For Norma

I thank you
For teaching me to love from a distance
The Postcards from Italy still carry the scent of fresh Olives; a
Token from the waiter, whose eye you caught
All I can ever be to you, is the darkness that you know:
On our trip to the river
I remember how
With my head bent and my face in the water
At the riverbank
Held there by your strong hand
You taught me how to save a fish from drowning
I remember the times we had
Floating in Limbo, weightless.
Every moment was synchronised bliss! 
Here Lies a changed man, Norma
For rain will only be water as long as Man says so.

Doe of the Morning too.

I'm here waiting for you,
I'm waiting in my best dress
By the altar of your doom
With my heart in duress
And a bouquet of calla lilies, beheaded.
But you
You're busy being dead
Cold and stiff in the heavy gloom.

BEHOLD, GOD

Go! stand outside in the air
Just before the rains  
And consder the dark remains  
From dusk to dusk
With the sun no longer
Giving its light      
                
That will be the age to come
After God with his sickle
Has reaped a harvest of his people
With their fruits and deeds
In thirty sixty hundred fold
And the chaff left behind

Ready to burn, to breathe sulphur
A warning today,
A reality tomorrow
Behold God now while he tarries,
Otherwise behold his wrath
When it is unleashed.

Echo

Azure was the sky
When we conceived, nay
Conjured you
For it was magic in magic
A moment full of God      
Fireworks flashing             
The making of you     

Azure was the morning
When you came forth
Quiet and naked
Like the African desert dawn
With a shock of red hair 
Like Daddy's
And a cry like the phoenix song

Azure was the day   
When the world fell and you with it
Beyond reach in your utopia
With your marksmen, and your footmen and your battle hardened warlords   
When the bullet pierced your psyche
And brought you peace.  
You have come home.

TITAN

You should never have been afraid

Of the colossus rising out of the sea
Your first mistake, a Tsunami
Sweeping your soul clean
And the destruction in its wake
A hole which burned became
A volcano which spurned
Your soul some more

To evil, To beget evil
That Poseidon may become a statue
Stubborn and unmoving
Angry like Jack's giant
But a myth always
You should have seen the truth
Reached out to touch and know
That he would scatter into smoke

You should never have unlocked the gates to Gehanna
For Hades gave life to your worst fears
So that the ground beneath is fire,

You sink with each step

Your unforgiving roots bore their tendrils deep into the earth
Binding you in eternity, with your weak heel

In the rage of a blind Cyclops

So that you should wake to break free

Eco Boyfriend

Father met mother
When they held hands and made a big circle
Around a dying tree
Friends of the earth became friends in love
Les amies de Terre
You slept in trees to protest their death
It didn't matter
They died anyway

But you canvassed regardless in your dirty brown converses
And hugged more trees
And chained yourself to French warship
In a protest so nuclear
They swore you had gone mad

Friends fell in love and a nought was tied
Mother began to brood and you were born
Mother began to nest
Father was restless
There were still trees to be hugged
So he told mother

And was gone before she could muster
The strength to stop him
She watched, scorned as he left
Then she put you in a bassinet
And swallowed lead
And that earth child
Is how you were found.

Ground

I have reclaimed you
Countless times
I have.
From the greedy ground who'd have you
Stiff in her belly

I have reclaimed you
Thankless times
I fought
Long before your feet
Stepped steady on the bare ground

She sought to own your blood
But I stopped that
With my fantastic indigo pashmina from the dye pits of Lahore
And the gold embroidered one from Pakistan
These, my offerings to the earth goddess
To leave you be.

Alas she wouldn't
She cursed me instead
With a gourd growing from my belly
A new life
So my feet no longer feels her
But she would have you still

Though I send you to bed with my heartbeat echoing the
drumbeat of your forefathers
before you,
It is not enough
Now you must fight

Lark

                                                              The blue lark is a lie,

                                                                  A bare-faced lie

                                                           Like Alouette unconcerned

                                                            About the fate of its tête

                                                                 The skylark is true

                                                  As true as a naked birch in December

                                                         Or wild swimming at dawn

                                                    In the Shepperton summer fog

Gopher's Fugue.

It had to make sense.
Adrift on sea    
Glad rags bound in a red, spotted kerchief.  
Afloat on dreams   
Eyes focused keenly on tomorrow
Today receeded with the sunset
Everything vivid in shades of thrown blue
And burnt orange 
Except the water rat.  
                                     

It had to make sense.
Holes plundered and resized
Waters stormed in gently, smoothly
Glissando. Smoke out the prey!  
Another way of life; It beckoned
So the sand rat is sniffing Maidenhair
Snatched from lakes
In retaliation for every slight
Real or imagined.

It had to make sense.
The Exodus, the future  
The flying rat migrating eastwards
To the past; dangerously:
Mount sodom and a pillar of salt
Another way of life.   
"Moo-Goo-Gai-Pan" 
Beckoning
A reckoning is at hand.   

Behold the Sons of Men.

You know how someone promises you a thing?

How you wait expectantly for that promise to manifest, how you long to behold and hold the thing and it all comes to naught?
You know how the passion waxed at first;  beating hurriedly like the wings of a trapped water fowl, 
How it waned like the tired wings of the same waterfowl slaughtered?
How your hope to see a thing fulfilled fell like dusk upon your expectations & how your excitement congealed and slowly became an anger that burned?

How you see the promissor long after the expected date of delivery only to understand that the promise made to you held no importance for them whatsoever?
And then your anger multiplied, gained weight and sat on your heart like a new born placed in his mother's bosom for the first time  

And how you nursed your anger until it grew further and became a grudge which poured over you like water at an immersion; so strong it makes you shudder with irritation at the sight/thought/mention of the promissor.
                         
And how you realize that the 'enemy' is oblivious to your grudge, created by his inability to make promises and remember to keep them and how much said grudge kills you.

          
Ever felt any of that before?

Well that, ladies and gentlemen is an unfortunate and self-evident truth about the sons of men.

Behold what spectacle we all are....