Loving Truth

There once was a man who loved the Truth,
He had gold-nibbed pens in pearly inkwells
and a sky-blue collection of recycled paper
upon which every night he would labour
to spill his research of the day's working
so that tomorrow made more sense than today.
One day, he swung his inventory on a shoulder
and set out to survey where the day pooled,
because the jagged shorelines held old names,
and the streetside music was inherited secrets,
These were names and secrets he needed to write down,
you could see him sitting against a dropping sun,
after a long day of hot bazaars and cold companies
and wonder at the arcana inside harbor air,
Every morning he would clean two squares of cloth,
write the Truth on its uneven fabric,
and paste them over his eyes as holy ritual
Thus he wandered the world with blind justice in day;
At night he would wax into his memoir
that the world was strung of a single thread
and that there is beauty to be found in its discovery.

Loud Music

There are times when I turn up the music
loud enough to not hear myself think,
The bed is filled with knots of cotton
and they push against my aching back
like guns through faded bedsheets
but I cannot get myself to buy a new one,
I cannot get myself to leave this room,
to force the slow career of my thoughts
into changing its golem-face that smiles,
sad grimaces of my forgetful making,
I have created monsters and skeletons
and they sleep on my bedroom floor,
ambush my dreams before they find hope,
My midnights are an album of memories
that make no sense when opened
but haunt the mind long after closing,
I forget how to find blankness again
and wear faces that I will leave in a box
when morning comes, it always comes,
although I haven't seen it in weeks,
Mornings are too full of opportunity,
they light my door and mock my inertia,
throw challenges on eyelids as if to say,
"These are not smoke and mirrors,
All of you is broken; your loneliness is."
I pretend I do not know what peace looks like,
that happy is a puzzle I am still solving,
my pieces are missing and I am not whole,
all of me is not a pile of cardboard pieces
I hid under my blanket ages ago.

I do not leave my room but listen to music,
loud enough to fill the empty in me,
until I forget the sound of my name,
I am not,
I am not.

"Yes, you are."

Image Source: htt548172585866315768/ps://www.pinterest.com/pin/

Broken People

It is effort, I know,

But cast honest eyes around
And you will find broken people everywhere.
These are sunflowers that turned too much and broke;
They carry their own Suns now.
They carry a jar of honey with them
Because wounds and infections are too common,
And sugar is useless.
Their hands and brows are knit
with lines they did not have when they wrote their first love-letters;
The graffiti on their skin
Cannot be contracted into creation.
Look away, then,
They are too much effort, I know,
Their covers are leather you cannot afford,
And their stories will have you looking for references you clearly don't have.
Walk up to them and become friends,
But they are not pure scripture,
Do not expect your deeds to sit alongside theirs
You will breathe their air and your body will be revolution,
Their colours will find friends in your shadows
And paint murals inside your chest,
Until you cannot piece apart their thunder from the quiet of your flesh.
Taste their unbecoming and
You will yearn to shatter into nightmares
That you may become the master of your dreams.


Image Source: http://alicexz.deviantart.com/art/Airplanes-200997113

What I Learnt Outside School

Value Education lectures never taught me
what to do when mirrors become horror stories,
there is blood in my teeth sometimes,
Was I supposed to check into hotels 
and wait for the piano music to stop
every time my house was haunted with music-boxes?
I try to hum in time with the plinks and plonks,
I carry the haunting with me like a bell,
Do not wonder why I am always on my toes,
I step around creases with practiced skill,
I fall a little less often these days,
Sometimes I wonder if that is fear or courage.
I know the number of steps to my bottle of antiseptic,
but forget where I kept the bag of balloons,
I run longer distances without colours,
I collect scars and scabs like spiky seeds,
and it seems a good enough currency.
Sometimes I come across chessboards in the forest
and it took my years before I could look past
the first row of chequered graves,
I win more times than not these days
and cry more promptly every time I lose a pawn.
There was a time when my home would walk away
and I would wait until morning swept under my garden-stones,
I am used to chasing my chimney-smoke these days,
but running is no less painful on tired soles.
I still remember the first time I became religious,
I left my hopes outside the temple-gates
as if only proper beggarhood deserved faith,
my emptiness was the first and last offering,
I will never be able to pray again
and I am no lesser for it.
I am less than the dreams of a future I made
on the riverside of a lonely glade,
I roam bazaars and barter help like coins,
my words are worn with the employ of several people,
this is my wealth and it has the warmth of many hands,
This is my wealth, it multiplies,
and my days are not without strife,
but my mirrors are history books now
and all the blood is fact and preparation.

