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.