On A Slow Gloaming
To Rijurekh da
The thin light from the window
sniffs, recognises the smoky petrichor
rising from my mellow core.
In the garden I buried my lies, fed by kitchen rot grows
a Pinocchio reed.
If you stare hard; eyes blur; 'I' dissolves
freeing you to see more in one, how a reed holds
some infinite reeds, possibilities,
as if a lie can be true when its turn arrives.
On Our Seventh Anniversary
A frayed postman
wearing a threadbare flat cap
delivers a letter you posted
seven years ago.
I offer him a dream.
He chooses coffee instead.
He leaves; I open the envelope,
and grasshoppers
from the heartland green
hops out of the creased within.
I remember - we've declared
them to be the national beings
of our Republic of Mind.
You are asleep. I whisper,
"They are alive."
Cat's Tongue, House No. One Hundred And Ten
The lane makes a bottleneck.
We have a name for the narrow isthmus;
we forgot that; perhaps the lane's purpose
is to pour the world into the house at the end,
No. One hundred and ten.
I desire to apprehend if you still live there,
keep the books you borrowed from me
decades ago on an evening remembered
for hidden feelings, fog muffled streetlights
casting unstable shadows of us on my celadon wall.
My mother coughed and coughed as you depart.
I recall you bent, hands fisted, books in your tote.
You didn't acknowledge that you would not return,
no one could. We stopped and watch a starling caught
in the orange cat's maw. The cat spoke
with its mouth full. I didn't know the tongue.
The Ghost of Democracy
The children's parade
led by a white eyed man
whose wand tilter rotates
and performs as a guiding baton
passes.
The morning lies thick on the skin.
Even the starlings in
the moist grass observe airy sombre.
Future nears the middle ground
where a leader will summon
the ghost of democracy and
the roads, streets and lanes will
shiver like a Ouija board.
The author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of 'Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe.
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
No comments:
Post a Comment