Image Sources: http://cyanparade.tumblr.com, http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Scrambled-Portrait/308858/199347/view/

Fake It Till You Make It

I practice happiness like piano music,
it plays like a song I have heard too many times --
although these notes make no sense to me.
Apparently, hi-fis do not conduct joy through stretched arms like telegraph poles,
and the only contagious aspect of laughter is the giggles,
it is the opium I carry in folded napkins,
I wear experiments like a second skin,
my face is a psychology textbook filled with problems
raised to the nth degree of complexity
because synthesis of thesis and antithesis was supposed to be catharsis,
my native skin is caked with the lies I tell myself,
Ignore the cracks my smile makes on my lips,
my charades are not for you, believe me,
I am just trying to be honest to myself.
They tell me to fake it till I make it
as if the space between my ribs is waiting for instructions,
No, I am not broken,
but that is because I was broken long enough
to know how to make sunshine into butterscotch-tape,
I will never break again
but, you see, I am always breaking,
You take my palms and wonder at the sweetness in them,
you know nothing of the flowers I clutch onto when it rains outside,
My garden is a bed of trauma victims waiting to happen,
it turns out that anointing dead stones will not breathe life into them,
but I will keep stenciling my dark against walls
until my graffiti is everything bright,
There are winds in my bedroom I did not breathe,
paper-planes on my window-sill I have never flown,
See, emptiness taught me to search for beauty,
search for rosebuds over strange teeth,
find the lemongrass in unwashed laundry,
walk, no, run towards the churchyard balloons,
and I am convinced I have all that I need,
I need to find myself somewhere in my arts,
I am supposed to fake it till I make it,
Fake it till I make it,
Fake it till I make it,
There are holes you cannot fill with illusions,
It is not faith that moves me to paint lies anymore,
it is the weight of not having done anything,
I want to tell myself I did everything I could,
I cannot shoulder the weight of regrets,
my shoulders are busy with identities I carry,
bandages around my face as if I were waking from plastic surgery,
I have no face anymore,
this is as real as it gets,
I have become everything I was supposed to be,
I throw myself at blank pages and
push my ennui into ivory and silk
as if metaphors were what I needed all along,
I grow beautiful with every verse I become,
my hands are works of art that cannot make anything useful,
I do, however, make fires under rain without thinking,
Wet wood isn't supposed to burn but it does if you try hard enough,
all of me is smoke and mirrors,
I am dragging shadows inside the Sun --
my trips are supposed to kill them
but they come back stronger, sharper,
I am the silver cloud with a black lining,
I am dreams waiting to disperse,
I will never break again
but I am always breaking,
and sometimes I wonder which is worse.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Rains Are Philosophy, Not Poetry

Rains are philosophy, not poetry,
It is a mistake easy enough to make
but the clouds are questions of identity,
The waterdrops begin to end with Sun
and break into beginnings with rain,
Tell me, then, which drop came to which shore?
How many Ships have been sundered
and rebuilt with new names on dry pages?

The mist begins where the ground smells sweet,
but where does the rain begin?
Is there a map for the skies with lightning bolts
to mark the borders of that country?
Or is the whole of world a cloud of water
that wanders and showers without knowing?

When the gutters swell and dogs lap at them,
do the grey skies grow gold and divine?
What colour is cast when the flood snuffs out
seeds laid with bony, then living, hands?
What court will condemn the procession?
Are moral ambiguities "Acts of Nature"?
Am I not an Act of Nature too?
Watch me tear hearts and their miseries,
my crying will be less ostentatious, I promise.

Is man greater than rain for watermills
or are the waters why man is greater?
Do rains, thereby, achieve greatness supreme?
Do dams owe their existence to tempers
of mothers that seek their children
from rills and streams and brooks,
Does man therefore achieve fatherhood?
What does it mean to conceive?
Are all effects proof of cause?

When you show rainbows to your children,
are you pointing at things that cannot be?
They will reach the promised Pot of Gold
and call you a liar that sows dreams,
and you will laugh and tell them of light
that breaks within the eye only on days
when the Sun is against invisible water,
but it is all within the eye of the beholder
and they will ask you if that is cheating,
Do you tell them beauty outside truth exists?
Is all of life a canvas for poets to paint upon?
Or will you tell them that their heartbeats lie,
all of the thunder and downpour is suspect
to the content of your fantasies?
Does truth exclude fantasy at all?
Do you exist?

Image Source: Seascape Study with Rain Cloud by John Constable

I Was A Dream

I held you in my arms because I was your dream,
your waking would be my unbecoming --
the weight of your knuckles tethered me,
my laughter was the hibiscus in your hair,
and I waited for you to tie me in knots beneath.
The winds threatened to pull me away
every time your fingers left mine,
Do you remember my eyes?
You saw the fear in them and called it love,
Did you know your softness kept me solid?
That I carried your jokes in a diary as if
forgetting your spirits would erase me,
I wonder if you could have carried peace
if you saw me fade inbetween the space
where sleep meets reality and unravels,
I am unravelled, untethered today,
people hear me croon to myself
and wonder if I dream of you.

