Born by a Whim

The nailed roof of my heart
Is overvast with rain
Dust to clean
These bitter fruit away
I summon the sun’s lion paws
To scratch my fate
Back into blood-alignment
My heart hath
No commentary left
But stolen music
From lost noons
Notes from the moon
Momentary words
Writ on cold stone
My bustling boughs
Are an umbrella to nobody
I cannot protect myself
The mad intensity of
My soul will kill me
With lips against the glass
And youth letting the light out
My inward eyes are
Always crying
I’ve learned how to hate
Through so much love
Baring no cruel intent
I have been corrupted
By women and their calculation
The ice moves near
The center of my pain
I am now a male courtesan
With a secret contempt
For the revelation of the game
And the character is me
The heartbroken break hearts
An all-too-eager willingness
To polish youthful bodies
With the glow of centuries.

I Devoured Your Lessons like a Savage

You seduce me with whispers
Of my own mortality, about how life is short
You guarantee in me a Revolution

For which you allow me to play the Hero
I’d suffice in happy endings, or not
Just for a masterpiece moment

With your lure of hospitality
You incite to passion with Headlines
Of how excited you are to know me

To allow me to enter you
Do you have any idea, how many
Emotions you inject into me

How quickly you shyly raise my pulse?
Like a get-well coordinator, you tease me
With an executive tantalizing order

You seduce me with candles and your
Warm brown body melting for my touch
Have you ever noticed how fierce you drive me

Forging a passage and passport to your bed
You close the curtains when I arrive
I’d thrust at any perfect link, of your
Blue butterfly heart, talented and fertile.

In the Earth’s Glory

I’ve bathed in invitations of uncertainty
I’ve wept some lonely history, in my time –
Ached for, my turn to come

For marriage, happiness, friendship
It was very hard to learn
To be patient, to not want too much –

I’m standing here before you
I do not know what I bring
Or if you can hear music

In my secret heart, it comes echoing
There were contagious smiles
Laughter traded between us

You said you liked to see a man
Come undone in bed, face to face

With your ever actively creative libido
I turned with the lips of the biggest happiness
To bathe in your eager-sweet hospitality.

I Smashed your Body – With the Ends of Love

You say you have built walls
Erected to protect yourself from
The world’s doom, maybe my doom

But what if I purified our creation
With a challenge of echoed purity
I gaze towards your eyes with

The logic of affectionate intervention
It’s not that I have gifts, only
The radiant clarity of connection

The little drops of vulnerable intimacy
I have no old-time God hidden in my loins
Only human commentary, spectacular

Sweetness in my charge of your wet places
I will spread my cloak of stars
Over your honeyed entrances

You say you have built walls
I will break down these walls with music
With a miracle of shared orgasm
Obscure your beauty, and anchor our union.

There are No More Lovers

A cloud of grasshoppers climb
From the rose that is my heart
It passed before the sun

Between the Moon and the crickets
Battalions of trials before security
I join the wandering and forget

Holiness, with an ordinary lust
For sensations I cannot find
They would trample the green

But I do not sense the freshness
Perhaps I have had too many lovers
Their nameless histories, inherited

In my corridor of tip-toe guilt
I’ve served the densest gardens
With the highest of intentions

But my lips are bruised on the lips
Of the bruised lips of those I have kissed
My virtues have been undressed by time.

Your Body is my Museum of Youth

I am dumb beside your body
I could once speak words, so beautifully
But poems, were once beautiful

Now I feel life’s kite moving
Upwards and onwards
You love because it pulls you

To Motherhood, to creation
I am dumb beside the challenge
Of winning your affection

To become only a tool, a means to an end
Until someone finds me, I shall be
The lonely hunter, contracting with solitude

I am dumb beside your instincts
They speak more loudly, than my lyrics
Unworthy and pure, poetry
Is for the flowers I left on the ground
In my meditations of youth.

I’ve Had Only Cruel Lovers

I hurt once and for all
Into silence, I retreat into
Ivory Towers, inner strength
To find sustenance, against abandonment

I have no more praise left –
For the friends who have left
Let me cry Help beside you
Mostly by seeking to aid you

I hurt once and for all
After heartbreak, I feel the great distance
Between me and all of society
I hurt once and for all

The wed red tongued alienation
Of bitter defeats, judged not desirable
I have no honor, as a son even
I hurt once and for all

After dysfunctional family ties
Linger like morbid displays of duty
I hurt once and for all
As an angry teacher of human cruelty

I have no more patience left
For rejection, for honesty
I hurt once and for all, by default
The smell that burning cities give
Of hearts left alone in their toil.

When Geography Meets Biography

My sky, lights up with questions/
When I am with you
Like an applause meter of naturalness
Acceptance, is a beautiful thing

With references, of quiet friendship/
I don’t need clever turns of phrase
But simplicity, that spells out the
Beautiful names, like laughter unbidden

I’d cherish that, like lightning/
Out on the evening veranda
Or raindrops heavy with moisture
That long for the ground, the quiet Earth

So strong and stable, so in need/
Of a little water, that’s how I am with you –
A running light, of golden miles
As far as the eyes can see, it’s comforting

To know, that I can find contentment/
Light-jeweled in the parks
Turning in only conversation, forth & replied
Like a deeper comfort into the night.

