At a certain phenomenon of light #NationalPoetryMonth #NaPoWriMo

At a certain phenomenon of light

In the jazz of listening to your jazz
It was a peacock’s cry
It was a re-statement of romance

When you thought romance was dead
And in perceiving this, I best
Perceive and listen to myself
Nor night nor blue, I exchange with pale light
My needs for the universe

I am an anecdote on how
To address clouds, elicit
The funest philosophers to speak from the dead

I am a promenade in mortal rendezvous
That lead nowhere, essentially
Converging upon oneself
In the streets and orchid sellers
In the women who blow kisses with just a look

They are young and do not hold candles
But I can feel evolution’s
Arrogance in their firm bodies

It’s not divine ingenuity then
To take one last look at the lilacs
Or in the hymeneal air search for a fragrance
That might help me remember
Earth, lavender, fantastic star

Looking for a Saturday metaphor
To describe the twenty bridges of feeling
The nuance of how meaning escapes
And time floods like ancient aspects.

Repetition of Art

Plunder the Influence

We aren’t finishing lines here
We are writing about love
Whatever we write
It’s there like alchemy
Writing the history of art
Over again with each poem

There is no grasping for wisdom
It’s summarized by the synthesis
Of what came before
Like culture evolving
Like a more refined perception of beauty
To sit in the chair called “witness”

ii

Where wonder is endlessness
Born, again and again
We are writing about love
Because it’s what is in the oven
Our womb breathes it
We aren’t finishing lines here

We are just living, doing what we love
Mourning the loss not knowing sooner
It’s a state of wonder
Overtaken by light
Black windows facing the future
With drift, descent, speed

And the mutual influence
Of reciprocal silence
Communicating in subtle gesture
The incommunicable.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Traveler-525752443

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I

In the Haiku between you and I
You and me, there is only silence
For I followed you blindly
Without words, like a fool’s errand

And our experiences were finite
But as poets we were prophets
Taking the ordinary
To make it all-beautiful

Immersed in the variables
Of relationships, I became
My own kind of poetic analytics
Poetry defined as immediate
Identification, and you were there

A myth in my eyes of incarnations
A lost journey of mine without a home
I followed you through time like a nomad
Of a poem our lives once wrote together

So pure and profound a calling
A writer-seer’s blind spot of pleasure
Ethereal, unattainable, self-sacrificial
That’s how the poetry between us sounded

Transparent, with a red dress of infatuation
Still warm, the muse of powerful
Barefoot cravings and blue-stretched out
Mythical bed of alphabetical nipple-tested
Vowel-slurring sweet anarchy.

Us

Us

There is always too little
Of us to go around, that sharing
I would want to be as mutual
But, I like them more than they can comprehend

Never mind reciprocate, it’s a shame
To be a people loving introvert
Never able to fully express

What you feel inside like
Like a family that went
Horribly wrong carrying the trauma

Without knowing the story
Each time I fall in love, I think
It’s a bit for myself, like sleep lost
In a troubled childhood, that I

No longer remember, or
The fragrance of things that you wish
You could retrieve, like the Sea

Or the forest when you lived in
Tropical countries, where fruits
Felt entirely different in your mouth
And now you labour, a slave more or less

To circumstance and the choices that made you
Choose fate over your own free-will
That you were not aware, were choices at the time.

Before adversity

Before adversity

before the finite variables
conspired to bring us
twixt circumstance, fate
free-will and intelligence

before the whispers of
our wounded self faltered
into the light of adulthood
before we felt truly loved

by another outside of our family
before we found what
we were truly passionate about
before we learned the Earth

ii

was an algorithm headed for
probable disaster, ruin, early graves
before we learned that meritocracy
was a myth, a name, given and taken

away from the masses long ago
before we meditated on bliss
so transcendent as to make our
personal cares irrelevant

I did not know how to appreciate
What was given, the
quality of gratitude appreciated
with our share of struggle,

iii

tragedy, drama, impoverishment
before my mother died
and I became another motherless child
I had an improbable vision of

the world and life that repeated
encounters with reality
were to correct, slowly
my sample-learning size

wasn’t extraordinary, in fact
rural living made it rather dull
before my idealism could have
been beaten down and my innate

goodwill was numbed by
the homeless sleepers, competition
poverty, heart-break, bankruptcy
student-debts, firings, lost friends

IV

= I might have been someone
You would have missed, noticed
Who knew who he was
Who knew how to hope
Who kept a little faith