The chimp stretches its arm,
a small hand, palm up under my chin,
fingers and thumb supple,
a pink-pawed sharing.
It’s a palmistry offering,
if only I had the skill to read it.
There is a lifeline.
It looks a lot like mine
if my hand were his.
I see a heart-line,
it seems open and flowing
as if this ape were following
another meaning of ‘heart.’
The handler moves on.
I check my own palm,
note the similarities, even see
an indistinct squeezed crease,
where the heart line bifurcates.
A sign, but of what?
And why does my hand
look like an old map of the moon,
while his looks like the hand
of a poet?
Categories:
bifurcates, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Daddy comes everyday when the twilight
Bifurcates the light into shadows
Like a miscreant, grasshopper
Intrudes into the cracks of walls
Mom became a vociferous loudspeaker
Alcohol staggers inside his belly
Like the movement of snake..
He never came that day
Mamma's hand freezed with
Wheat flour and dough
My rapacious belly was ready to suffer
Starvation.. And I thought
Where did Those besotted legs and trampled
Shadows go?
It can't go to some other pastures
Some other homes,
It can't slap some other shoulders..
Myopic eyes often started to sew the dress
again enhancing the sartorial elegance..
I missed those shadows hued with that
Of pickles and spirit..
Still I proclaimed:
Shadows have gone..
Light is yet to come...
Life is yet to start
Categories:
bifurcates, addiction, anger, betrayal, death,
Form: Free verse
I haven’t walked for long
on the backstreets of my mind.
In the twilight hour i see now
the fading memory lane meander
to meet the dim pavement deserted
where our footsteps once echoed
with the resonance of our togetherness
as we walked hand in hand.
The mystic glow of the luring lights
cast our fused shadows on the present,
lengthening onto the past
down the rhapsody road we paved.
The future bifurcates at the crossroads,
regret searches for the escape route
at the back of my mind.
September 26, 2019
For Brian Strand's Contest All Yours (Mar 15)
Categories:
bifurcates, memory,
Form: Free verse
A river carries me through noon,
Bifurcates,
There are two rivers,
One heads north
The other west.
Is one life,
The other death?
I spin a coin,
The last I’ve left.
Categories:
bifurcates, angst, boat, fate, leaving,
Form: Free verse
blind path bifurcates
time arrow cleaves paired footprints...
shadows unmingle
June 13, 2019
Brian Strand Contest A Strand (1071)
Categories:
bifurcates, conflict, lost love,
Form: Senryu