Like you, I too once entertained the childish theology of monsters beneath the bed.
Only, where you slept with your face toward the door, praying for survival, I turned my back to the darkness, because I did not care whether it killed me—
for I did not fear being destroyed when I was already tormented by the violence within my mind.
The street exhales in measured, patient light,
Where footsteps keep a cadence soft and slow,
An I, a witness to the day, walk on—
While somewhere in my mind, a name begins to grow.
A stone appears where none was set before,
Its surface pale with weather, time, and loss;
No hands in sight, yet carved with patient care—
A name, a date, and silence etched across.
It feels so close, yet too far to reach,
As if the thought itself has learned to wait;
A whispered echo at the edge of speech,
Where life and stillness almost hesitate.
A though intrudes, unbidden, keen, and still,
It settles where the quiet held its form;
Not summoned by intent, yet marks the will,
A distant tremor in an unseen storm.
I measure life against what time unthreads,
Each breath a brief inscription on the air;
The body writes what memory still treads,
And fades into the grammar of the bare.
And still I walk, the cadence kept and known,
The sky unchanged, though meanings rearrange;
What lingers is not lost, but overgrown,
A quiet thought, persistent, yet estranged.
Is this the world that deserves our softest light?
Is this how we get on with a little fight?
We know we’re not in control
We pull through whatever may arise or fall
But despite convalescing from an affliction
Banefully, we seem diagnosed with manipulation
Either you’re blind or refusing to see
Escaping the decaying reality
Countering every dire theory—
Consciously—with a dreamy philosophy
Not for the sake of sweet innocence
Nor for ignorance’s safe pretense
But for seizing the right to live
Because we ought to find grace in what we receive
To drink from the sacred cup of existence—
To taste salvation without a tang of grievance
So I keep asking with a tainted insight…
Is this really the world I once believed to have a hidden light?
—Nicola An
where beginning
and start collide
and kiss the air
and eternity
finds a home.
Mine was closer
than anticipated.
A dead boar, a terrible Ram Rajya, a crippled grasshopper—
A toothache-stricken sky—you, I,
The frustrated Jampui and Bhuban Bru.
My twenty-first lover—Bhuban Bru,
He had two hands, a brain, and a dozen or so bidis.
He knew how to cook well, and he could eat too.
One day, he made a broth with a wild boar and my blood—
Eating it, I felt like sacrificing my entire body to the cooking.
I even told him so; he didn't agree and sat down to write a poem,
The poem was titled Soil—
'Soil is nothing but the saliva of a spider
Soil means some deaths, soil is just the spider's own spit...'
Those memories come floating, sinking and rising in the Manu River,
I keep staring...,
Then someone comes and covers both my eyes and says—
'Tell me, who has come! '
Oupa Dean ! With Him she brushed shoulders, forty years ago,
on a rainy twilight down Adderley Street caressing yellow freesias,
bought by her late tea date.
Flower sellers on The Parade delighted with sale.
Mind flashed an evening recall three centuries
earlier, same TwinSoul promenading down Rue des
Iris soon after the 1636 French-Spanish conflict, her name then, Amoré.
Moon-Tears rained French defeat on street,
lamps casting moist shadows across black hats
~ Realities flow into one another, clutching yellow freesias.
Everything is temporary. Maybe it's not even real...
Life, this life...
I think you know, we have already been here.
Post-apocalyptic existence.
Utopian dreams.
Uncertainty at the surface,
the shift in between.
Contemplation and choice.
Birth.
Life.
Death.
They are all one and the same,
sharing the same knife,
to carve out the same name.
A thing that yearns in constant devour,
And finds itself to be a constant sour,
Totally dissolute… and an accumulation of none,
Is the thing that burns, at a constant run.
For the thing is… in all its effortless glory,
The ache of a thousand suns.
are these beetles born
to die around burning bulbs?
zenith of folly
To be yourself-ish
Or to be yourself-less
That is the question:
It's like not knowing yourself
to be “yourself” that you'll be
everyone else but you
But knowing yourself
that being yourself
cause all but hurt for you
If they know themselves
they’ll save themselves by
knowing they can't save you
So you think to yourself
To end yourself to
spare them the truth
But don't refuse yourself
and turn yourself-less
It's okay to be yourself-ish
Got to be yourself-ish
or remain yourself-less
Both are all but hellish
Lose yourself or
Warp yourself
None can offer help
And yet. I could care no less
The answer, I shall relish
Forever, I’ll cherish.
In what good has it all come to
In my imaginary mind?
We roll through the wake of the water,
Goddammitting our way through.
Rising with our victories.
Cursing in our swift descents.
Buddhists are laughing on the shoreline.
I’m selling popcorn on the boat.
All Dreams end, sadly
The stardust they are made of,
Scattered,
To form again for others.
We travel with the dust,
Blowing,
From dream to dream.
A caravan of moments
Held together by our feelings.
The best of these dreams:
The one I had of you.
Through these rough terrains
Past the ruthless showers
I tread on
The tunnel seems
Without an end
And yet I go on
Is that last shimmering piece
In me, gold hued
Hope?
I trudge along
To the sound of strangers
Appealing me to go on
Like salesman
Going on and on about the perks
The benefits
I have never touched them
Known their warmth
Breathed the same air as them
And yet
Through the glass wall
It's strange
They know me so well
So even when I don't trust
I like all else
Wish but to be understood
So I will myself to trust them
Even when I stop each give minutes
To list out why I mustn't
The absurdity of it all
I walk on
To where the it supposedly is
The light
The end
Something without definition
Something even they haven't figured out
And yet babble on about
And press me
To- Go on.
Living layers of being tugged around scraps of lusterless metal shape the man who was
Or is it the other way around
He can not tell anymore
Improvements or subpar substitutions
He marches on despite his contemplation
The clang and tang of metal on metal echo from his right leg while the muffled thud of organic flesh whispers from his lesser left
He marches on
Imagine feeling where your blood stops flowing as if your veins have hit a metal door yet beyond its frame lay dancing ghost who mock your past
With every augmentation he advances yet diminishes his mortality and morality
Still he marches on
On assignment that must be completed
Computing
The command was entered, a reaction will occur, must occur
His ability for choice is doubtful yet feared
A semi-bionic time bomb ticking its way to a liberating explosion of conscience freedom
Until then he will march on
drove wife to doctor
counting wheelchair ramp spindles
~waiting for Godot
7/10/2020
My wife smiled at this one. Or was it a smirk?
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett
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