How Poetry Should Be

Maybe this is how poetry should be -
Plain and patient,
Filtered of those translucent words
That leave blanks in your mind
You cannot fill -
Nothing to digest,
Just to swallow - slowly -
Like gulps of clear water,
Smooth and slippery
And clean -
Maybe.

Shadows On The Stage

Have we all become the antagonists?

The ones who cry wolf
And smile with teeth
Like polished daggers.

What are heroes but the ones
With their best side
Against the spotlight?

Because when the curtain falls
And the stage lights dim,
There is a darkness
No darker than any other
Spreading, consuming,
Like an infection.

We belong to our shadows -
We are not the masks we wear,
We are beneath them.

We are of a certain kind -
Perhaps not the beholders
We believe ourselves to be,
And the beauty we see
Only surrounds us.

Beneath the skin we are bone.
When we decompose,
Who knows
How we will be known?

Give Me Words

Give me words
To plug my ears, my mouth
And keep my sanity,
My sense and what clarity I have left
Inside my head.

Speak, speak before you
Lose your voice
Screaming for help.
Speak softly, in a language I can understand,
And maybe we can hold
A conversation
Heavier than air

Weigh me down -
A rock, a burden,
A doorstop -
With a whisper
And show me that
We inhale the same smoke,
The one that
Lies over my eyes.

I do not want to be silent -
In the silence
Everything is dead.

The Day Is Red

The day is red;
It fumes and breathes -

The sky is ablaze with crimson rain
Running, bullets of acid, down
War-worn faces;

Red reads in lines across wrists -
Battle scars of
Children of war;

Can you feel the rage -
The diesel that runs in our arteries
And seeps through our skin

While the smoke we breathe
Into the lungs of our eyes
Smothers our senses

The day is burning
Bright, and turning,
Waiting,
For another day.

Somebody

When will she have cried her full
And cried herself empty
How many times has she
Wanted to be someone to somebody
More than she wanted to be herself?

I am

I am not moved,
I cannot feel my legs.
I have no space, except the space
I occupy.
I fill a vacuum.
I search for - something -
I look inwards,
I look into a mirror.
I know nothing except what
I feel inside, and
I wonder,
Is this what it feels like, living in myself?

Deeper Things

Where the sea meets sand,
People scour the land,
For hollow shells and strings of coral -
Debris of the ocean
That the tide has cast ashore,
Unable - to search the waters for more

But this is the way
Learnt from age old philosophers
Those who, in their day,
Made the earth to be flat -
For they could not see beyond the horizon

To them,
Nothing existed that

escaped their understanding, and

Nothing could be understood

that escaped their sight,
But they saw only through their eyes

And did not see

The heart seeks always;

But the heart never sees
There lie deeper
Things than these

Unknown

Measure reason with the span of the mind
Compress theology into theories
Calculate values of time to find
Paper answers to abstract queries
Observe the universe through microscopes
See only what studies have shown
Searching eyes avert wider scopes
In fear of the unknown

Suddenly

Suddenly she can feel her veins
And the pain in her pulse
It was here to stay
Unlike everybody else

Strangers

Where is the stranger
In the capsule of a body
So familiar to your own

Maybe we are so alike
Because we were never meant
To feel so alone

What Poet

What poet composed
The poetry within us
Or creator supposed
That we would create

What love has waived
All terms and conditions
Or price has saved us
Our fall to fate

Tides

Tides of time washed over her,
Corrosive as coarse acid,
And there she stood, like pale shards of rock
Jutting out of the ocean
Which once made up a great silver arch,
Rising majestically
Above the waters beneath,
And now they were no longer an arch
Instead, standing still
They did not quite know
What they were,
What they were supposed to be,
Or how to draw a line
Between the two.

Sense

I am not going to pretend
I see any sense in living
But I can only try to live
As if time will be forgiving
And someday I will

Ecclesiastes 3:11

Eternity set in our hearts -
Within our very beings -
Yet we cannot see
Beauty in its infinite form;
But only a negligible fraction
Of what is to be
And what is to come.

Belated

I go through old photographs
To try and see into the emptiness you were
Hiding behind those eyes

I did not see the tears.

The warmth of the sun
Reminds me of that smile so long ago
Of a girl who once gave light to the world
But kept none for herself.