station facing our college gates
with the first rose I had ever purchased,
the easiest ten-rupee investment of my life,
and how you looked at me with guilt and
wicked amusement at making me squirm;
I would not let you hold this rose,
this rose was not yours just yet.

I remember the kilometer we walked
beneath your neighbourhood trees,
and although we spoke of everything
our eyes were filled with confessions
of love made the previous night
but our hands were not brave enough
to find each other's fingers yet.

I remember not wanting to look ahead
but into your eyes, eyes full of secrets
of life and poetry and easy promises,
O, those easy promises!
but I held my neck stiff so you couldn't see
my disbelief at calling you my own,
so you couldn't find the unworthiness
hidden in my nervous smiles;
I wanted to ask: "Are you sure about this?",
"Will you teach me to love you so that
I don't break you when I hold you too tight?",
"Can I teach our children how to measure
our planet with the shadow of a stick?
To ask questions that have no answers?",
but all I asked you that day was,
"So, what do you want to do next?"
and you found us the right kind of silence
around a park we loved to loiter about
and we spoke of everything, everything,
but all I remember is how beautiful you looked
when I forbade you to ever wear make-up,
and how you complained with a pout that
I was exaggerating your beauty, as if
the mirror of my soul was too much,
too soon, the mirror of my soul
is still too much for you, I know.

I remember you predicting rain and
how I half-worshipped you when the sky
surrendered its water and forced us
to run beneath the window-roof of
the old building next to our favourite café,
I remember broken stone against knuckles,
my faded jeans staining with brown
when I dropped on one knee and
tried to ignore the lump in my throat
as I asked you to be mine, formally,
the way they do it in movies I've never watched ,
and your body looked so small, so
precious as you stood overwhelmed,
even though there was no surprise,
both of us knew how the scene ended,
but the rose was now yours, I was yours,
and my fingers suddenly found courage
to find the spaces between yours.

I remember, I remember,  I remember.

Image Source: René Magritte

Death of a Star

In a soft, hidden niche of heavens,
you levitate in infinity’s embrace,
burning with your fiery tunic
with the astral winds on your face!

Within the crimson and the vermillion
lies your throbbing heart, your cyclone,
A sweetheart’s blood rushes in your veins,
molten gold sings in decibels unknown.

How many flights your messengers take!
and how their legs run deep!
Yet with every other journey they embark,
their feet keep losing their keep!

Two immense invisible fountains,
one which consumes another,
that are like arms outstretched,
and any metal core do brother.

Your captivating charm has allured
so many sycophants around your dance,
whirling and dancing along like tops,
pulled by the string of your glance!

They say I am the vestige of a star,
your brother perchance, who still shines,
and I live not for a proton’s worth,
my time is infinitesimal to your primes!

Your reddish flush of weak health,
in the sky of mine scintillates white,
your adamantine dignity in the sphere,
keeps shifting in my black nights.

Slowly your color has deepened
and your heart grown weaker,
but your build has grown larger,
and my eyes are now meeker.

Expanding your inferno to legions undecided,
you explode like imagination may never recite,
into trillions of diamonds and pearls
and a wizened dwarf is your sight.

Every speck of your reach is a grave,
you contain within your ashes lights which last
for times long in my unworthy character,
and those invisible to my unworthy cast.

Tombstones furnaced, that shall roam the cosmos,
forever shall tell of your beauty and law,
It is the way your kind is resurrected,
for mortals of flesh to be in awe.

Image source: http://facundodiaz.deviantart.com/art/Canis-Mayoris-106714461

Spilling Freshwater

I spilled you all over my life,
the way I spill water sometimes,
clumsy hands knocking glasses
or happy feet splashing puddles,
because water always evaporates;
See, caution is just a bother with water --
water always leaves before dawn,
like a welcome guest too polite to
trespass your tolerance for strangeness,
It will be thrown on flowerbeds until
the concrete outside weeps excess
but the sun remembers to carry it all
like a matron chiding spoilt children
back into some nursery above earth.

