Category: Poems

I don’t think I’m someone to miss,
But you should meet my little sis,
Who leaves behind her sheltered teens
Today to wear her lady jeans.

At twenty, she produces art
That grabs the viewer by the heart
And paints a smile upon their face
That brightens up their gloomy days.

In person, she becomes her art
And cheers you from the very start.
The secret to these feats above:
She gives her all with all her love.

So, she is all that I was not.
(Or maybe she was never caught!
And that you have to figure out)
You’ll get along without a doubt.

Go, help her paint her wildest dreams.
Go, help her find her flowing streams
Of consciousness that shape a soul.
And where she lacks, go, make her whole.

Adieu, adieu, my failed decade.
Adieu and thanks for lessons all.
You cut my crutches with your blade,
But chiseled legs for standing tall.

You found an angry, pampered boy
And tried to make a tempered man.
You tried your every trick and ploy,
And still I threw you off your plan.

But worry not, you managed well.
You did inject maturity.
I know at times it’s hard to tell,
But now I have some clarity.

You taught me where to put my time,
And who to give my faith and trust,
And how to push beyond my prime,
And when to parry, when to thrust.

You drilled in me a discipline
To do the things I love to do,
To draw my art from deep within,
To learn again a skill or two.

Again I thank you for the years
Of wanderings through luck and loss,
For now I see my smiles and tears
As heads and tails of equal toss.

The mirror shone on tyrant thrones
And tore into their tired tones,
Which held the whole hierarchic hold
On guilty gentry and their gold.

The mirror shone on constant minds
Inconstant turned by constant grinds
Of treasured trustee’s treachery
In forms of fawning flattery.

The mirror shone on racist views
Towards the Moors and moored-up Jews
With proclamations prejudiced:
At once, “Reward!” At once, “Resist!”

The mirror shone on sexist tongues
Who launched pollutions from their lungs
For females frequenting outdoors,
To frame them frequently as whores.

The mirror shone on private fears,
Soliloquies of sullied seers,
For who’s he has his hand on heart
And airs not any aches of art?

I do the things that writers do
Except the thing that matters most.
I stay compulsive, stay alone
Inside my head for hours and hours.
I make routines, and stick to them,
Until I don’t, and start over.
I read a lot, reread a lot.
I take some notes, forget I did,
Convince myself I never will
Amount to much by way of work.
Depression, check. Anxiety, check.
Distempered notoriety, check.
I sleep in fear of waking up.
I wake in fear of losing sleep.
I feed my self a lunch of doubt
And vomit out my swallowed pride.
I throw a tantrum when I’m scared
A thing will never get resolved.
I play the victim, play accursed:
I blame the people in my life
For giving me no space no time
To write the lines I’m meant to write
But never really seem to do.

Get off, get off the writing desk,
Where hours pass in seconds’ blinks.
At once, at once to running fields!
Compose in motion static lines
That keep the beat of landing feet
And do so at the speed of time,
For runners running breast to breast
Do not outrun or run out of
The other one so easily.

‘They’ say the Way to Everlife
Is paved with words we write in strife.
Then, how can my obsession be
The pencil that erases me?

‘They’ say the remedy to gloom
Is having one’s own writing room.
Then, how can this prescription be
The pencil that erases me?

‘They’ say that Doubt is but a voice,
Which can be silenced by our Choice.
Are ‘They’ who sharpen for a fee
The pencil that erases me?

Are You who pays these artful ‘They’?
Are You who bricks and walls my Way?
Then, lend me for Your final glee
The pencil that erases me.

I wake up with the windiness
Of blanket clouds inside my head.
I breathe to meditate in zen.
I sit to meditate in zen.
I walk to meditate in zen.
I think I meditate in zen.
I hardly feel I am in zen.
I feel I am in denial.
I feel I am about to smash
To little pieces every thing
Imposing on my senses five.

The roshi smiles and gently asks
To make my mind as open sky.
I would agree, except it takes
Atlassian efforts to uphold
The sky of my cast-over mind,
With grumbling thunders shocking me
At every rise and fall of air.

She swears she wants me to improve –
To write beyond my current groove –
But when I send her layered verse,
She rolls those beetle eyes of hers,
Preferring every single time
The easy pleasure of a rhyme.

Is nothing here so fertile
To match unburdened turmoils
Of idle workers’ jealousies,
Whose farmvillesque imaginings
Can sling and fling them on the wings
Of angry birds who crush candies?

Is nothing here so sterile
To match encumbered salty toils
Of sweaty workers’ hopefulness,
Whose dreams, as freshly cottoned fields
Receiving monsoon’s early yields,
Are drowning in a muddy mess?

This man, he wrote which we by rote
Recite in hopes to match his pen.
Emboldened by his poetry,
Assuming ambiguity,
We play the cast of characters
Defining our humanity.

This man, he did invent the man
Upon a Globe – as Nature, Earth –
In verses, with researches deep
Into the one or two accounts
Historians had penciled down.
He breathed into the paper hearts
The spirit and the sentiment
Which, to the glass of seeing eyes,
Supplied the misty warmth on which
The fingers of his fantasy
Described the circularity
Of things that are, but will not be.

This man, he sowed the seeds of time,
Against the knowledge and the art
To know which grain will grow, which not,
And reaped the world in afterlife.
His good was not interred with bones.
Not once intrepid lines of his
Did ask to be or not to be.
They are, they are, they are, they are
So good that thinking makes it so
Today and every next today.