story II

I have a story for you.

What if I refuse it?
Along with this
inheritance of stories
bequeathed to no one
and mine only because
I was able to look back?
I am no Orpheus, and
my Eurydice is a seized
collateral, and we never
knew one another.

what kinds of promise
can remembrance keep
that forgetting can betray?
what sort of vengeance
would remembrance wreak
that forgetting might forgive?

But, more importantly –
who shall I be this time – 

Penelope or Scheherazade?

story I

Snorkelling in bleached coral reefs
must be different from pearl diving -
treasures of the sea and of land
are not meant for stateless exiles
forced to trade deathly oblivions.
Meanwhile, who is gathering oysters?

You have heard stories in sleepy hollows
of experience - and drowned in dreams
that have woken you - dankly, gasping -
into the darkness you sought to escape.
Tell me, how fast does light travel?

Always the blue pill. Though in the story
You chose the red one. Somewhere between
This storied life and this lifed story, the world
turns to a second coming in a purple haze. 

But then, where are all the children?

out of order

This neverland is sooty
and smells of crusty blood.
The sun never reaches us,
though we burn feverish.

We have been counting
the days and the bodies,
studying hopes and ‘likes’
you have been sharing.

There is no space to keep
the dream we dreamed
from the last time we slept.
How the sky was silent
that night, and we were certain
of the next morning. In the
“sort of time we inhabit today”
we are too tired to lie down,
Never mind the azure is ablaze.
We sit together, cramped
in huddled wonder between
yesterday and tomorrow.
When the wind of thought chimes
its Aeolian sound, we sing
the songs of our ancestors
and our land, in return.

mourning

How do you commiserate?
condolences and silences
in appropriate measure
spread thin over the surface
of that place of yearning
grief and loss has ripped
into the fabric of our being.

Your language of mourning
searches sincerity in trite phrases.
sending empty thoughts and
faithless prayers,
and thoughtless apologies
that disguise our failures as those
of language, always inadequate.

In this rubble of babel, how do we
trace once more the lingua franca
of besieged, divided truth?

My silences lament in lavish despair
haunted by a restless dream
(or a dreamy restlessness?)
of catching “thought-trains”
that traversing through “banal
and radical terrains” might
arrive toward (if not, at) meaning.

being human

Standing on jagged edges
lingering in the interstices
Waiting to cross over,
To that other place
We all have names for.

When the schools were blown up,
We pretended to be dead
They pretended to be deaf,
And everybody watched.
They say, Wails and prayers
sound the same on airwaves.

You turned your eyes away
From the jigsaw of bodies-
It was only a click for you.
we searched missing pieces
and found only wrong ones.

“This ontological vocation
of being human”
asks more from some of us.
How should we respond?
To whom should we report?
Who will come with?

taking account

Across four thousand kilometres
sitting in concrete comfort,
across a screen, we watch
bodies like ours,
waiting, wailing, wading
sifting, shifting, stifling
falling, flailing, failing
through smoked rubble
of fire and brimstone,
clinging desperately
to remnants of (hi)stories.

scattered piecemeal lives
lived on shrinking strips
of what used to be home.

Memory serves up a map
whose contours have changed
as if drawn on vaporous clouds,
if not desert(ed) sands of untimely time.

Who will take responsibility,
Or perhaps, will we take responsibility
for remembrance and forgiveness
from which thought might be born?

How do we begin to take account?

staying in

my words, like me,

stay in these days.
it has been days
since either of us
saw the sun.
home has moved,
we stay, transfixed.
everything fades but
ennui and nostalgia.