There is no sun where I spilled you
every time you knocked your head
against mine with liquid smiles,
where your words cleaved broken soil
and disappeared and men dug me up
but could not find you, like a God lost
in prayers to a wind that cannot be
plucked out except for the wetness
in all my corners, my body is a cave
that cannot stop dripping, cold always,
I did not anticipate so much darkness,
did not plan my gambols and gambles
to account for waterproofed nightmares,
so when I call you rain the next time,
my dear, know that I am blaming you
for making me rich enough
to purchase debts I can never repay,
know that I am desperate to
see anything in rainwater but melancholy
and all of you is freshwater
but under your summer lakes, love,
See how I decay!

Image Source: Andrew Salgado

Love Songs

The problem with poetry is that
heartbreak sounds like a love-song
and if I strung it to a harpsichord,
it would be dedicated on radios
to new sweethearts on Valentine's
before the roses could be shared,
as if the cold lacquer of my words
was polishing delicate musicboxes
made of ancient oakwood forests
where the sun never stops shining,
My darkness accosts these hearts
but they hold hands and await dawn,
while I distribute a litany of sunsets
with ink borrowed from long nights.


Image Source: Phoenix Decor

Nostalgia

Words are poor messengers for emotions,
for what I am when I sit on the marble
of my bedroom window in late June,
as rain needles through cool air,
makes dark spots on my trousers;
I am in a lost childhood dream,
the last ten years never happened
but this is just a really long déjà vu,
I simply forgot not to grow up,
to keep building castles in games
and none outside;
I sip tea from a mug with painted roses,
and have just returned four hours late
from a school-library filled with fairy-tales
and new-smelling encyclopedias
with DNA helixes and blue-white comets
and my mother chides my forgetfulness,
How do I lose track of time, she asks,
I fall on the freshly-washed bedsheets
of a bed I no longer fit in and ask myself
How do I lose track of time?

Grey Skies

Grey skies are grand ivory cloths spread
above us like an uncoloured ceiling,
but that is not what makes them beautiful.
It is the light that descends softly
onto mundane, decrepit buildings
and lonely trees, otherwise lit
by a bored Sun or a miserly Moon,
How all colors seem sharper, brand new
in the pearliness of air that remembers
rain, but forgets everything else.
How the birds do not time their songs,
how the winds will beat the leaves
into paranoid dances without notice,
forcing you to anticipate wild rains,
angry, lashing, cold rains,
Everything has a voice with which to cry
in joy or fear or downright despair
and it doesn't take a poet philosopher
to read a world in motion.

Image Source: http://www.simonsgallery.com/001landscapes.php

Rains Remind Me of You

I sometimes imagine you in your room,

focused on something I do not know,
when the rain sounds beyond your window
and you open the curtain slowly and are no longer
in your unlit room -- suddenly the speakers are
mute and the room is a time-machine inside rain,
and you are in my arms on a lost monsoon noon,
You remember my fingers on your waist and
my lips above your left breast, you remember
worrying about my mouth leaving evidence
of our first moments with each other,
you remember how I laughed when
your hair interrupted my kisses on your face,
how I swore to cut them away: a bald sweetheart
would suit my need to kiss all of you better,
and how you stopped and stared into my eyes
as if you saw the fire in them for the first time,
as if you stumbled upon all my love-letters again
and re-read every single word, making sure
that I wasn't mistaking you for someone else
and that this moment with me, within the wild rain
that made all of the world a fuzzy nothing,
all of it truly belonged to you and me;
I imagine you stare into a tree opposite your room,
through the glass shut against the winds,
as the water hammers its leaves into reluctant shapes;
You are not looking at the tree or at the glass,
but my imagination doesn't know whether
those eyes are filled with sadness or the
dampness of old memories that will dry away
with enough daylight.

Image Source: Silence by Mara Light

Funeral Pyre

They will call you a good man,
shed praise on your cooling name
like votive sacrifices upon holy stones,
they will believe their sweet murmurs
as they torch the foot of a dry pyre,
and before the flames have grown
into full-sized masts on dead wood,
all feet will shuffle away, softly
into the pockets of a living night,
eager to save skin from the furnace
on you,
as they did when the hot was
in you.

Image Source: Joshua Robert Cook.

