VERSE | LET’S BLAME IT ON THE RAIN

Blamed again and again for massacres 
We have no clue of, our proxy war
Of 40 years ago is still biting us in the bum
‘Fo-Fum - this beast at least
Does not have the bite of the ‘other-man’
With its depraved ideology
Hijacking faith and humanity
Bankrolling them into human bombs
Boom! There goes another one
Creating martyrs of civilians
We protest, we didn’t do it
They say we did, you see
Another ethos, dark and evil has floated in upon the sea
And so they insist it is us
Nurturing terrorists underground and above
Guns blazing, egos inflating
Up up to the constellation
Of ISRO satellites

But what is this?

3, 4, 5, 6 jets down - not ours
We shook them right out of their stars - their 5 out of 5 on Amazon
Now they’re raging like bulls in a ring
We’re meme-ing and gif-ing like comedy kings
I’m laughing at both
A little harder at the misplaced ire
Full of apocalyptic brimstone and fire

But here it is

War is not what any of us need
Good sense, forebearance, lucidity
Is the need of the hour and I want to believe
In this ideology even as I
Pin a little pin of green and white
Crescent moon and star shining bright
Onto my beating heart full of pride

Because when all’s said and done

Between neighbours who live side by side
Sharing a culture old as time
Huddled albeit over our nuclear buttons
War really is just not an option.

Image: generated via illustration software

VERSE | SIT WITH ME

Sit with me today my love 
We don’t have to talk
I just want to know you’re here
So I can feel your warmth

The day’s been difficult and sad
My body throbs with pain that’s new
There are little jagged holes
In my desolate heart now too

I thought that I would go to bed
Lie with my grief a while
But that kind of lonesomeness
In its visceral rank and file

Is not what my aching heart yearns for
While in its darkened nook it weeps
So sit with me for a bit my love
Let your tenderness cloak me.
Image: Fine Art America

VERSE | LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES

Life is like a box of chocolates
Someone once said
Sometimes you get
The caramel-drenched centres
That melt in the mouth
Like liquid satin, swishing on your tongue
In silky, sweet tones
Caressing your taste buds until
Languidly, unhurriedly
They lavish one last nectarous kiss
Before disappearing
In ambrosial bliss
Down the tunnel of your throat

At others it’s the bitterness of a centre
That’s dark - 90% cacao
That unleashes on your tongue
Spearing, laughing, spearing again
Inflicting a bitter-sweet pain
Just enough for you to stop and think
To wonder if this is good
A revelation
Of taste, an experience
That’s bold, distinct
To recall, to remember when
You’re short on inspiration
Or whether in fact
It is an assault no less
On the mundaneness
The safeness
On your everydayness
Plodding on your tongue
Like a thug that’s sold
His essence, his soul
To the gods of gastronomic
Absurdity and virulence

I look back, the rhyme is longer
For the bitterness that lingers
In the mouth; but I have also realized
That my taste buds have conspired
With my mind to bind
Most of the time
To memories that are wholesome
Sugared, caramelised
So even when I pick
A chocolate from life’s mix
I hope for the sweetness
The toffiness, the bliss
But I also sit in readiness
For the wave of bitterness
That sometimes takes me in its grip
But always itinerant
Shifting, moving on
And so I too go on
Savouring
Every piece, never wavering
From the cholocate box of life.
Image: Steven Willis

VERSE | STARRY NIGHT

The blue-purple sky today 
Has spent its moisture-ladenness
It is now cloaked in quietness
Its sadness it has put away
In some clouded corner that
Will hold it, hide it tenderly
For now it wears a lighter heart
Star-smeared, it now gleams
Wetly with nostalgia
A tender melancholia
I look at it as it glimmers
Stalwart in its eternalness
Its timelessness, its ceaselessness
I yearn for that serenity
That noiselessness, that peacefulness
I take in a ragged breath
All my grief sits in my chest
Heaving, cleaving achingly
Endlessly, relentlessly
I look at the resolute sky
At its crush of dewy stars
Valiantly twinkling at me
And I look away
Tonight I don’t feel brave enough
To let the shimmering cloak of night
Take me into its embrace
Away, away from my sad place.
It moved its glutted grief today
The sorrowing, water-laden sky
And I have in my wretchedness
Made it my own this starry night.
Image: Getty Images

VERSE | IF I COULD

If I could live another life with you 
I’d talk of a few more things
More palpably, more honestly with you
Of things that gnawed
At my mind; at the way my gut wrenched
Balling up inside, or even when
The pit of my belly dissolved
In a fluttering crush of butterflies
I’d speak of love light-footed and pure
The kind that knocks you to the floor
And the next instant pins shimmering wings
On your tingling spine so you can fly
High high, breath-catchingly high!

