Summer

In the sighs of shadowed faces

I see the ghosts of happy children

That once laughed softly and danced in the rain

Worn now by the expectations of a civilised world

Talk softly

Don’t sing while studying

Be polite and courteous

Smile even when you don’t feel like

And we have created a generation of ghosts

Living out of tombs in fear or forgetfulness

Being this or that

Not needing anymore to be told

But here comes the soft hum of a once remembered note

While she washes herself clean of the world

Maybe we aren’t ghosts after all!

Just  winter-worn  buds waiting for summer to bloom.

What's In a Name

A sudden nostalgic attachment for a name long despised

As the time comes for the shedding of the same

Shedding with it a past identity, if an identity is ever past

So much or so little? And they say what’s in a name.

Surfaced from some forgotten ancestral shrines of my forefathers

Sounded proudly before men of worth and honour

Castrated by the British to suit their lack of vocabulary

Re-emerging with the drum roll of Bengal’s mutinous power.

Seventeen long letters, the extent of my identity

Lazy drawling alphabets stretched to fill pages and time

Little knowing how they coloured my personality

Simply musing over its rhythm and rhyme.

And now a sudden nostalgic attachment develops

For this name, that was never really mine

Questioning all that came with it

As it slowly loses its shine.

An Attempt at Healing

The ease with which fragments are born
Brings on an incredulous smile
Of a surprise fraught with anguish
For an unspoken truth to have the power
Of vanquishing all whispered comforts 
Treasured in warm hands thus far
Is a sight as terrible as it is beautiful.

A new lie is begotten
Formed of a strength alien to a former world
That lies, slowly dismembering,
Under the shroud of pride
Of kings
And mighty queens
All fire and fury

And a sadness
Too deep to heal.

Just a Thought

Day breaks
The blank page is writ
Clouds shade, not hide
Waves collect, drop and rise again
Ink flows unspilt
Blots are flowers
Or planets revolving around the sun
Empty minds are no longer blank
They're tabula rasa
Bruises play paintball
And head home light headed
Perhaps a little drunk
Even straight lines bend
And meet in circles
Even the moon is lost without the night
What then is a sigh amidst a flutter of hearts?
What then am I in a flurry of thoughts?

Playing with Shadows

The familiar lies forgotten
The unfamiliar forgiven
Months and years lay blurred and barren
A cluttered mind fumbles in sudden emptiness
And stubs a toe

The dim moons
Of previous rendezvous
Are replaced by flashing screens
That dim vision
And hurt the eye

Stray locks brush across cheeks
Weary fingers feel about for warmth
And cease mid hunt
Finding plastic instead
And a different heat

Memories lie warm and prickle
The smell of ink and envelopes
Hide smiles that never should have been
Bewitched minds crawling into pillow cases
Turning figures over in shadow play

The Artist

A light-headedness too light to be breached

A numbness too warm to be uncomfortable

A light too dim to usher in a desire to blink

A silence too deep to sight from the surface

A memory too stark to notice blurring edges

A night too close to consider a memory

A time relived too many times to deserve a remembrance

A thought too loud to need a voice to be heard

Subtlety is a fledgling of an art

Conceived to cover the most ingenious plots

An art performed by artists most ruthless

Skimming away on the dreams of the faint-hearted

Too frightened to finger the crevices of an after thought

Leaving the artist a freeway to another show, another mind

The brainchild of a devious mind

Yellow pepper in heartless ravines

Clinging to past glories

Assuring the comfort of childhood blankets

A familiarity too priceless to be bought

Eyes red with the fever of an unforgiving guilt

There remains a faint nostalgia

For the familiar, the forgotten,

The begetter, the begotten,

The forgiving and the forgiven.

Yours truly.

Remembering Dylan

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars


Love in the Asylum,
Dylan Thomas