I Shall Always Remain

The silence consumes and I fall,

On my knees, my spine withdrawn,
My eyes lead-plated with broken lights,
And the tears erase the lines I had drawn.

I keep losing the sight of the shore I knew once,
The resonance of the river the only sound,
That keeps me awake when the sun has set,
And my destination is nebulously profound.

I trust those who scintillate like gems,
Those who can pierce my shattered eyes,
Those who preach a purpose multi-folded,
And for that blind belief I forever rise.

A morbid vulture perch’d upon a morbid tree,
Is ever so kind, for he keeps me alive,
His composed gaze awaits my corpse,
And that’s heavenly incentive to strive!

All around me the world is waiting,
Ever so, with a transcendent poise,
Patience is a virtue of Gods and heroes alone,
I am not patient, I am without any choice.

But I am uncomplaining, enduring,
Even in the most chiding thunderclaps,
For the river I left behind still gurgles,
Its crystal song lifts me when I collapse.

The sky was never black, only abstained,
From the spontaneity of Helios’ fine sunshine,
The clouds were never tufts of metallic rage,
They are the same cotton giants redefined.

For every water droplet that adorns sky’s brooch,
Is a drop borrowed from the watery expanse,
Every loan tethered to its unconquered realm,
Is a debt that will flow in smooth romance.

It’s a tale too well engraved within my soul,
And it’s a moral that shall abide its own law,
Many a tempest my bared chest has witnessed,
And every unforgiving frost must thaw.

These times do not melt to caricatures of God,
And they don’t soften to Love’s noble larks,
Integrity alone can salvage me from this tempest,
For the ghouls shall vanish when Time barks!

And I can only wait, for I have Hope,
Hidden in some beautiful leaf of my tome,
The cover dilapidates, the essence grows musty,
And the pain froths into chronicles like foam.

My today leaks into my veins and condenses,
And my eyes slowly dull and grow cold,
I am the very Oracle that writes my Fate,
And to write on, I grow old.

Image Source: Ilir Pojani

Honey in Nightshade

Your kiss was honey deposited
at the back of my throat,
thick like night's wet shade,
Nightshade nectar crossing
our caves into deep streams,
memory's blossom-hold
on my lips, your nape, my eyes
drenched with the sweet patience
that holds sleep hostage,
demands everything in black,
and leaves dry throats behind.

Image Source: Yatuxuan

Shedding Hope

Fear keeps your eyes burning
when other fires have been lost,
but there is justice to be sought
and you will be fool enough
to seek it and wonder why
there is no beauty in sunsets,
The wait for closed ends and
balanced debts will string your eyes
on a horizon that never comes;
Drop your gauntlets, your heart
will play every conch shell
with air eager to swim out --
that skeleton will be music
sweeter than all the flutes
you never expect to hold,
and you will find beauty
just yet.

Image Source: Laura Iverson

Forget-Me-Not

A bad memory will not help
forget the forget-me-nots
planted between the nooks
of her soft fingers,
fingers full of kindness
to make flowers of blues,
yellow crowns of laughter,
You will pretend to find bloom
in free skies and deep ponds
but your feet will be cool
in waters you left behind.

Image Source: http://www.kellyannedesigns.com/77forgetmenot.htm

Chance Kings

You're not a flower that opens with rain,

nor a grand scar tissue over old wounds,

Strength will not populate the empty in you

like angry waves in the holes of a cliff.

Stop growing and start building 

the kingdom you would have call you king,

Its arches will need hard stonemasons,

its wine will drink decades to flavour,

Or do you hope to steal castles from dreams?

Trust to stumble onto the lucky mistakes?

Gamble your name to the winds

and success will taste foreign,

failure all too comfortable,

Stop growing and start building.

Image Source: The Astronomer by Johannes Vermeer

Pain

Pain is your only incentive
to keep broken bones straight,
to watch them heal while walls
invite you to stand atop and
taste the gold of undissolved suns,
nevermind the copse of corpses
at its unbroken unconquered base;
You will bite your wrist when
you hop for copper vessels --
food will cost agony and
you will know economy of breath,
husband the coiling ambition
and remember each mistake
in your flesh -- to err is inhumane;
You will reach dark cities
and captain naïve feet
to stowaway crannies beyond bends
where they may see honey in old skies
on stone floors of a mountain;
You will touch your leg,
remember the price of knowing
the paths you must not tread
and smile at the walls behind you.

