Month: November 2021

Approach, approach, my worried friend.
Approach with comments constructive.
You think my feelings should be so?
Then tell me open, pretty please.
I welcome every word of yours
As welcome every bee-sting is:
The pain for me is passing, but
I know when once your sting is lost
Your time with it is forfeit too.
And has the tragic Hamlet not
Enlightened us to profits of
Delay in gratification
By virtue of deferred revenge?
So is it such a folly that
I choose to act in madness now
Within a drama of my dreams?
For I, the prince of dense remarks,
Will soon condense a brevity
To fill the hollowness of hearts
Which steam from freezing tragedy.
Until that day, mock all you may
My surfeit manic lunacy.

1.

She loved the ocean.
She spent months in deep sea,
Atop a titanic metal straw
That tankers sipped oil with.
She loved hydrodynamic metaphors.
Her poems were letters in bottles
Bobbing along sharks and dolphins
And plastic islands of use-and-throw.
Her angry sunset dissolved in brine
And precipitated again at dawn
With a calmer colour on its cheek,
Profiting from a good night’s sleep,
While she drowned in dashboards
From one dawn to the next day’s dusk.

I loved the sky.
I spent months in open air
Among perfumed leaves that carried
The fresh fragrance of inhaled stories.
I loved aerodynamic metaphors.
My poems were kites on yarns
Flapping along crows and cranes
And exhausted clouds of pipe exhales.
My nights blanketed the cold sky
With a moth-eaten bedsheet
Whose orifices swayed in the breeze,
Ever so gently, never too much,
Twinkling the light that passed through,
Twinkling again in my starry eyes
As I wrote down what they told me.

2.

She often dove under
To understand the primitive
Evolution of our modern nature,
Hidden deep in our layered spirits.
She loved the quiet underneath
So much that she’d angle low
Even on buoyant occasions.
Though, when her refracted reality
Seduced her into treacherous currents,
Or, when the pressure got too high,
Her inner gyroscope centered her,
And brought her to an even keel.
Soon, she’d slowly surface again,
Periscoping with silent insight.

So, when I landed in her life
And shredded her level sea
With my reckless rotor blades
Without ever touching it,
She said she loved how I hovered
Through a pressure far lighter,
But far more temperamental,
Offering little resistance to the pull
That threatened to crash my soul.
She loved how I could lift her off
And take her places, securely
Strapped in, but yet so free,
To witness the vast generosity
Of the primordial soup underneath.
She also enjoyed my little game
Of sculpting nimbuses into characters,
And sending them on different paths,
Nimbly pitching and yawing around
Far above the clutches of real life.

She said she could even strip
Herself from her ocean home
And go see our parent lands,
So long as I was there
To pick her up and carry her,
And pull my own weight too,
For she would have to push back
In waves of loving ferocity
To erode the shoring resistance
We knew we would meet.

3.

The rocks on shore stood firm
And cautioned us against us.
They asked the girl of great depth
And the boy of airy worth
If on our magic carpet rides,
We both forgot to remember that
The ocean truly meets the sky
Only at the horizon –
That infinitely elusive illusion
That has doomed many a romantic?
Everywhere else they merely touch
Each other on the surface,
Tension keeping them apart.

We rebelled against this design.
We stormed the land together,
Uprooting heavy trunks of tradition.
She tried her all with all her might
To tsunami into me and stay.
I tried my all with all my might
To typhoon her up and hold.
We managed, together, to declare
That we’re a force to reckon with.

In all that storming, all that energy,
Who we were was changing fast.
The calm and depth and freshness
We loved so much in each other –
Sacrificed or traded off or bartered,
Depending on whose word you take.
She no longer noticed when I lifted her
For that was now the expected thing,
But when her depths pulled her back,
She said I had let her down again.
I kept cursing my ungraspable being
Or protested how unfair she was,
And I raged the more, to lift her more,
But she was scared of my thunders now,
Scared of how her self darkened in me
Charged up now, discharged again,
Its flashes dazzling reality.
And so one night, she bid goodbye,
And retreated into the doldrums.

4.