I’d talk of heartbreaks too
That shred the organs into little bits
Where the pain ripples in screaming peals
My thoughts marking time with the cacophony
Where I stumble on my own feet
Where I want to just lie down and feel
Nothing for a while
I’d share secrets that I have held deep inside
Now frozen, frigid, petrified
Mute scars of speechless agonies
Never named, never identified

I’d also tell you that I loved
My quiet, my solitude
When it was just me in my room
Or just you and me
Sipping tea
In the lounge, watching tv
And then I’d tell you about the things
That would make my tone-deaf heart sing
A constant humming underneath
Beneath the sheath of my skin
Of peace that was soothing, softening
Of flame-bright hope and quiet joy

I’d talk to you
Of beginnings and of endings too
Some tragic some tender
Of sometimes going under
But always re-surfacing, I would
Talk of spirituality, the ethereal kind
That makes the hair stand on end
The kind that quickens your breath
That makes life and even death
A fleeting, splendorous enterprise
A mystical trip with no finish line

And when your time here or mine
Was drawing to a close
Together we would
Strum those notes
One last time
Of all the things that we’d talked about
And all the times that we had spent
And then I’d have held your hand in mine
We would have laughed and we would have cried
And we would have laughed again
Because nothing would have been left
Unsaid, unfelt at the end.
Image: Cathy Jacobs

VERSE | HUMID SQUALLS

It’s so soakingly humid 
That I swim on the pavements
I glide
Through the waves of moisture
Like an eel,
No, like a duck in water
Submerged, breathing through new-fangled gills
A chimerical, mystical thing
The stuff of science fiction and ETs
In a universe of visions and dreams
Morphing, dissolving, changing
Even as I wade on

When I bring a glass to my lips
To quench a thirst that sits
Uneasily, timorously in my throat
There, but not really there
More habit-driven than the need
To drench a parched desert inside my skin
I swim into the water
Like a goldfish, lips turgid
Gut kicking against the liquid intrusion
But the impulse of living
Compels me to sip, sip, sip
Until I think I’ve had enough

When I dress in the morning
Each garment feels like cellophane
Stuck tightly to me, I’m cling-wrapped
Even though each begins its day airily
Lightly. I look at myself in the mirror
My forehead is already wet
In the heat of protest
Against the layers I must don
Linen - lying-in wait to suffocate
Cotton - caught-on my liquified bones
Fabric, propriety, a proper-riot
Of ceaseless stickiness
More fabric, more properness
I ignore the tangled wrangle within
I now wear also my morning smile
Even as my upper lip glistens
With the sweat of struggle
Ageless now, muscle-memorized
I step onto the pavement
To swim, swim, swim
In my designated line.
Image: Gerry Miles

VERSE | GENTLE GLOOM

Today I woke up to clouds 
Sitting in the morning sky
They’d been there a while
They looked cozy-comfortable
Their greyness was all shades
From the smoky pearl of sparrows eggs
To the steeliness of granite
They were contented in just being
There was no bloated turgidity
To their form, no urgency
To spend themselves
To waterously end themselves
To cut their rain-sodden wrists
To release the essence from their seams
In a tryst with vanity
Of azure blue visions and dreams

These clouds they rolled in differently
Serenely, so quietly
They lay claim upon the sky
Wiping out all the sunlight
But there were no thunderous sighs
No jagged lightning in their eyes
No weeping sheeting pouring rain
No genesis, no annihilation

These clouds they swept in differently
Stirring up a little breeze
Cool, it brushed against my skin
There was no banshee trapped within
Wailing of storms and other things
The darkness lingered for a while
It left a whisper in the breeze
A silver rustle in the trees
Then gently, gently it went by.
Image: Van Gogh (Wheat field under a cloudy sky)

VERSE | I FEEL OUT OF TOUCH

For all the times when writer’s block has dammed the flow of words. Like a beaver it plugs the essence, but like a force of nature, the floods of creativity bring those dams crashing down. Again and again, hope shimmers at the end of every one of those bottlenecks.