Image Source: Spooning Couples in Love by Carolyn Weltman

Firestone

I remember the first time I wrote you a poem,

You thanked me as if I had given you a bouquet
to be placed by your bedside for two days
until it wasn't impolite to throw it away.

I remember being hurt as an artist and not a lover,
because your eyes held proof of our love on days
when my words weren't tender enough
to coax you out of your hiding places.

I remember your messenger-pigeons
and everything you said touched me without warmth,
I wondered whether your heart held flame
that lost itself on the long way to your lips.

I remember showing you all I never became,
I was the foolish bird that plucked stars
and while I lamented not having the Sun,
you taught me to search in darkness.

I remember telling myself with pride,
"This woman is fire that survives storms,
I must carry her like a Moon,
and if the skies refuse to give her room,
there is space enough in my chest."

I remember how I fell in love with you --
it was when I stopped writing couplets
of a fair maiden who stole my heart,
See, you are sorrow that teaches strength,
you are the stone that ignites hearts
until they stop sighing for home,
they lick the sky with fondness
enough to burn all the cold in their blood.

I fell in love with a firestone.
Gods above, I fell in love with a firestone!
and there is nothing left to burn,
I am an effigy that roams the world
with phoenix songs of long lost sparks,
I die, I live, I die.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Cold Amidst Light

Your silences ask "Why do you bother?",
We talk about the fire in black skies
that steal your peace on open eyes,
I weave long lost memories in jokes,
open bottled laughter, vintage and musty,
and invite you to break bread with me,
I tell you how silly your misery is,
that problems are made of sterner stuff,
I drown your excuses in my darkness,
show them my demons, let you touch them
until all my sharp edges prickle you again,
your fingers are blushing with my living,
Do you remember descending into me,
your softness brushing all my dead,
all my forgetting, all my unforgetting?
You were the promise of beauty
that made grief out of emptiness,
My dear, you are blackness and you fill voids
like you were born to possess them,
dress everything in meaning,
teach the broken heart the fear of losing again
when everything is lost,
"because nothing is ever lost,
nothing will ever be lost",
you told me that when I couldn't see
the price of my peace was paid in dreams,
you walked over them and made black clouds,
it rained all night and all morning
and even as I drowned, you told me to swim,
told me to find strength that defies storms,
you told me to befriend demons.

I know the fire in the sky scares you
but that is the color of hope, my pretty,
and I will teach you to look at it
until you laugh the way you used to,
You will hold my hand,
and we will be cold amidst light,
Our cold will be the color of the night,
Our cold will be the color of moonlight.

Source: http://carts.deviantart.com/art/Depression-60274662

Reignition

No red-lettered date marks
the national holiday on which I will step outside my house of cards
built with razor-sharp memories,
But I trust that day to come.
And then I will not think twice of its random collapsing on my flesh,
Of being buried under metal edges,
Of losing old skin.

I will have sewn myself together
And made a backpack of every patch you kissed,
I will stuff all doubts in it, carry it without choice,
and search for broken people that have reconstructed themselves.
I will scout for love so hot
that it burns your hands just once
I worry that the scar-tissue on my fingers refuses to understand warmth again.
I will look for brazen gamblers
Who can cajole me into investing my life's savings into untapped opportunities
after having slept on streets
through cold nights.
I worry I have become a miser.
I will dig their backyards with tired hands and find skeletons we can bond over,
Ignoring the smell of your gardens beneath my fingernails.
I will trust the pepper in their lies
The way I did yours
when all your footsteps were the correct direction.
I will crush the chalk in their bones and draw on their living-room walls
Until the misery of our experiments with other people
Become the preface to better stories,
I will add your name to a blank page
And be grateful for being the flint
That taught me ignition.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Rejection

Rejection feels like forgetting

everything that made you solid,
you were dangerous, rugged icebergs,
only smooth floes swim in you now,
There is no tragedy in rejection,
you will not bawl into soft pillows,
but lie half-awake and wonder
if all those glories were a dream
spun on wheels faster than Time,
Your mornings will carry promises
but you do not know how to trust,
how to leap into dances for eyes
that might not remember you,
all of you is wispy, hollow smoke
and you are afraid of winds
as if they know your emptiness,
a secret you did not know you had.

Image Source: http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/11/agnes-cecile-1991-roma-italy.html

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.

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

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

Pretending to go to War

I set up the bivouacs
And decided that I was busy,
My hourglasses set besides camp-fires,
Overlooking oiled armour and picket-lines,
My footsteps parked by every totem,
My labour bunched in muscles
Awaiting hot water baths.

