These Urban Rites

If the soul selects her own society
Then tell me who shut the door on years
Shared, oblivious, estranged that was
Once so intimate, divorced reality

Some things that fly – are meant to be
Don’t you know, lover, formerly Beloved?
Where we two crept through winters
Hand in hand for a short while

Was it enough, tell me lost friends?
I have known some of the most lonely hours
Sensitive perhaps to primitive emotions
Of abandonment, alienation, dependency

On a clan, a tribe, a friend, a partner
Who was not truly there, the family unit
Is then, not what it used to be
Brothers, unsistered, father impersonal and past

Faith is a fine invention, for community
But what if the world was dangerously anonymous
What if the trusting woods were no more?
And friendship, as if spoken by a distant bird

Whose voice has been ripped from evolution’s side
We, who were once two butterflies at noon
In our starry youth, overcome with glee
The tides have turned and we’ve been beaten

By men who would be our competition,
What mystery pervades such a world
Where the street and brutality have new meaning
And poverty a disfigured face to those
Who once might have shown us kindness.

Montreal, The Ruined City

These cities they smell
Of advertisement, new degrees
Of invasions of privacy
The flashing lights

Do not complete me
The anonymous crowds
Do not seem reasonable
These cities they

Have forgotten how to smile
I am alone in them
While surrounded by
People on their mobile outlets

Each connected to their
Private reality, which is artificial
They click ‘like’ on an
Imaginary event, a poor distraction

For living, and I realize
I am impoverished socially by this
The augmented reality is
Digital, and I could be anywhere

But do I want to be here?
In a culture, that refuses
To speak the common tongue
English, in a city with a poor economy

These cities they seem to be
Getting more impoverished
As the decades celebrate
Cheap technological progress
And the provincial politics
Of the human condition continues.

Suicide of a Diwan

The streets are mute
And the downtrodden are cold
And the girl pretends she
Has many suitors
The handkerchief in my hands

Is nothing much more
Than a rag now
And the night only has one moon
And the fountains have
Ten thousand pennies

I carry the “No” that you gave me
Buried somewhere, as if
It was a part of me now
My love is spinning
The murmur of the masses

Grows loud and I tremble
At the greed of this society
That takes more than it gives
Until giving means giving
To those who would profit from you

The afternoon was something else
Sunlight had been forgotten
If I die like this, from regret
Leave the balcony open
The reaper will harvest

The soul of my art
In my study
Beneath my dirty sheets
From my balcony I can see him
He finds the weight of the snow

Annoying like a transparent shadow
The streets will still be mute
And the downtrodden will
Still beg at the metro of the church
And when I am gone

I will feel myself both like
The balcony, and the tower, and the skies
Moving up, in a stream of shadow-light
And there, I will
Pretend that God loved me.

LANDSCAPE WITHOUT ANGELS

Bravely in a land of dust
As pilgrims we make our way
To some far country we believe is good
But the truth is, we are all immigrants

Nomads and priestesses of our faith
Sojourning in foreign countries
In heart-broken cities that endure
An agony to submit

To the volatile finger of God
Or to thrust our lives
In the climate or our Self-Will
Our solid body craving so much

In the muted landscapes of our youth
Bravely in a land of dust
As pilgrims we make our way
In forever-turning seasons

That bend in the breeze with rust
Beneath implied-expectations where
Our worth is judged, every day.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/the-city-lights-152148064

An Urban Afterlife

Aspiring to empty myself of information
The city carves me up with an orbit of
Advertisements, carcinogens, plastics

I am afflicted – rehearsing my escape
Where on the Earth can I leave it?
Modern life injures my spirit

Like a repetitive cognitive stress fracture
Of too much schizophrenia & separation
This world has chosen a kind of doom
*
Without volunteers, for needless kindness
I want a simple life, like fruit ripening
Before you eat it on a Sunday morning

Aspiring to coax myself back into balance
The city trespasses over my congruity
With an excess of competition

For wealth and breeding, for a restless
Workaholic’s lifetime of drudgery, slavery
I am stripped of my humanity a bit more
*
Year by year, till I reach my thirties
With hardly dream or innocence –
We believe the lies they tell us, until
We begin to tell ourselves the same lies.

Lament of Individual Freedom

Love walked alone
With a companion of the Self
That wore a heart of pain
In a name, a vacant horizon

Without a descendant line
Love walked alone
Accosted by harsh individualism
Autonomy became an exaggeration

Of running strong without limitation
Love walked alone
With no common goods
Of things to trade from the heart

Life became an anonymous journey
With a lonely middle without reward.