I feel out of touch 
A tad bit rusty
Cranky and creaky
Tinny and such
The words clump together
With a grind and a grate
I wonder if a month away
Has dulled my tapestry of verse
Shimmering skeins that advance and traverse
Embroidering and stitching
Notions and qualms
Into billowing storms
Into rippling, sashaying ribbons of calm
Bewildering phrases that make me guffaw
Festering sentences painful and raw
In bobbing waves with lacy edges
In crashing, lashing, tearing deluges
In twinkling stardust upon my page
My blinking cursor running away
With the train of my thoughts to the drum of my heart
Laughing, singing, assuaging an ache
Grieving, weeping, caught in the wake
I wonder if my keyboard, unstirred, unscathed
For two score nights and forty days
Has borne my quickening string away.
Image: The New York Times

VERSE | SPACES

I sit with my tea
The silence sits with me
Deafeningly
Piercing my eardrums
With its wordless cacophony

It has made its forever home
In the lounge where I now sit alone
It’s been there a while
Years of rooting itself in place
The air, the space
Is soundless, still
Like the world in night’s numbing vigil
I look around for something
Anything to cut through the dead air
Its atoms conspiring
With the silence that sits everywhere

And then I see it, a little plume
Floating, dancing in the room
From my mug
As the tea steams up
Severing the bond of silence and air
The desolate, deflated, joyless pair
Their essence once filled
With people now gone
The moist vapor wafts in
Reaching into spaces
Where images, reminiscences
Lie inert, forsaken
Loosening, thawing, warming them

I take a sip of my tea
I feel my spine tingle
Familiarly
As I’m wrapped in the arms
Of rekindled memories.

VERSE | BE STILL MY BEATING HEART

Be still my beating heart 
It’s only the setting sun
With its fiery orange hues
Tinged with scarlet and indigo
They’re the colours of a day that’s done
Be still my beating heart
It’s only the setting sun

Be still my racing blood
It’s only the ocean wide
Its waves unfurling liquid lace
Onto my upturned, sun-warmed face
As I leap into the rushing tide
Be still my racing blood
It’s only the ocean wide

Be still my aching breast
It’s only a trail in the greenwood glade
Hemmed on the edges with wild flowers
Glistening in the wake of a spring shower
It’s only the whispering leaf dappled shade
Be still my aching breast
It’s only a trail in the greenwood glade

Be still my breathless lungs
It’s only the afternoon sky
With a rainbow that has looped around
The azure blueness like a crown
A beautiful palette of pastel dyes
Be still my breathless lungs
It’s only the after-rain sky

Be still my quickening breath
It’s only the lover’s first kiss
You’ve been on that road before
You’ve flown where the eagles soar
And also curled up where the earthworms live
Be still my quickening breath
It’s only the sweetheart’s first kiss

Be still my beating heart
It’s only the setting sun
The mystical ocean and the greenwood glade
The after-rain sky and the lover’s kiss
It’s the enchantment that nostalgia has spun
Be still my beating heart
It’s just life in perpetual thrum.

VERSE | TENDER METTLE

The very edge of the building 
The one of glass
So fragile by day and in the cloak of night
Catches the last light
Of the setting sun
Sharp-angled, it thrusts its shoulders
Into the fiery horizon
Brave, unmoving
It makes a stand
It will endure even as its heart
Of delicate, shattery glass
Throbs behind curtains of lace
Fluttering against its radiant face
Glittering, it plucks at the setting rays
Shining swords drawn against
The darkening skies
And tomorrow’s daylight
Until twilight when it will remind
The concrete world again
That it still stands
It still prevails, gleaming, upright.
Image: Stained Glass Inc.

VERSE | THE BOUGAINVILLEA

O Beauteous one 
This is for you
For all the times that you have bloomed
When all around have burrowed deep
Into the coolness of earth’s breast
Hiding away, biding their time
Until gentler, lighter climes
Bestir them in their loamy beds
But you, O Intrepid one
You have always overcome
You have worn your gem-like garb
In ways that made me catch my breath
Racing, chasing to my heart
Wondering if you’d shimmer on
Or if your time here too was done
But you wore your jeweled crown
Glittering in the scorching sun
I looked at you, O Enchanting one
As you cavorted with the breeze
Those molten gusts upon my skin
I gulped in then, the oxygen
That sat timorously in the air
But I was pulled
By the oasis that surrounded you
Perfect, paradisiacal
Unsundered by the elements
There you danced so full of joy
I came to you pulled by the spell
Of your vividness, O Alluring one
You swayed your head
Spangled whorls overspread
Across the fretwork of your boughs
Mesmerized I reached out
Into your magic latticed web
You pricked me then, O Bewitching one
Your thorns were invisible, hidden
I knew then that your glittering grace
Your wild gumption to face the sun
Aren’t just in the softness of your blooms
But in the armor you have chiseled from
The tempests - stormy and searing
I looked at the ruby that had sprung
On my fingertip that you had stung
It dazzled on my glistening skin
Its precious seams filling my lungs
My essence and throb, O Wondrous one
I found that day in the scorching sun.
Image: Fine Art America