Boy

Tender footsteps fall

On the porch outside his house;

The child looks around in wonder,

Taking everything in with a sweeping glance;

He respects what he sees

Yet feels a strange anonymity within him;

The voice that resounds within is not his own.

He feels estranged and stranded.

Not quite able to comprehend what to do next

Or how to take in this situation;

The child moves then to the garden,

Where he sees many plants,

And thorns under his feet

Which he learns to carefully avoid,

He wanders from tree to tree and shrub to shrub

Blissfully lost but in the search for something

When a voice calls him back home;

He turns around, and in a shrug

Forgets what he was searching for.

With a smile he comes back home

And notices there is something to eat on offer, on a plate.

He gobbles it readily and runs back into the garden

Leaving the plate behind;

He is quickly reprimanded for his mistake,

Of which he had no idea of committing and

Unwillingly, obeys and puts the plate back inside.

He does not understand why he was asked to do so,

He runs back out into the garden

And climbs a tree;

He sits on it and listens to the birds chirping and the sun

Shining through the canopy,

He makes patterns with his eyes

Askew and out of focus,

He tries different means to entertain himself.

He dreams of being a cricketer,

Of being the best in the world,

And showing everyone how skilled he is.

He takes a stick and swings it and traces the trajectory

Of a ball that has gone miles into the stands

With the commentator all in a flurry;

He returns home victorious, covered in mud,

Clothed in a vest and a Lungi;

He expects a hero’s welcome

And pretends to receive an obliging nod from his father;

He sleeps without a care in the world,

The dream still running amok in his mind

And a clock ticks, surely but surely

Towards a conclusion, which just as surely

Awaits him.

Time

Closed doors and broken windows,

An abandoned old building

With a falling roof;

Everywhere is the sign of dilapidation.

The rain trickles down the walls

Making patterns irreversible,

Marking the passage of time;

Slowly and steadily some rust accumulates

On the pipes that travel upwards and downwards,

All along the walls;

Abandoned and forgotten, this old house

Still reeks of its former glory.

On the fruit of labor it was built

And without it death stalks it down.

How futile our efforts to make something

That unmakes us in their making.

Zen

The clock ticks away gently on my wall,

I feel the cake eaten the day before

Churn within my intestines and send up

Memories of its taste;

I loiter around the corridors of thought

Until after dark, when I am visited

By a sage;

He tells me to take a shit.

Desperate

There is some dirt under my fingernails

And a lizard crawls up the wall.

A sharp horn of the bike can be heard from outside,

Where it is really cold and only the brave

Or the desperate walk about.

I am not just trying to fill in words,

I actually do see and hear all these things,

But maybe someday, I’ll listen to the noises inside.

The End of The World

I look back and see the rift

Widening like a chasm between us

In it are many broken bones and promises

I see you and your eyes that sparkle like the sun

Across the shore, standing there and shining.

You look so beautiful, yet I could never love you,

You were so right and I never acknowledged you,

I look around to see the chasm on all sides and me,

Stranded alone on this island;

It’s nice, this space of mine,

Nothing wrong with it,

In it I can lay about for half a day

And think of the glory that waits in the other half.

I can dream and drift, close my eyes and escape.

The only way out of there is to fly, or to let loose

And jump in that canyon, filled with broken bones

And promises, biting like cold broken glass.

Every step will be like misery on a galactic scale.

But it will only take so many steps to reach the other side,

Where she waits with a gun in her hand and a black flag,

Flying high;

That pain would be brief, and I would welcome it

And for that I might even jump and forget about all the rest.

But there is a certain joy in being forsaken,

In being kept alive against your wish;

In knowing that day after day you betray yourself

And grow darker and darker within.

It is this joy that keeps me alive;

The joy of my life: green, oozing and perverted.

The day of reckoning draws near.

The day where not everything will be an abstraction

And indefinable, the day where I can actually

Send forth a message to the stars, of the completion of my term.

My time in servitude draws to an end, I can feel it in my bones.

The clock ticks me closer to home.

I set my eyes on the sunset,

And sit silently staring. One day

That sun will rise, and in a sparkle,

You will materialize before my eyes.

And we can choke each other, for all our worth,

Till death do us apart.