On a cold night

The night is cold in a nearly ethereal way.
My eyes are lost in the depths of the indigo-grey night sky
and my body unravels around me.
The feeling is inexplicable - it is an ephemeral desire
that draws me towards the stars - celestial orbs that radiate and allure -
as fleeting as a passing breeze that barely touches the earth.
It feels as if the vastness within us descended from the sky,
from the light-years between this galaxy and the next -
maybe we belong with the stars
and we are merely adopted into this world
where a consuming darkness
dimmed our light.

To tell you the truth

To tell you the truth, I'm afraid of honesty -

of it's sharp, defined edges that cut like ice,

the way it outlines a person's face instead of his shadow;

how absolute it is, whole, intolerant of halves,

it's ability to probe into the seabed depths of a soul,

but mostly because of this:

how close it hits home, because home is where the heart is

and where we build our strongest defense.

What is time

What is time well spent

if barely a dent in the

surface of history, spread

thinly across the face of the earth?

The seconds are fleeting, and

minutes are eating into hours.

I sit still because the world is

moving and my heart moves

within my chest.

The Need To Be

Can I speak

(without technique)

without critique

of the words I use

(that I never had

the freedom to choose)?

The silences sting

more than anything

(as piercing as

a pointed stare or

the point of a finger,

and as deep as a wound

could be and still

remain unseen)

because they ring

(as echoes do)

of an emptiness,

a lack of -

a nothingness

(like the deceiving

vastness of a vacuum

stretching as wide as open arms)

in which it is impossible

to be.

As of now

We were never children,
but there were children who were once us,
with a wonder of the world
that outgrew us before we realised
it was gone.

But we grew anyway and
suddenly everything around us moved -
except they no longer moved around us,
the planets orbited the sun
and we felt smaller than we used to.

Now we are what we've never been before -
the people standing on the mountaintop
overlooking time,
trying to find their place in history, their
piece of puzzle in the 'big picture',
while everything is still growing,
still in fluid and motion,
before everything is still,
and still less than they
had hoped for.

The fear of change

I do not ask time for more or less

my palms enclose the present defensively

but my fingers bind my fragments

as the shore binds the sea

A Debate

You don't understand, I said,
But neither do I.

Don't you see?
We're in the same boat,
you and I,
surrounded by the same expanse of sea
and handspan width -
the distance in between my eyes -
of sky.

My argument?
It was lost in words long ago.
Only two things I still know:
the seawater made me
even thirstier
and the sky is
infinitely wider than
a handspan.

Faith

Because it holds more water
than the sieve of science -
That was my thought
as I felt each
question
emotion
trickling
steadily
through
the pores
of my heart that
I only suspected
but never saw
and suddenly
I looked at the sky and
felt neither big or small
but a part of it all
because it was in me -
we were stitched
from the same thread
that went around the
world and wove it together
through the eye of
the needle that saw
and into eyes
that did not see.

Wild fire

What is this feeling -
A wild fire raging,
Consuming both heat and light -
That not even tears could dampen,
Could still with their flow.

But it is a desert,
The scorching sun on barren land -
The hardened heart of which, inside,
All that was has dried and died.

And it serves to choke
The thirsty throat
That could never speak the words she wrote.

On The Train

The train travels soundlessly.

People stand like figurines -
Glazed, untouchable -
Positioned in perfect balance
So that inertia barely moves them.

So many eyes,
With black holes for centers
Filled with - nothing;
Absorbing - nothing;
One vastness penetrating another,
They hold no emotion.

Stranger, what is your story?
Traveller, where are you heading?
Maybe we could weave a net
Of understanding deep enough
To draw emotion from this sea of people.

Even a smile could breathe warmth into this stillness -
Even the air is unmoved.

If I Could

You make me want to write, you know -
Crawl out of my skin and
Wear myself inside out
It's the wrong way, people say
But it feels right,
In that way wrong things do.

Vocabulary is stifling -
If I could show instead of tell,
I would show you the world,
Show you how the world looks
From here, where words fail,
From the center - core - heart - of
My soul - being -
The axis on which
My world - larger than earth, which only
Appears as the size of a coin in my mind
Amidst the backdrop of a vast darkness -
Rotates.

But there is no showing to be done -
Our hands could never construct
Such a language,
For hands can be touched and seen -
They are shown, they do not show -
And yes, here, where words fail
Is where we find ourselves.

This Tragedy

I have nothing to give
To the ground
But ashes
And the ground has
Nothing to give
To me
But the trees
Barely feel the wind
Unmoved
By this tragedy

I want to pretend

Swallow the pain
And swallow my pride
Maybe these could
Fill me inside

Voices in a Vacuum

If I opened my mouth to speak
Would it scream like blood
Or whisper, like tears?

What could it say?
The world is a vacuum,
It eats sound,
Swallows it whole,
And after it digests
The air and the ashes,
It is empty.

We mouth syllables
As if breathing,
Inhaling and
Exhaling silence,
And maybe one day,
When our lips turn dry,
And the lip-readers turn away,
We will finally have the leisure
To listen.

Tonight

This is where it ends.

The violins are playing slow tonight,
With their trembling bows dipped low - a dying dance -
Grasped in closed fists - do they want peace now? -
And poised under chins held high
There is nowhere to go
But down.

There are cries for help, for
A buoy, a plank, a splinter;
Something,
Anything,
To hold onto -

As the silver anchor
The legs thought to chain to themselves
Turns into stone, dull as ash
Under the night sky,
And they begin to sink into the water,
The same water,
That feet once walked on.

What a sight -
The flailing arms, wild like fire,
Soon grow slow, limp from the cold,
And then they are still,
Raised in surrender.
The half-empty boats leave -
why should they turn back? -
Carrying only bodies,
Ones like those that they are
Leaving behind;
Those that lie,
Drifting with the current,
Over the sea
Tonight.