26.4.2013

Like the Quiet Pinch of Ovaries

At the cutting edge of the recurring now/
It must have been a trick of time
That brought us together, stop-motion universe

Laughter in reverse, some lapse /
Of concentration and epiphany of choice
A direction so mutually unassuming

It seemed natural, like retreating /
From a downpour, or taking a break
When we truly didn’t require one –

Something must have told me, nudged me/
As if a long afternoon, with broken continuity
The future is a lapse, where our heart

Falls, the flower petal we step over/
Without noticing, the riot of the unseen
Hands of change, ahhh! That’s enough

To make one happy, The birds feel it/
The seagulls abandon everything for it –
I’ve felt it a few times, maybe less than some

The human torch of the flame moving on/
The floor of a melted life, turning forty
Honey, news and loneliness

Where did my life go – with what force of memory/
To which latitude and why, these are things
That require constant negotiation, careful

Acceptance, at the end of days/
I stacked in a corner all the things I could let go.

How the Music Crept By Us

You recited unblinkingly
The code of compassion
As if in that hopeless moment
I had erred beyond your comprehension
(
The brass bed was bearing your suitcase
A one way ticket to – far away from me
I know your stomach churned
In some weird way, not quite like mine
)
But you were always stronger, that way
I heard your mother’s voice
In the way you closed the door
For the last time, the last look
(
Was like your father’s rebellion
For a life he did not choose
All that was left in my sweaty palms
Was the necklace you gave back to me
)
To signify, there would be no
More headline hysterical breakfasts
No more cat-cheers, for the temptations of the new day
You had condemned me
.
To a lust-asylum universe
Where everyone was a bad copy of you.

A Poet as a Lover

The best poets wait for words
I rush them as I would a woman
I have no patience for timid steps
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But a routine of loving, relentlessly!

The best lovers are fueled by smoldering desire!
Slow movements seem too dull
Youth is a show that passes quickly
So make it happen, poems & women
Easy come, easy go, they have taught me

With darkness at their steamy cores
I am a watcher of the rarest birds
And a hunter for the most exotic women
I’ll risk rejection – it shall Kill me not
So long as I hold, a great perspective to Love-Making.

So You Will Not Have to be Always Letting me In and Out

Today, there are no consolations
All I have been is as a dream
Nobody remembers, nor can I say do I
Remember closeness, I am learning to support myself
As foundations that require convincing proof

That this is no ordinary friendship
The way I am with myself, how I attend the banquet
Of my thoughts, life – what drink I pass around the table
Of so much longing, an expert at grief
Today, there is no consolation

I have congregated here to face, what I already suspect
That I have not the backbone, for love
I can deliver you form yourself in this moment
Says my mouth burning for sweetness
Today, there are no consolations

I must understand what it means to be wounded
Hands of my hands, everything is made of water
There is nothing drastic left, that can be done
I can no longer be the ring-knocker at your door.

Hafiza Sundered Hope

Unbroken as a new settler
I was a guest of Infinitude
With some weeks & months
To teach you, the triumph of the Birds

My soul that asked your shelter
Adored by my solemn honesty
I entered your Dining Room hopes
But only could offer you crumbs

The sunrises scattered me
You wished I would part
So I left with the little dignity
In my small library of hope

I left a bookmark to your name
The humble fuel, for the poetry of a lifetime.

Not With Your Foreign Wings to Shelter Me

Beneath sentiments better left, unsaid
Untouched like some dead weight
Beneath the rubble-fields of battered words
That amount to little more, mere memories

They are not tangible, precious, or alive
But constrict me from the inside
Let them try to pronounce a winter of hurt
For a floundering of spring, yet to be

With fevered heart, let them melt away in summer
Clang shut eternal gates of love, forever?
Yet, for all that, trust shall come again, as ever?
With nostrils of bleeding gold, for rich rewards?

You will not appear again, with that dusty mantle
Of golden olive skin and pouty eyes
I am sick of dissipating you in mere fantasy
As blind as I ever am, a prelude and a requiem, or a preface
Where my luckless touches, touched a foreign woman’s shore.

The Breakup

And with a sudden emphasis
Of our sad geometry
Like an old flower in a tender vase
You threw me out the window!
Circumscribing our enormous debts

A lover’s never so beautiful
As when they look at you with cold eyes
As if for the last time
Kissing you on the cheek
Knowing that this will be the last time

But I must replay the excess that stops me with its dream
Love is fickle as the sea
Though it is my rite to everything
The one in me who’s lazy & distracted
And requires art & romance
To feel complete, or entertained?

Trapped by the impatience for another
As if experience could mount immortality
Into my forgotten heart
But like a pinned butterfly
Motionless and fragile
I may only beat my wings

Your child seemed surprised
I cried for him, the last look
And I have been debased
Lost to the vast circle of beautiful things

And with a sudden emphasis
The purest sigh, there was not affection

Here, waiting for me, at the other end of the room
In your eyes, only ruthlessness
Proof of a goodbye so grand
Your promises of friendship were like
The curtains you said you would tailor for me

Thing one says, when trying to be polite
To someone, you can’t be the other half of the world – for.

Being Used

I have bartered myself
With violent abandon
Suffered myself against
Pitiful impulsivity
I have given myself

To the wounded and the aloof
Only to be abused like crushed dahlias
I have held myself like a shinning ghost
For marigold-garlanded projects
Attempted healing, at my own expense

I have martyred myself
In the arms of uncaring lovers
And I am dismembered & bruised
I have sought connection
Like a fragment without a purpose

Stockpiling fruits of attraction
For something outside myself
I have been illuminated by gargoyles
Tortured by single mothers
All to be somebody’s rebound, somebody’s scapegoat
Until the wind of their lust changed direction.