Ruthless

Time is the friend time is the foe

Time is the one that watches you go

Like a building on waterlogged land

Just a bit in the beginning, barely it shows

Like a shadow in a crevice or a corner, it grows

Water then creeps, water then crawls

Water then slithers onto the walls

Slinking to the ceiling, leaving its mark

In wrinkles and creases and blisters and scars

The beams will sag and the rafters will groan

And slowly the warping building will moan

Entrapped in a watery bane

Time is a friend, time is a foe

Time is the one that watches you go

In the droop of your shoulders, in the furrows of your brow

In the sighs of your bones as they bend into boughs

And on it flows, through lives dissolved

Like a whisper departing unnoticed, unheard

buildings then crumble, bodies then drop

Somewhere in the silent resonance of a thud.

Why Must the Rain Gods troll? (not your usual children's poem).

 By Saif Khan

Jackery Swickelson of four Montgomery Lane

Was quite hoping that morning for some unpredicted rain

He had dressed up for school but felt quite unprepared   

With an unfinished project due to the partner with whom he was paired

Apparently his partner Frederick Von Trapp

Had gone off and taken a six week nap

It was because of ol’ Frederick’s slumber

And of course, Jackery not having his number

That the project had errors which were easily spotted
and could not be finished in the time allotted

So Jackery wished upon every candle and every star

That the great rain gods of Banzhabar

Would grant him this favor and make the world wet

And Jackery would forever be in their debt

And just as he wished Jackery heard a loud clap

Followed by a bang, a woosh and a snap

He looked out his window into the morning sky

And what he saw amazed him, he couldn't believe his eyes

Darkest of clouds came creeping over the sun

‘Oh’! He thought, ‘so it has begun’!

Down came the rain pouring with force

He knew that the rain gods had to be the source

Smiling to himself, he sat down on his bed

“Seems impossible to walk to school now” he said

“I shall wait for it to stop, or slow down to a drizzle,

And then I can take an umbrella in the mizzle.” 

But the rain didn't stop, it kept on falling

He wondered now if the rain gods had been trolling

He watched the downpour spill over the gutters

And spray itself in, through the open shutters

Jackery then panicked Jackery then worried

Out of the door he hurried and scurried

Cars were sinking in the newly formed bay

People were paddling trying to get away

“Stop” he whispered, “the water’s flooding the street!

Children will be thrown out of class still in their seats”

The Gods didn't listen so he looked up to the sky

“Why won't you stop? I need to know why”?

  

The wind at that moment pushed in a big wave

Jackery whimpered, not knowing how else to behave

When one person came floating right up to his door

It was Frederick! Still sleeping, he let out a snore.

Trivial Thoughts

I think it shouldn’t be so

To be opinionated about opinions

To think ill of thoughts and be skeptical of speculations

To call norms values, and old practices traditions

And to write words in stone and stone like books

I think it shouldn’t be so

That God in the dictionary, is a being, not a concept

That cows are sacred and pigs are not

And philosophies are sacred cows

And some men are killed and some are martyred

And the thesaurus lists spirituality as a synonym for religion

Right next to theology, cult, myth and ritual

I think it shouldn’t be so

I think it shouldn’t be so

That food is expensive

And good food is more expensive

That there is good food and bad food

And that food is thrown in cafeteria food fights

And in trash for the fear of liability

I think it shouldn't be so

That there can be liability for feeding the hungry

I think it shouldn’t be so

That female infanticide is an issue

And ‘male dominant society’ is still a subject of discussion

That there are war crimes but war is not a crime

And heroes are chosen from wars

That equal is different from just

And ethics is assumed to be ethical

I think it shouldn’t be so

That some children and relationships can be illegitimate

That morality is subjected to paradigms

That sex is for procreation

And love does not have a plural form

I think it shouldn’t be so

That life is often compared to a journey

My life is not a journey

It is like orange colored play dough

I use it to make buttercups

Sometimes they don’t look like buttercups

Sometimes I forget how to make buttercups

Sometimes I get tired of making buttercups

I think it shouldn’t be so

That it is trivially called destiny.

Mysterious ways

Do you know how grief feels?

It is not pain but lingers like that

Similar to holding your heart in your hand and watch it burn

Do you know how grief feels?

Its when you stitch up your eyes slowly as if closing a wound

And then rip them open because you couldn't breath

Do you know how that feels?

And do you know how salt feels in those eyes?

And on breasts where you flayed them with your own nails

Or on raw fingertips

After you plucked off the nails in disgust

Do you know how grief feels?

When each pore on your body is either a pustule or a canker

And you cannot get rid of the stench?

And you wander from room to room

Looking for a prepared place  

Where they would put the body on a plank

To bathe and shroud it

And if you asked them ever so nicely

To bathe and shroud you instead

They'd tell you to get hold of yourself

Because God works in mysterious ways

Do you know how grief feels to hear that?

I do!

