Category: Poems

The swelling love within your heart
Erupted in your cake’s relief.
I gulped it down your Adam’s Apple,
Oh my perfect Christmas Eve.

I graduated Nobody,
Escaping in bellwether fur
Mistaken by its cosiness.

My one-eyed Education writhed
In agony of blinding pain
My passioned pen inflicted deep.

I should have listened to my peers
Who spoke of patient temperance
In stormy waters of the world.

But I, emancipated wrath,
Ebullient bravado-wreathed,
Proclaimed my name aloud to all.

My Education’s cursed response –
A prayer to Reality,
Its Father by divinity:

To keep me far from native skills
Whose love forever beckons me.
My dear, dear Poetry.

And so marooned from page to page
In fated twists, or false allures,
I write and yet I do not write.

See how the nymph of Comfort Zone
Confines me on her daily page.
My verse is worsening with age.

How much of this will I retain?
And if I don’t, have I progressed?
They say to squeeze the real juice
I have to read it all again
To find the things I’ve missed between
The lines, the words, the spaces too.
And then I’ll doubt my doubt again:
Is there a point to what I do?
To read and read and read again
To read and read and read again?
To learn that I have learned too less
To learn that I have learned too less?
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned
To waste my time to learn I’ve learned?

In school plays, he always was
Solomon the Wise.
Two mothers, one son.
Two claims, one lie.
My brother draws
His cardboard sword
To split the baby equally.
One mother cries and walks away.
She cannot see her son divided.

Now, every time I fight with him,
And mother has to mediate,
He simply walks away from us.
He cannot see her so divided.

You seem to have a lot of time
To find new ways of tearing flesh
The way you do around your thumbs.
You simply cannot let it heal.
You have to pick and open it.
And in the pain of opening
You push the borders of the scab.
Tomorrow you’ll have more to teethe
And more to show off, reddened raw.
Such comfortable victimhood,
Possessiveness of suffering.

Why should we tire ourselves
Debating, arguing?
It’s easier to learn
To stay inert, agree.
For making points is pointless.
Winning points, supreme.
A contest. Finite Game.
The Nash Equilibrium:
Pyrrhus, Asoka.
Why should we tire ourselves?

The night is bored. It leaves.
The window blinds have cast
Their rungs upon the floor,
Connecting us,
Reminding us
That ladders can be bridges too.

I want someone to teach me how
To say the truth and be okay.

I want someone to teach me how
To be okay with being okay.

I want someone to teach me how
To be okay to say the truth.

I want someone to teach me how
To teach someone to say the truth.

He sits and nods and only asks.
He doesn’t answer anything.
I ask him why, get no reply,
Except a smile, a nod, a gaze.
I’ve booked him for eleven days
And two have passed on one-way-street.
His questions throw me off my feet.
They have been stuck in drying muck.
My head is splitting into halves
The size of thirds.

I’m sinking
In the books. I learn
I’ll earn. Such shame
I feel. Such worthlessness
I know is false, is just
Hormones.
Her moans
I miss. Her
Breathlessness,
Her need to surf-
Ace up
For air. Forayer, dive
Into the deep. End
All these hesitations. Suck
Her breath away.
Her breath – a way.

They call me to the Principal’s.
Which isn’t odd. I often win
Some scholarship or contest prize.
We had a few this Christmas Week.
I also am on Santa’s List
For full attendance round the year.

The English teacher’s stoic face
Is all the warning I receive
Before receiving to my face
The Christian hand of Sister B.,
Who holds the staff of Principal,
When Sister K. is out on leave.
I see the Nativity Star
Resplendent in my smarting eyes,
As smarting cheek receives again
The Christian touch of bamboo stick.

She points to where my essay lies,
To words she’s circled out in red:
“If Jesus is of virgin birth,
Is Jesus, then, the first to break
His Mother’s sacred Maidenhead?”

I point to where the title reads,
“What will you ask of Santa Claus?”
And picking up her Pilate pen,
I cross my name off Santa’s List.