wb :

I walked a road, beneath a boulevard of trees that gaped and arched like the ribs of some monstrous whale that had swallowed me but was empty inside, ravaged by time and hunger and pestilence that it had to swallow something as small, pathetic, insignificant as myself to stave off its mortal pangs. As though its flesh was already half-eaten away, the sun poked its rays between the branches, stabbing spears of some great fisherman with a shield of shining gold that blinded the Medusa to take her head; so I walked down, its throat impaled by the terrible splendour of a vengeful god.

I walked that road alone, as though there was nobody else to walk with; the oldest monster of old, the last leviathan, its beached corpse sucked every breath with labour, swept every morsel into its mouth despairingly as its gargantuan bulk thrashed, twitched to keep warm, even as the rays of the sun warmed its carrion-to-be. I strolled beneath its hide, left my footprints on the flesh of that which wrecked ships, broke nations, wrought devastation on Earth so complete the ancients named it and feared its name.

So pathetic now!- but I walked the road, paved in pools of blackened blood, clotted and hardened in a profusion of pebbles, and stared as the sky sprung another salvo at the Earth, the two locked in a mortal grip like titans wrestling. At the dusk of day, even Atlas falters and Hercules wavers; I let the two rest in their writhing embrace, and brought my feet ahead of each other, intent on finding the end of that throbbing maw, the bowels of the great creature that even I called home now and walked the alleys of in search of something I only had a vague picture of.

That vague picture I held in my hand, a map or painting or torn shred of canvas on which the directions to salvation could be found. Perchance perdition, but the road I walked led me onwards, and there was nowhere else to go; so much for a map. Still its presence in my hands reassured me, as though the path I walked down, lined with the specks of shadows sprayed from the rays that spilled across the ground, was Destiny, was Fate, was the straight and narrow way that I should never stray from lest I lose my soul in damnation.

When the gods give you a road, walk it!- there is nothing else you can do, when the bars of your cage are the ribs of a nameless beast that yet flails its final breaths, shaking the world with the tremors, the inhumanity of its suffering, each quiver of agony rocking your path as a bolt from heaven splits the air and roars of its power. Each step I take is at the mercy of my maddened master, which might crush me in the labyrinthine folds of its gullet with the slightest sneeze. Stalwart I stride, but travellers as myself already know that any moment we might find ourselves less a breath and a heartbeat.

I am a traveller, and my journeying never ceases. Even on a road as straight as this, wrought by the same divinities that built our frail flesh from mud and air, there is a wanderlust in my heart that drives it onwards. May it be the patterns that the sun throws on the ground, or the shapes the leaves form in the whimpering wheezes of the grand entity that wrapped its jaws about me, there is always something different to see, something else that lingers at the edge of remembering, then bids me goodbye in the blink of a half-woken eye.

The shoes I wear are old, but scarce as old as the monster of the sea that gasps on land like a drowning man, scarce as old as even my own race, who were infants huddled around campfires when the oceanic behemoths had watched countless mountains rise and fall. Now the last of their kind lies with the last of mine, and we are two waltzers to the strains of some melody that ears cannot hear, notes that eyes cannot read, and instruments even the devil cannot hope to play. We are harmonics on the same frequency, the same flesh in different form, our hearts beating on the same accord.

I am a creature of the universe, that journeys down the throat of fearsome time who in his age lies dying on the shore. So long ago he counted all the grains, each one a day that he would live to see; now he has counted each and every one, and found the last beneath my feet, which walk and step their path because a merciless deliverer of judgement: fate, demands the souls of time and man alike.

-~-

In the tradition of posting once a month to keep the ol' blog on life-support.

// A sonnet cycle

An evening lost to strangers on the street
Who peddle hours, sell illegally
Exchanging for your soul, another minute-

You cannot come near them as carelessly
As I have done. They linger in the light,
And hawk their wares where one might triumphantly

Declare his victory over certain night
When all around, the hands of watches tick
Without a sound, so as to be polite.

And as I roared, the candle burned its wick,
The day dissolved to dusk yet incomplete
To leave a few lit windows, stark and stoic;

I checked the time, the sky, and found defeat,
An evening lost to strangers on the street.