Image Source: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/synesthesiaart/interesting/

Pilgrimage

Blind men should not make pilgrimage

to breaking waters on zealous feet,

piety will make them stick elbows in the wet,

their devotion will be answered with grains

rough between teeth, metal on their gums;

they will steal divine wealth in cups,

clutch water like a lover's last kiss,

make trips until all of their soil

is seeped with the fine and the coarse

of bodies they never drank once,

and they shall wait on lean haunches

for bountiful harvests come winter;

The difference between salt and silt

is starvation.

Image Source: Twilight by Diane Leonard

Desert Moon

Do not fuss over onyx moonlight
and carve nights with soft fingers,
You will anoint her with jasmine oils,
but her fealty cannot outpace her heart,
a heart that knows your cold winds,
hands that find the sand in your oasis,
but her tongue will not cluck as she
collects your sweat like shadows
in her purse, smuggled to loud bazaars
where the splintered din cuts into her
like potsherds on colored sandstone,
she will uncork the liquid of your name,
drop her wispy storehouse of black
splash the walls with the quiet of your breath,
until all is taut and fragile and poetry,
she will scream your white songs into the sky,
you will be the desert moon and
wonder if you want to give her the Sun.

Image Source: Allison Haley

Revisiting My Childhood Home

Full homes are messy places,

Licked spoons on starry kitchen altars

To the goddess you call Mother

When she pilfers heavens to fill

A hunger run on butterscotch days,

Occult coins spinning through the

Plastic-bag tumbleweeds blown

By fans that debate air into flowing

Across slant tiles' rearing humps,

Askew on edges which ants negotiate

With patience only summer-days give

Your untidy holiday scrawls across

Dappled living-room sofas and

Rubber buttons of fell controllers

When control was easy pushes

On little boxes for larger boxes,

When your whims were simpler,

Milk-chocolate notions:

Their sugar is far too sweet now.

Someone Somewhere

She is waiting for me without my name,
Combing crowds, each face the same,
Entering laughter without the game
That a full heart is wont to enflame.

Her eyes are the color of dirty snow,
Bold mistakes have knit her slow
Into tatters that urge you to know
The stubborn flint that bids her aglow.

Her mornings are stoked by tea over fire,
In an untidy bedroom that reeks of desire
Left to savage beauty before quagmires
Steal the smiles saved to irk my ire.

We will meet on some unspectacular tile,
She will greet with an impatient smile,
My words will close wings in her aisle,
And wait for her to understand discovery.

A Broken Foot

A broken foot will shoot you
With lightning fractures in bone,
Until your only sky is the blue
Of a dreary room of stone.

The leg that woke to memory
Of its first failing will give
All its debts to a brother free,
Bound to new strength conceive.

The bazaars will craft of you
A doddering six-foot circus tent,
Make of every unblemished hue
The contrast you never intend.

Fair-weather, foul-weather friends
Will make campfire at your bed,
Their laughter shall slyly lend
Wet color to every frayed thread.

Watch hot seconds become lame,
Limp away cold noons on a dry race,
Every deed will strike its name,
And show you its naked face.

Padlocks

These padlocks will tattle on you,
Tell journeymen of an empty home,
They will peep into clumsy windows
And find your workshop in disrepair,
No groaning armours inside to fend them --
"This is not a warrior's home!" --
The wind will spill silver windchimes
All over their beggar ears and force
Hungry eyes onto the gold of her dress,
Framed where you sometimes stare at it
On nights too full of nothing soft,
They will rush without anticipation
And knock over the jade bowl,
Your crypt of unforgetting:
A blue-rose earring, the plastic hairpin,
That raspberry sherbet drop from her purse,
They lie as mummies under jealous vigil,
Scattered and waiting for deliverance
In hands that find in them clairvoyance,
"Yes, I will survive you just yet",
Their boots will creak on floorboards
That lead to deeper places,
Rooms where winds cannot reach
And it still smells of old summers,
Where the wallpaper cannot contain
The aldehydes of new construction,
All you remember of your visits are tears,
Wet tears, always, warm tears,
These men will unhinge croaking doors
But what will they take?
Perhaps the craftpaper stars she taped
On the lilac ceiling with trembling hands
As you sinfully waited for her to fall,
But they will leave the room, it's haunted
By the hiccups of pealing echoes,
They will leave your home red-handed,
Their boots heavier on decaying wood,
You will stare from behind curtains
and wonder, why do you lock doors at all?

