Miscarriage

The cold licks the smoke clean from the skin.
Your broken reflection crawls down your face.
A dream flutters against the street lamp.
Its wings drop at the command of a scream.
What are ashes but the miscarriage of light?

The ceiling hugs the floor but the walls don't break down.
The spider trembles at the sight of its own web.
You can't seem to understand the cause of your frown,
But the folds of your bedsheet know it is you yourself.
What are ashes but the miscarriage of light?

The mosquito remains hesitant outside the net,
Can never be certain of the nature of the filament.
The blood sticks to the wrist trying to claim it,
Doesn't understand the departed spirit's hint.
What is suicide but the miscarriage of night?

-

Sonnet To Weird Verma

Your Fellini-esque dreamscape pulls me out of the stereotype box.
Behind me, I hear Dylan's psychedelic guitar and Lynch's knocks
on the consciousness-door. Kafka sits with a smile on the dinner
table beckoning me to eat your delicious words, infinite winners
in the test of time. Life is absurd. Life is paradox. Life imitates art
more than art imitates life, says Wilde. Then, you do your part
creating the best kind of art. The kind of art that frees the soul
from the shackles of the world. Where imagination truly unfolds
into the unexpected and original. Where fancy becomes greatness.
And I, your weird friend, Weird Verma, cannot very humbly express
how delighted I am to see a real poet like you here in this clichéd mess
of words and stolen quotes. Keep showering us with your uniqueness,
that is the best I can say. May we meet someday in some corner dark yet
illuminated and discuss the visions and illusions that turned us into prophets.

-

III

that makes a rubble
of my fragile mansion
tell me how can i explain
my singular situation
without feeling disdain
because no one can understand
what it is like to see
your castle turn to sand
your moment of horror
turn to a loop of eternity
no one can feel the tremor
that you feel underneath you
every goddamn day no one
it isn't about being false or true
it's about being the pun
in punishment and the ban
in banishment it's about
being a paradox and a doubt
when all you are is a symbol
of a victim who can't stand
and who can't even fall
hanging underneath a clock
in disrepair suspended
like a poem uncomfortably ended

-

Imprisoned in the skies, I roamed.
One day, I decided to break the cage.
That day I knew, I was the rain.

-

In every last drop of laughter,
There is a strange surface tension towards madness.

-

Sonnet To Beauty

The sun rolls between two returning birds
like a basketball between two children.
The mother of one clasping firmly the wheelchair
where the father of another sits smiling.

The beloved sustains on the honey of words
as her head finds rest on her shoulder.
Another beloved sustains on the quiet
as his lap provides rest to his lover.

I stroll through the park resting on these scenes
as the water is disturbed by falling leaves.
Some pigeons survive on the rice of a kind man,
some fishes feed on the bread of teenagers.

Absence is not as overwhelming when the hues
and fragrances of gratitude surround you.

-

Notes:

1 Murder In The Cathedral, Part II, Thomas Eliot.
2 The Wisdom Of Life, Chapter III, Arthur Schopenhauer.
3 Lud-In-The-Mist, Chapter 3, Hope Mirrlees.
4 Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.
5 Paris: A Poem, P.6, Hope Mirrlees.
6 Les Complaintes, Complainte De Lord Pierrot, Jules Laforgue.
6 Living Or Dead, III, Rabindranath Tagore.
7 The Library Of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges.
8 Ash-Wednesday, IV, Thomas Eliot.
9 The Adults Are Talking, The Strokes.
10 The Flowers Of Evil, Spleen And Ideal, Against Her Levity, Charles Baudelaire.
11 Living Or Dead, II, Rabindranath Tagore.

-

To See

The bareness of a dream
as it converges into the threshold

of an interrupting sound is bonier
than your silence. Like a scroll

you unfurl your cliché secrets but
the treasure is already lost in your eyes.

Your laughter puts down the world
and crushes its kindnesses into delirium.

Somewhere the pain blooms and it's not
a flower or a memory, just ignorance.

May you recognize the odours of lost time.
May they suffocate your destiny

until it learns to breathe. May the fish
find its water. Every touch evaporates

anyway like your consolations.
Lips are frail brands. Experience

squeezes the skin clean. The fire taunts
the ash. The ash haunts the fire.

And nothing comes to a resolution
except the beauty of fitting a shoe.

-

A Sonnet For The Inconspicuous

From counterfeit desire, they gain expect,
As from a plastic flower, bees seek nectar,
For time's tight leash obtains no dog's respect,
No bark did, then again, ever reach its ears.
Youth's fire in tempest single will burn out
And recognition too with one misdeed.
Yet it is transience where true glory lies:
A short-lived love is love still, soldiers shout
Surviving war, a crocodile ever cries
In funerals, junkies too return for weed.
Life's vein in soil does grow, in core the seed.
No x-ray shows the mind, no art the feel.
The best remain forever hid from eyes
For purity to favour win never tries.

-

Psychomination

The stairs, like lightning, drop into the lurid loch,
Averse, you walk, then stop, your soul as if in gridlock,
You hear the chant of life, much louder than the strife,
You swim and pull the knife out of the mermaid's windpipe.

With blood, the water rife now, mirroring your wife,
Shadows with drums and fife, towards the guttersnipe,
Marching like stars and stripes, the one no one can snipe,
Until his flag is wiped so clean, he can't even gripe.

Pale, I lie down and type, until the apple's ripe,
Until the devil kipes the fantasy of faith,
Till shamelessly Eve baits naïve Adam to his fate,
Till God Himself negates our notion of Him. Great?

It isn't child's play to swipe the truth with such persuasion.
Far easier to execute hence the invasion.

-