-~-

It is the night, a shimmer in the night,
A glint of silver dream, a fetid finger
To graze my nape, the morning's old malinger
That stood my hair, that toss'd me left and right
Beneath my blanket, safe I thought I slept
But cold is flagrant, oh so gently burning,
And in my sleep, I never knew the turning
As cold and clamour carelessly they crept

I bed with Winter and a herd of nightmares,
Upon her needles, midst their maddened neighs,
The verve of phantoms clutching at my nerves
For when my eyelids flutter, into nowheres
The ghosts of morning fade by ancient ways
Into my past, a fate they scarce deserve.

-~-

My night is lit by clinic fluorescence
All through the hours, till the sun again
Dares peek through grey-wooled curtains, takes his rein
And rides his chariot o'er the senescence
Of worlds that rot in ignominous black,
The mould of time, held back by desperate men-
Like trembling scratchings of an inkless pen,
They wreak upon this earth with soul alack

For dreams are stronger, fiercer than the wan
Of pallid noon, the god of feeble yearns.
I slumber in its glory, torn apart
By night and dark, for day is powerless when
The fire in the sky no longer burns
As bright as that which lights my mortal heart.

-~-

I shiver. It is morning, and my sun
Breaks bleakly over rippling sheets. I sneeze,
Disturbing asymmetricalities,
And then their silk-dune shadows merge to one.
It is a time when I should be resigned,
But somehow, something tugs me to my bed,
That bows my black-capped, great, and mighty head
And swallows sunrays gingerly consigned
To fetch me from the maw of somnolence.
The shadow tendrils flit as light as air,
As tentative as morning's breath on glass;
Those heavy hands to hold my reverence
Have clutched it close and signed their sigils where
The brightest light will never dare trespass.

O God, thou who art mildly terrible,
You awe me with your stubbly clouds, which shave
And spatter their despondence on the pave
That shrugs the water off, immiscible.
You strike fear in the hearts of kids and mice,
O mighty one! who rocks the air at night
By knocking on the panes with drizzles slight,
The flaccid drops, o through the air they slice
To kiss the ground yet trampled by my feet
And sog up the foundations of my city
That through the years, it falls to apathy
Returning to the earth, a khaki sheet-
The slate of Gods that work their drops by drops
And watch the world until its turning stops.

-~-

since we don't seem to be posting muchly

Deliverance is still an age away.
You know it when the skies are tinted gray,
The hue of seas that burst in ragged spray
Upon a night which parts in shreds and rags
For pins and pricks of light, the morning's dregs.
This is the night that births another day,
That spawns the brood of men which everyday
Are, drowsy, dragged from concrete cliffs and crags
To stir machines of painted metal slags,
Each sputter, chokes on smoke, another gags;
Scarce older than the trees, but looking hags,
Parading puppets dressed in tattered flags-
If these are children of the earth, I say
Deliverance is still an age away.

-~-

This one was written in an epic burst of inspiration. I call it a sonnet because it's written in iambic pentameter, has 14 lines, and has seven or less rhymes. Heck, if Robert Frost could write terza rima sonnets I don't see why I can't play around a little. But eh, enough ranting.

You are like a needle shot into my vein
puncturing its wall
drawing out the gall
in a splendrous insertion of pain

Then you pulled out, and the wound bleeding, scarred,
and my blood thickened, clotted
widening, blackening, blotted
and stopped the throb of my heart.

Moonbeams gloss over cobbled streets
Washing them aglow.
A glass sea,
Deep as granite
Passes underfoot as you
Run into me.

