the orchid lamp burns low against the screen of jade
a silver hairpin pierces the frozen musk
kingfisher quilt lies undone
eaglewood breathes unrisen dusk
dripping copper drains last watch
bronze worn where our first shadows seamed
morning mirror broken bride
embroidered sash unlaces on the hearthstone
the spring silkworm spun its chamber shut
silk wound against a bridal drum untouched
red wax sealed—spent wick weeps into the stele
beside the moonlit sill the brush-knife cleaves the charred core
the seal breaks at midnight
a single scent of eaglewood rises
Kunlun incense
rain on Kunlun has fallen for thirty years
water settles Kunlun-hore
the rain not yet wet
My plate is always piled
yet my fork has nothing on it,
beamed up by sensory overload
onto a different culinary planet.
Please don’t think me rude
for leaving most of each meal,
it’s simply an agreement I made
with my devil, a self-imposed deal.
My fridge may look full
though recipes are few,
at least I know how to mix vowels
and consonants into a syllable stew.
This is an empty shame,
a hollow unrisen bun:
I’m male, I’m white, I’m educated,
so surely this cake should be done.
A deprivation tank which I worry
echoes an expected gay cliché;
“No, I’ve already eaten, I’ll snack later.
I’m not feeling well, sorry I can’t stay.”
Twenty years of hunger and binge
now seem to live inside my skin,
the pain a physical invisible
late fee payment for thin.
My bowl is always full, but my spoon has no story to be told.
My body is a restaurant chain business, finally ready to fold.
Give me a dawn stilled by mist,
a gray haze unrisen.
The shimmer of nocturnal lamps
held high.
A time for tree magic; a quite majesty,
all growth halted, transpiring not,
but held within a mystical abeyance.
A pause on the lip of light,
when woodland dreams
are hung from trailing moss,
or a dew drop drip,
from spider webs of translucency -
a fairytale time,
when a walker's warm breath
is the only path,
through the stillness of self.
O what a time we had,
we had a time of it didn't we,
you in your stripy flouncy dress
and pink kneed splendor,
and I dragging a foot behind you,
as callow and unrisen as
a half-baked pudding.
We between us
had the blindly brilliant knowledge,
of everything not worth knowing.
We had textbooks and crayons,
to color bluer an already blue sky.
Our heads held high,
in the fancy hats of headlong youth.
God, I loved the smell of you,
not your dabs of perfume,
but the buttercup musk of you.
That afternoon I played rugby,
while you watched your bruised hero,
galumph and totter all over a muddy field.
God was kind to us wasn’t he,
he made every chicken dinner sunny-side-up,
he tinted our eyes with a simple wonder
for a while,
didn’t he?
Can I love you again, just for a moment,
love us both in this dumb poem,
that I hope speaks for everyone
at least once.
A temple bell clangs through echoing ears.
My vision today
could turn a green leaf brown.
Why do I tilt my head like a bird
just to see its reflection in
a muddy puddle?
Why the need to know
If mud is real or just a mote in my eye?
In your eleventh hour,
in your distress,
why did you utter that accusatory word, 'forsaken'?
Those unrisen words reverberate still.
Body temples crumble away,
the altar returns to eternal flame.
Knowing this, you still cried out.
As a bird's broken wing
un-fluttering,
yet not squelched,
am I.
I die not,
to long dead thoughts.
Forsaken, forsook, forgiven.
My fear of falling
makes me ever the lame pilgrim.
Will you walk a little away,
that I might feel your leaving?
I then might for certain know,
that you are my very own
sacred heart.
For I forget myself
in this long dream of existence,
though, all-unknowing,
I will surely
blunder into the light.
Divorced from rules we once held sacrosanct
The hunger pangs we felt were eased not stilled
We knew their judgments grim and hard embanked
Unrisen loaves that left us unfulfilled
Yet now our quest so fast and wild pursued
Creates a thirst for waters deep and clear
And fruit ripe picked must be our soulful food
To satisfy a primal longing here
But meat too freely taken lacks the salt
That flavored and preserved the elders’ bread
Let graceful limits come though finding fault
With reason we shall meet and make our bed
We’ll eat the skin and flesh and want no more
While casting out the poisoned apple core
An unrisen Sun has power —
Rays unsuitable to the day-world break the night cover
The Sun is brighter and stronger without sunlight
Some other things to do with the Sun too are a misnomer
It matters not if I see him leave at the end of prayer
He always returns to be a brief companion
To do which he has mountains to maneuver
They do aarti to the Ganga and him too
Pure orangeness of setting Ganga shares
It is her nature to love her beholder
He is her viewer and she his waiter.
Take off the glasses and
look at it closely, the infant
universe of the ?
receding age.
I said, weapons should not
be allowed to speak, cheating
the all terrain of
humankind.
The legality has to be
defined to earn the daily
bread for impregnable
hunger.
Whatsoever, there was no
precedence to take the occult
into the homes of non-
committal voices.
You become the temple
without god, who was
waiting at the gate.
Satish Verma
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