They talk of the calm before the storm
But never of the calm that follows it,
When people pick up their lives’ debris
And question the comic-book reality
Of alchemical collateral damage,
Of shielded lives now shattered,
By Ether’s patch-eyed Wrath,
By Nature’s one-eyed Fury.

I take my gaseous self now
And try to fill some quieter voids
In someone’s frothy morning coffee,
In someone’s spongy weekend cake,
In someone’s tired bicycle ride
On a three-day dirty oxygen diet.
And though I cannot know her now,
Though I know not what she does,
I sense my blues mirrored in her.
I know beyond a cloud of doubt:
She will always cradle a bit of me
In tiny bubbles throughout her self,
As I will cradle a bit of her
In tiny vapours throughout mine.

I find myself in cul-de-sacs
With buildings tall around my spot
Preventing data services
From reaching Maps, which doesn’t load.
I’ve lost my way to confidence,
Even to ask of those around
The route to get to somewhere safe
To somewhere with a WiFi strength
That stops the spinning wheel of life.
Though, was it not dependence on
Instructions from a trusted source,
Without the use of common sense,
Which got me to the cul-de-sacs?
And yet I seek the comfort still
Of answers at my fingertips,
Without discerning on my own
The merits of decisions mine?
And yet I ask a stranger’s voice
Encoded with the knowledge of
The masses pouring their insides
Into the brain decentralized
In service of the masters few
Who mine these private pourings to
Extract the excess wealth of all?
So, where am I, the actual I,
Beyond the bios, pics, and texts?
My Maps is not so helpful when
It points an arrow, “You are here.”

He climbed atop the Empire State
And looked below – the antsy gait
Of men and women fighting Fate.

And, like his hero Whitman, yawped
Before as thunderbolt he dropped
Upon their grounded conscience; stopped.

The street gathered around the rise of moon
Assuming the positions eagerly.
Erect with lotus legs and petal palms
That gently woke into a prayer trance:

Har Har Shivaaye, Har Har Shivaaye!
Har Har aah-choo, Har Har Shivaaye!
Har Har urgh-hoo, Har Har Shivaaye!
Har Har aakkh-thoo, Har Har Shivaaye!

The morning came – Har Har Shivaaye!
The street dissolved – Har Har Shivaaye!
The coughs and phlegm declared – Shivaaye!
The slurping noses sang – Shivaaye!

They hailed the Mrityunjaya, Shivaaye!
The Conqueror of Death, Shivaaye!

Do you see the sea of nauseating news
Waves of headlines are always breaking
On isolated island shores
Of individual sensitivities
Crippled and clawed by the fallout of
Weapons of mass distraction
Deployed from subliminal submarines
Fueled by grease of political hot potatoes
Cut and fried into bite-sized wedges

They tell the tale of Sisyphus
But tell it false from what I see.
For every morn I see him hurl
His cursëd load from Eastern peaks.
It catches fire in the air,
As meteors and spaceships do,
And after flying through the day,
It cools upon the Western seas.
But blasted curses of the Gods
Do not allow our Sisyphus
A wink of rest upon his brow:
No sooner he descends his peak
Than like a bowling ball it comes
A-railing through the underworld
And rests again as obstacle
Across his path to living free.

The more I learn the more I lose
My truths in pieces lie about
The meanings mined of storied lives
Unwholesome they may seem at first
But cuts of skill can make them shine
Though never whole and never all
A foolishness it is to claim
The sharper tool is not a fool

The strength in me is breaking down
With all the voices weighting me.
My head will soon be on the ground.
May short the time of waiting be.

I trudge on four iambic feet
By matching every other stride
With marching beats of heart’s retreat
Away, again, to suicide.

[I have removed the dark details
For none deserve to know my means,
Until the day my will prevails
To show my friends my brutal scenes.]

I choose today to die in verse
Because I cannot die in sooth
For there are those I need to nurse
And there is much to write, in truth.

Some days the only things that work
Are elements of style and craft.
A thought askew in meter true
Can still produce a decent draft.

A seasoning of mood and rhyme
With Shutterstock imagery
Can freshen up leftover fluff
From yestermorning’s poetry.

A line is all I need those days,
Reminding I can conjure verse,
Despite the voice that leaves no choice
Except for writing through the curse.