i love it when we sit beneath the sky
and look up at it.
it reminds me that the sky is upwards, as it usually is.
and i am thinking "it's really blue" when you give me a kiss
which surprises me. i wonder why
i don't mind the taste of your spit

which reminds me. our love flows
just like the river in the spring, beside
the spot of grass beneath the tree in the meadow where we sat.
the world around us is rather green and flat,
but i write it again anyway as though nobody knows.
just like our relationship. nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

whoops, now you know why i'm fidgeting
even as i put my arm about your shoulders.
the warm caress of soil upon my arm
is starting to irritate me, damp and was that a worm?-
and the way you hold on to me, gripping, tightening,
like you want to ignite our last smoulders

into a blaze, the last of summer's sun.
ha-ha, no way.
didn't we get bored of this a long long while ago?
no reason i can think of to keep up this show.
you know we've had our fun
and you've had the lion's share of the say

the whispers, rages, weeps and roars of love.
i've been content to listen.
somehow though you never seem to stay angry for too long
and eventually it's all ha-ha and fun and song
but i'd swear to god above
all the while i'm chewing my nails in vexation.

so while you nuzzle, i look up. in fact, i stare,
at sky and river, trees and meadows green.
eyes closed, you hold me close. perhaps too close for comfort.
and you have that indescribably fascinating smile. like a pervert.
i wonder what sort fruit our love will bear?
- haps children, or strychnine.

all your fantasies and their gallant steeds
they streak across the sky, in their wake Apollo's chariot drowning
uncaring about the moon in their sky frowning

while down below, upon the blooming weeds
a rooster crows and goes to sleep

there can be no rest while the night is deep-
stop your ears, and the carnival will dance
close your eyes, and their music finds their way into your trance
purples, greens, and pinks, upon a star-studded black
and the silent crescent who turns her haughty back

never remembered by their deeds
(only in the dark does your tritium glow)
and when you walk in the sun, nothing will you know

nothing will you remember of the dancing in the sky
the meteors' frantic waltz before they blaze and die
with shimmering aurora, her iridescent gown ablaze
you will wave your hair along with the grasses
(still in your left hand, three fingers clutching your glasses)
and through half-curled lips gently tongue your praise
and in the morning when you rub your eyes

tell me- when a dreamer wakes- does he laugh or cry?

I open my eyes every morning
to see my world in a different perspective.
I’m parallel to it.
The old taste of last night’s vacillating reverie lingers,
Gently treading on not quite awakened taste buds.

I get up.
A bit dizzy from the altitude of everlastingness;
life is buzzing beneath me.
the noncongruent stories of yesterday,
and the day before and the day after
whir through my mind,
almost as if played on film.

to fill up a three second gap
in conversation
Someone asks
“what have you been doing?”
sounding the whips of syntax.
I am stuffing the tireless altitudes of the created space
– the void
With eloquence.

the sinewy efforts at sincerity
– can't you feel it gliding round you?
mutating, yielding the effort-filled phrases of speak to air,
compounding, saccharinely opening the sheerest
the trellised tiny purposes, parables,
this marketplace
of tightening truths
and balmy drops of joy

These blue chords plunging deep to twang a melody of resonating power
This luscious melancholy voice crying a note of penetrating assurance
That randy rhythm moving my eyes to gaze upon the thought of our aching memories
Hope to find my look plunges deep
Hope to find my lips cry a note
Hope to find my touch will sooth the ache
Lend me your heart, I'll give it back whole if it takes my blood
Lavish me your solace, I'll keep it secure if it costs me my own
Grant me a moment with your thoughts, alone to cherish
Hope to find my look plunges deep
Hope to find my lips cry a note
Hope to find my touch will soothe the ache
When I speak with him my toes hush to listen, in silence enthralled
When I stop and catch a sudden scent, my pores soak in prostrate delight
It's bound to be shimmering of hues, Michaelangelo reaching down to paint our sky
It's bound to be murky of thunder, Van Goh splashing the clouds with rusty rain
It's bound to be surreal as fiction, Rousseau sketching what was only dreams
When I touch his body again on that 19th of September I hope to find only him

I. mellifluous

Sweetly or smoothly
cascading dapples of
midnight blues &
lemon chiffons.
coralshades striate
antiquewhites.
a dash! of ivory,
a whisper! of bisque,
a hint! of chartreuse,
humming murmurs
flowing; melodious


II. ostentatious

showy; pretentious;
trying to etch a
presence, an
existence; but only
to leave behind
a hushed tone of
caricaturizedimitations.
blurs of intense jazz
drone in the
humdrum;
within depths of
ambivalence, yet
played seemingly
to attract attention


III. pastiche

a piece of music
confused&blurred
by paraphernalia,
stained with traces
of paranoia.
in the quiet tone
of pathos, I
envision that
you are just
another undistinguished
daub on my hued
psychedelic palette,
made up of borrowed
bits and pieces.

adam, thought you might like to know, this poem had nothing to do with you. i was feeling vicious at that time. lols. love ya anyhow. haha.