Did I look away
when I found your fingers
Kindling pits that threatened
To froth with ash?
I do not remember your gaunt memories
Tempering the steel of my weapons
Stealing the sin they earned,
Making of them gentle playthings,
I should have heard your whispers
Woven into sentry reports
Painting my horizons with dull colours,
My scouts found farmsteads
stocked with grain to ground empires
But I saw mundane trophies
That I couldn't bother to prise
From hands filled with life
Distinctly more musical than mine.
Was your name always on these fetishes?

I spend my whole day in bathtubs.

Image Source: Corneliu Baba

Wasted Potential

There is anguish in not becoming,
Seconds pitter-patter on my forehead
Make a dented shell of my mind,
Every vista undresses its secrets and
Reveals the clock-chimes I can steal before night strikes,
Eager to have its meanings swallowed,
But I will be statue admist clay,
My hands will not kiss shapes into opportunity
And make of it legacy,
I threw promises on morning clouds
Before the Sun knew the dead in my face,
Is it any wonder that their dismay
Is so violent in its receipt?
I will be statue and watch rain
Carve pits in my plaster,
I am regret in making,
Gather around and
watch me do
nothing.

Image Source: Saeed Tavakkol

Greedy Rain

The rain was not always beautiful,

It was a procession of water-drops and nothing else.
It fed on your paper boats
and whispered its secrets to the winds,
licked your cheeks when you walked back
home from places that wouldn't take you in,
until the taste of your loneliness salted the cheer of your childhood screams
deposited in broken skies.
The water is greedy to learn your fears,
to linger on your windowpane 

when the trees cast phantom murders on the bedroom glass
in which you left music to mix with humidity
last Friday evening; you were too busy to notice
when the showers left your searing escapes
because it had to rush to potholes in your street,
come morning you would not find 

the stone that marked the route to her home,

Your anguish would be photographed by sly mirrors
because the tissue-paper laughter tears when retrieved,
the heads of your sorrows look comical
perched on spears crashing onto dry earth,
The army plans to leave no survivors,
it plans to scorch every temple in your memory,
cut the throats of the babes,
force traders to see the rubble and find opportunities to reinvent
a civilization in you,
and the descendants will call their history beautiful.

Image Source: Zachary Johnson

Blunt

Yes, I am blunt;
I will forget your name,
With impunity that belongs,
To kings and lunatics alone.

Yes, I am blunt;
I will call a spade a spade,
And a heart a heart,
And leave you wondering:
What just happened?

You wish I cared enough,
To ruffle the feathers one at a time,
Unlike a Colossus amidst a forest
That has grown over centuries.

You wish I cared enough,
To keep to myself the volley of questions,
To not disturb the flows of thought
That have grown laminar with much patience.

But you forget, my dear Sirs and Dames,
That I walk barren myself,
And wish upon you the very same:
The unattached ease with which
Lunatics become kings.

For the forest breeds darkness,
And the darkness breeds the lies
That keep us from becoming
Everything that we can be,
But are not.

For History was written amidst
The most outrageous turbulence,
And the liberated were those,
To whom anchors were of no consequence,
Whose identities were not rewritten
When the waters washed away
The inks of illusion.

I do not exist as a fixed point in time,
And it kills me to see hearts tear and attach
To ideas and biases and hymns and speeches,
And beauties and families and sciences,
The rationalities amongst irrationalities,
And histories and stories and her stories,
And their stories and the worst of the lot:

Your stories.

I bite and spar and tear and rejuvenate,
With a promise that I see in you,
Nothing more than what the circumstances,
Have made of you.

Yes, I am blunt;
I wear my heart on the sleeve,
And seek to see it destroyed,
For I rise with the tenacity,
A thousand suns couldn't afford,
With all their fuel.

Yes, I am blunt;
I tire of the slimes and machinations,
That keep the machine running;
My dear Sirs and Dames,
Art is long and Time is fleeting;
I am busy running;
What about you?

Image Source: Joseph Ducreux (Yes, of the memetic fame)

Finding Others

I was to find others,
My charred remains
were to finance
charcoal murals.

I tried to unbecome,
but was lonely winds,
angry razors storming
surprised monks.

And then I was daffodils,
waiting cogent poets,
that my sea finds home,
in gentler hearts.

For all the fury of
one overflowing heart,
my hands are still hers:
I have touched nothing.


Image Source: Nicola Samorì

Remembering Myself

I visited my memories,
And found your mirrors,
Showing me,
Who I was.

In your unchecked laughs,
And long lamentations,
I found my stories
In forgotten lands.

So mundane would be
This procession of mistakes,
But it sleeps in your cavities
And is golden fire.

Image Source: Alfred Gockel