After a bath, i feel clean.
but there remains other unwashable things.
Spots and stains by many kinds of sin.
After a bath and a prayer,
inside and out, It is like being ,
one half clean and the other half
marred and soiled by sin!
(07.01.2022)
White Faces
and We the People
go hand in hand.
White hands
shake
white hands
without ever washing
their hands.
Handcuffs,
In God we trust
Affirmations
rendered on
God's word
promotes equality
Yet,
same crime
different times
feels like
slavery after the fact
Your flag
rebellious
by nature
Mine unified
with plenty of
disruptions
I tend to side with you
But that only leaves
Me handcuffed
swearing
to a misappropriated deity
while you
are telling me
to get over it
high-fiving your
one and only
***** friend
washing your
hands
The sun has set upon the hills
The moonlight glares as my body
Awaits the embrace of dreams.
My mind wanders, my thoughts drift
A noise stirs in the silence,
The crash foreshadows more.
A scream—is it my mother?
A boom, more yelling too,
A thud, is that my brother?
The men invade my room
I follow them and do as I’m told,
Kill them, they say, and hand me a knife.
I feel the fear in my family’s eyes,
My chance for life rests in their destruction
I give into my captors’ demand,
Coating my hands in unwashable stains.
My leaders delight in my compliance,
The tallest one turns to me
He motions to leave.
I step into the cold night,
I’m alone and shaking, my eyes leak,
My masters join me; both grinning
The stinging in my head is a joy.
the dead eyes frighten
when the secret held by many
has already seasoned the crowd
now fed up with everything &
dead set with nothing left to lose
out in the street where they know
deep in their hearts
that the only sense of justice
that they’ll ever attain
will come from striving together
against what doesn’t respect them
against what doesn’t value their existence
against what has to fall &
what will inevitably fall---
for the secret on their lips
which they may whisper together now
while amassing in the street,
is one from which the rest believe that they are
immune,
but it is the last true verse left to be uttered by a sane
individual & it doesn’t abide by critics or editors or
authoritarian tyrants who look about the rest of us with
manufactured smiles concocted from blood/dirt on their
unwashable hands with contempt for our very
lives.
Let’s not go,
let’s not reach anywhere.
The toenails have started digging in the earth,
to make peace with the distress response
of the bruised hunger for transactional surrender.
And the surrogate mother will abandon
the child for the father who had
run away in pursuit of pleasure, like others
sowing his wild oats in rags
unwashable in the milk of mercy.
It has spilled again my full heart.
The pain provokes the stopped clocks,
in the wake of explosions. Unstitched
fissures bleed, I see the ashen face
of a floating wisdom.
SATISH VERMA
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