What You Want

Your soft voice rings like
A gentle bell through my ears
Slightly affected, yet in a good way

Your enthusiasm mixed with
A certain kind of uncertainty–
Was I doing something to you?
Did something grow?

And soon your presence, your
Corporeal, physical being
Settled themselves next to
My aspirations and desires
For closeness and intimacy.

But what I did to you was nothing,
Compared to what you did to me.

And all my desires laughed at me–
A young boy, a man, a fool,
Whose dreamy mind grew old and dark
Amidst the silence that now fell there.

Still I keep waiting for that day,
Knowing that this ability is the curse
that God had always planned for me.

Full Stop.

I had made peace
But peace hardly meant rest
And didn’t mean acceptance
Though the letters corresponded.

The ones I communicated into the void
Scribbles that became a story.

But stories, being as they are,
They must end.

A comma does not suffice
And if drawn right, can be corrosive
But its implicatures not conclusive.

Stories only receive some nuance
When one inserts a full stop.

After which the blame and the shame
Poured over all my writing,

The endless pages,
Or so they seemed,
Were besmudged and contaminated,

A sanguinal infection
That seeps through the paper…

Is peace, then, ever viable
When you know that the pen will blotch forever?

Overblown by Twenty

A decision impossible
To water the belladonna
Or to drown in the drought?

To rather shelter the venom
Than to set it free
And let it consume all.

My mere existence
Overgrown by the ruin to my soul

One decision to replenish my all—
One decision my heart can’t bear to make.

A Million Mirages

But not in this lifetime.

I envision the words like smoke

As I utter them to those with infinite access
To the crawling, intertwining
Spirals of flesh and nerves
That most humans would not call more
Than a brain.

A sentiment so thorough
That it impedes the vessels of
Oxygen somehow more so
Than the delicate encasement
That survives the journey of life.

As ’twas touched, or rather, struck open by
The remains of what once was a transparency solid to the soul,

They cloudily mirrored the fragmented vessel
In the dim-lit eyes that beheld
The smoke bearing the indestructible
Ruins of my psyche.

Bleed.

Tears must kill
But serve as rain,

Hands must grasp
But cannot hold,

Feet must crush
But don’t proceed,

Eyes must avert
But rain impedes,

Brain must restrain
But only in vain.

.

As the heart concedes
It lives to bleed.

Preying Eyes

When night and day attain the same name
A fog does not affect the atmosphere
In which a bird flies

Yet a sight that troubles
Slowly seeps into its pupil

It starts to give its powers
To the revolving resemblance of air

That flings the bird’s freezing wings
Into a frightening flight into the eye

After which it drowns the remnant thorns
In a deep, contrastive red

To the name attained by night and day
That’s not yet dark, but only grey.

Remember the Time

Why do you remember the time you were hurt the best?

Why does gravity pull you towards that which makes you remember the time and the torture?

Why does remembering make you want to squeeze out and electrocute your own heart

to empty it of feeling the feelings that will fill the future with frustration and disappointment

if you do not attempt to avoid the traps that lead you down this hell?

White Haven

Wood splintering of the haven

Once filled with clamour
And with tremour

That walls of plaster would not fix.

Where the scent of poverty
Permeated every step in the way,

The blandness broken
By shapes and colours,

The serenity of evenness distorted
By holes, lines, and relief,

Exposed veins of liquid covered up by
The inferiors of Beauty.

The form of safety from the dark, ultimately.

Heartless

Scars on my reflection
As I stare at my complexion

A sightless pair of eyes
Observe a human pretending a disguise

His former self’s unlucky fate
Twists his soul to Satan incarnate

Who speaks to it in subtle lies
As it tries its own shape to devise

But all it can express
Is a body with a soul so heartless.

Navigating Compassion

North I cannot go
That is the way to sorrow

So is moving to the East
I’ll rather go where it hurts the least

The South is not where I can travel
I don’t want that direction for me to unravel

Left over is the very West
It seems the option that is best.

To watch the sun go down
While trying not to drown

But to know as the sky turns ashen
That the sun will rise again
A new chance to reduce the pain.
All I need is to navigate with compassion.