If happiness comes with forgetting,
grey matter is a small price to pay.

The Inability to describe
Whitewashed hopes in denial.
In denial of love
too afraid to risk all in a folly's embrace
too impure to hide the truth
Putting sugar-strained smiles on display
But only in gibe
too powdery to see the pink vibrance of life beneath
too thin to taste the sentimental yearning
Of a heart without a soul
adrift and separate by the madness
The madness ingrown
too many times before
too many times before
too many times before
oh! the discombobulate
emotions in a verbal manner

bodies entwined in smoke and dancing
writhing desperately –
clinging.

dusted visages, titian sanguine lips
painting smudges
on collars and
burnished cheeks

careless whispers of love and desire
hearts twisted, tangled
and reason has stolen
fancy’s painted wings

the phantom shapes that haunt
sweet reveries of
lives,
seemingly on filmstrips

What cruel vices poets do inflict
upon the fright, unknowing, youthful world;
upon an early morning interdict
with Language's faint and frivolous curls
a flower I find I can no longer smell
without immediately thinking of a bell
and rhyme's tyranny I patiently bore
until my coffee turned a metaphor

what beauty justifieth this torment?
in time each word must surely lose its power
a symbol of some artist's discontent?
i much rather call a flower a flower

this was written one disgruntled night
by a poet short on sleep and sight.

Each sliver of disguise
that peels away from you
I treasure it contentedly
I nurse it in my eyes

That when you fall apart
and flippantly entombed
You float in faint eternity
Preservèd in my heart.

"What use are hands on a clock?", he said; "You can't hold on to time. It slips away, it crumbles like a weather-beaten rock".
"That's true", I replied and smiled at him, "fingers on time have just the use as stones on the graves, on those who have died".
He laughed and sipped at his tea and stirred it; "Not consolation for those who've kicked it".

I write for you. It has to be
better than feeling like a worm,
while wallowing in increasingly
melting goo. So I shall mow
down any feelings that show, peeking out
like sprouts in brightly
green rows. Spring came early
and uninvited, that is true,
but everything I do, I'll
later rue. However, it's an easy
matter to glue a letter firm and
tight so I won't squirm,
and I'll never remember.

It should comprise things about
the universe and seas, then go
on to curse and wheeze. Perhaps
some metaphors comparing love to
war, or to unidentifiable black fungal moss?
Why, that might help to close some
doors. Not that you really care,
of course, but even if we never
watched the sunsets in a breeze, or
languidly together fed the fish, which
sounds quite boring, and probably
is, shock and horror, I think I'll
gladly? miss? whatever constitutes "all this".

____________________
comments v appreciated, especially if it's too prosaic?
eli

is the time to shed your old skins
like a snake. Pack rats
should not be cowed
by the mountains of memories
crammed in boxes, but be ruthless
as the tiger. Out with the old!
And tomorrow, as the rooster crows,
you can pig out on cakes and civilities
til you're hoarse. Pineapple tarts and
rabbit sweets are particularly good for this.
Just don't behave like a bull
in a china shop when goaded; only children
get to monkey around. Your thrice-removed
cousin's cat stretches,
yawning like a minature dragon.
Even it is dog-tired.

eli

_______________
(extremely unseasonal post. well, i wrote it before cny! and please tell me you guys know what a pack rat is. half the people i showed this to didn't!)

freshly basked, make you toasty
when it's cold, or so I'm
told. These just
look at me quizzically.
No, mustn't act rashly.

Must it be none? Not even
one? The browned and crisp
crowns seem to frown
at my indecision.
Outside the sun winks - almost,
I think - and I say "Nuffink."

eli