Image Source: Niki Feijen

They Do Nothing

Look under garden stones,
Behind black waterfalls,
They will stare into your eyes
Without guilt and purpose,
Covered in blankets of moss,
Biding their time until never,
They do nothing but look into
The notes of Time as if feasting
On events and bloating on turbulence
Find their open mouths perched
On false columns and gray stairwells,
Hear the creak of their joints
When they migrate with dandelion seeds
On allotted landscapes with fairy lights
Because they refuse to wear the iron
That commits lesser men to the ground,
They cannot digest the sickly mortar
That binds fortresses of ambition
And makes gutters of thick arteries,
No, they are much too divine, you see,
Their eyes are lanterns that throw
Moonlight on every forest floor,
Do not confuse the reflections
Of knotted trunks and bulbous roots
With melancholy,
You will sully the dregs that lovers wear
When tempests in small cups were spent,
Throw away the longing in their empty hands,
Lest you make of privation a charade
Too easily worn by gaunt faces,
Old faces, worn faces,
Calcified, porous, stone faces,
These are men you will walk on
Long before their husks are cast,
And they will not deign to be human enough
To cry protest.

Image Source: Agnes Cecile

God

This mortal man will not accept Godhood,
Throw totems and coins on his grave,
Until you make of his bones a temple,
But he will not rise into answered prayers,
And that was never the point anyway,
His burdens were never lowered onto riverbanks,
Nor did he slake summers with rain,
His marble was veined with misery
But you will find thread in these ruins,
Your children will knit His name
With the same patience that makes mediocrity
Raw stone against glacial winds,
His tears will be agony he chose to feed
The unbroken earth when he could have
Spilled blood and become champion,
Ascend into songs for bonfire nights,
But your children will memorize the hymn
Of his unbeaten beating heart,
Plant trees on deep soil,
Swallow winters with holy duty,
To find their quiet in his iced over bells,
They will know peace under their eyes,
Breathe pain in plain sacrifice,
And you will etch His name on skies,
But he will not accept Godhood.

Image Source: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/blind-faith-alfredo-coelho.html

Stolen Summers

Do your hands still wear
The hot of my neck
The prints of my fingers
Deep in your loamy flesh
Long left to dry
To find in my lips
Silky showers that
Scent you fertile
Make of your silences
A long-released hush
Throw your fingers into
The summers I stole from you.

Image Source: http://martanael.deviantart.com/art/Be-my-Valentine-284680869

Replacing Sunshine

She eclipsed the Sun with a coin
Laughed like an unaltared Goddess,
Her eyes busy as I purloined
The rays that stole through her dress.

I promised to carry the sunlight
In my throat and sing with the roar
Of bonfires she traced into my plight
When silence was my only shore.

Without her fingers the Sun is not --
An eclipse that lives into my wait,
Into days where the coal will rot
Prayers that seek to compensate.

I will find the coins that knew her hand,
Lick their copper until I taste the rain
That stole into her sacred land
And make myself whole again.

Regret

The taste of regret

is not bitter,
It will not slake
your throat with needles
when you see flagons
of sunshine to warm
a home not quite made.
No.
Regret will slip into color:
Its orange will pin you
to the sky
for the winds to whisper
the cloying promises
you forgot to make.
You will taste them,
The sugar in those ceremonies
will parch your tongue
until all you search
in dreamy rainfalls
is the tastelessness
of water.


Image Source: http://www.working-beautifully.co.uk/gallery/paintings/players-regret-bullseye-snooker-room-digital-painting