This Hungry Wave
A hungry wave rumbles
through our streets,
painting this April red,
pillaging the homes,
filling the graveyards
harvesting the bodies of dead.
Humans have turned into crops
feeding the starved earth,
a scythe runs invisible,
gleaning its prized stock.
This spring, the terror
blooms in abundance.
This year, we have learnt
that doom doesn’t make a noise.
It comes insidiously
and silently poisons the air
with an imperial poise.
Our gods have forsaken us
as we have our idols,
we are searching for them
behind masks, behind goodness
in vials of survival.
The gold sits neglected
Luxury is a hospital bed.
We, the coveters of riches,
are hoarding oxygen instead.
Liminal Space
What is liminal?
The thin line between appearing and disappearing,
the blurring between dream and existence,
fiction and reality.
The red that fades into no color.
The traffic that dwindles into silent empty
streets.
Ice thawing until it is water
Body shrinking until it is dust.
Cataractous vision until the blindness sets in.
The shallow breath that separates the dead
from alive.
The thinnest line between life and afterlife.
That pause.
The memory warping until it is forgotten
The Chinese whispers.
The lost in translations.
The meaning
until it is meaningless.
Emotions fading into apathy.
Love waning into loss.
Reader
We will not die but
talk and talk, endlessly
from mouths of yawning
tomes and yellow books,
vocal chords straining
against the blue screens.
We will sing through
those lights
through those pixels,
our voice imagined by
the reader who will
feed us immortality,
he being the god with
a potion of ambrosia
and we drinking
from his poured cup
of curiosity.
How he will resurrect us
mining from the pages,
drawing from
a well of words,
our life force.
How we will be startled
out of our excessive slumber
of oblivion
setting us free from our graves,
taking arms against death
and live like ghosts, like jinns,
fleetingly alive
in our afterlife,
our verses echoing,
ferrying us from
the otherworld
into this.
Ennui
This collection of hours,
these numberless days,
ask a fortune teller,
how will it all fall apart
how will we be asymptotes
and when exactly will
we start drifting?
Is it the seven-year itch?
Is it the bell jar that traps
our desires?
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Is the man holding the cigar
in love with the cigar or
in love with slow death?
Is the decay also
between people?
Is the white picket fence
a monument of love, for love
built by love?
But does it also wilt with love?
Does it get smothering, does it
get humdrum,
if it does then when?
What when people feel like
prison rather than freedom?
What when only the lady
on the wall is free to
dream yet tethered with cobwebs?
Will she get a dusting
or is apathy contagious,
from animate to the inanimate,
to the stoppered
bottle where the liquor
waits to be set free?
Where the mouth waits
to be set free,
where inhibitions wait
to be set free,
where the birds wait to
be set free,
where two knotted souls
wait to be set free.
Ask the fortune teller
will he walk out first
or will she,
from this ennui?
Ghost of Past
We want to kill the living and
bring back the dead.
How we summon the ghost of our past.
How this ghost is always hollow,
peeling at the edges
frayed at the seams.
It dismantles time,
like an engine shuddering to death.
Until the memory is warped,
a faintly stained table cloth
except on a windy morning
it comes wheezing back.
No parachute unfolds.
No wings grow.
No carpet flies.
It jumps out of the wide sky,
lands on the earth,
a meteorite vaporized,
as rocks upturn,
a crater is formed.
No residue, only emptiness.
Only a yawning gap
filling up steadily with
anxieties of what’s
yet not seen,
what’s yet not done.
Past can never live in the present though.
It is the home that calls us
when we are leaving
and shows us the door when we try
to stay and own it.
Now we wrap it in body bags
lest it gets out and
continues to infect.
The ochre, the rust.
The sadness and beauty of
the moment
when you look at someplace
thinking that you will never
be able to see it,
never again in the same light
never again as you behold it now,
A thing forever lost to time.
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