Just as I know that God is not a mother

Enlightenment

Then, in the light

I see the divine secrets unfold

Simplifications consume the magic

And pride dissipates

Under the soggy showers of awakening

Love is a bitch, truth is a bother

I fight with myself to put desires to sleep

Memories of hope, confidence and belief

Are blown out by time

One by one, like candles in a dust storm

So again it is a journey

Again it is departure

And yet again I trust my deceptive heart

To be a fellow traveler

Through the colors of a one night stand

Demons

Eclipse is when the moon stands in front of the sun

Looking for its reflection as a whole entity

Finding that it’s smaller and darker

A storm is when the wind and the rain turn my garden to muck

Monsoon is when young girls sway on the seats of tall swings

Monsoon is when the river swells and wipes away little towns on its banks

In eyes like mine saline waters of a rising tide threaten but do not spill

Doomsday recurs every day

With different names and in different garbs

Dark, deep and quiet

Dreams in the night become dreams of the night

Beauty of life remains undecided

For reasons like the peacock and its feet and its cry

I look for signs; I read the lines

In coffee cups, in sea shells and on the palm of my hand

I find you closer than myself, to me

I pray to keep and I let it bee

Eternal

Deathless I exist
In countless days within endless seasons
Writing my own tomorrows
Limit is the word which was not to be for me

Eternal time,
The source of all beginnings
For it has no barriers no bounds no brinks

Like a fountain of prolific intuitions
Volleying between sensibility and perception ...
Time gushes
As the mind muses over logic,
Teasing, pondering, reflecting

And somewhere
In these countless days within endless seasons
Begins a morning at noon
With urgent conversations and swift comprehensions
In lives where midnight will always be at sunrise

The Other Side

If life is a journey

Then direction is insignificant

And passage should be unconstricted 

Through this aberrant sojourn in time

While here

I prevail in icicle moments
hanging from a thin sky
Dripping microseconds
Which evaporate before they hit where there's no ground

Within the icicles

I spin on my heels,

And march through strange corridors

Flippantly constructed for me

Counting every breath, marking every step

I seek a beating pulse in each clangorous footfall

Sometimes I pause

On unfamiliar shores edging unexplored vastnesses

My eyes reaching the heaving watery horizons

From where age, like swelling tide

Rises in rollicking waves 

Each touching a note higher than the previous

Before breaking into scintillating moments 

On moist sands of time

Sometimes I sit on the moist sand

And gaze at the pieces of past

Just watching through the wait of long lazy hours

Looking for a glimpse of myself 

Or an eyeful of you

And the drumming of a heartbeat in that!

Headlong

I fell hard

And the delicate blow glass shapes in me

Shattered into smithereens

The curves, the bends, the swells and the mounds

Came down

Shriveled into sparkling grains of nothing

                        

My eyes rolled to the tilted corner of the rickety table I fell on

Eyes of jade

With specks of quartz

I saw my brow

Lying flat on the ground

A marble slab carved with a void

My sparkling tongue of topaz blue

Lay nearby

Pulsating with the last bits of life

My ruby lips, turned to garnet where blood dried

My hands snagging on the thick sheets of time

With shrapnel in place of finger nails

My feet are still planted firmly

But the cracks in the ground run up my ankles

To my knees, into my chest

There will be cracks in my heart

There is blood

Oozing out of crystalline pureness of glass

There is pain resting in each broken chard

I try to recall the moment of divinity

The moment of grace

The moment of nirvana

The point from where I fell

I fell hard

Through the arms of those who could have caught me

Or so I wanted to believe

Love Walks With Me the Empty Street

Love walks with me the empty street

Through nagging cries coaxing retreat

Stepping around an old defeat

Rags of dust over aching feet

Love walks with me the empty street

Facing all odds, all exceptions

Steering past lies, shams, deceptions

Hopes which die before inception

Love walks with me the empty street

On storm beaten paths, in ditches and puddles

Where seasons of past have rendered a muddle

I ramble, I shuffle, I lag, I huddle

Love walks with me the empty street

Through treacherous climbs of pathways so steep

Curbsides lay laden with milestones in heaps

Where salt crusted eyes wait begging to weep

Love walks with me the empty street

Turning a corner it happens by chance

When into its eyes I manage a glance

It bats them at me in fetching conceit

Love walks with me the empty street

The Tenacious Traveler

And he began

From within the capricious shadows of the night

Under destiny’s fickle eye

The tenacious traveler set his travel afoot

Though the voices called him to linger by


For the dark is deceitful and the moment obscure

Lest the journey is arduous than presumed

The path could be darker than perceived by any

Leading endless to a murky gloom


He began still, the tenacious traveler


His was the courage, the conviction and the valor

Truth was his light for all which was dark

His was the belief, profound and stellar

Stars were his guide for the journey embarked


The tenacious traveler travelled


The tenacious traveler travelled in the night

And the night travelled with him

The belief sat firmly perched on his shoulder

And the valor stayed put within


But the light which shimmered at the deepest end

Did not grow into a star

The conniving flame, it flickered the same

From near, as it did from afar


The skyline did not rise into a city at all

It tapered to tombstones instead

Where the sounds were lost in the stillness of time

And the living were replaced with dead


The fires were cold and cries were quiet

And tears had nowhere to flow

The saplings of passion were hammered back into ground

By convention’s fateful blows



And echoes there, never left the walls

Of caverns where screams were formed

Where blood never oozed from gaping wounds

On bodies mangled and torn

So

The tenacious traveler’s hopes plummeted

As he swallowed his rage and pride

With a bigoted sword, he slit his throat

And lay down by a forgotten grave’s side!

The Willows on Danube

I grow on my own

I spread like a weed

I let pools of water

Sit next to my feet

I ripe without fuss

I flower with ease

I watch every season

Sprout stories on me

Bound into verses

By poets of yore

Lived through the chapters

Of legend and lore

You picture me tall

You picture me bent

You picture me spread

From end to an end

In sunlight I shimmer

In twilight I swoon

My tales can be told

Under a full moon

Who am I?