Graceless

I am old, Oh, I grow old
Now red is a colour way too bold
To stick on my lips and kiss my sighs
Goodbye with a heavier laugh
Than the one I stabbed between the ribs
When breath wasn't just a foreign word,
And grave dust flew like shooting stars
Between the hands of manic claps,
Between intervals of History's taps
On shoulder blades that looked across
Sagging chasms of rigid backs.

After

And after,
When the dewdrops have shed their shimmering shrouds,
And the sky gazes down with a clear face
Will the leaves all crumble into eulogy
And talk of the faces that traveled here.
And will they remember the way we were,
The way they watched from dusky sidelines
And saw how we extended our cracked fingertips
To let the universe seep back to us.
                   (Us- the place where it originally came from.)
The roots that held on to vacuum
And sung of Chaos amid dancing lights
That refused to burn out even after Time
Had touched their shoulders in a parting salute.
And after,
When all is said and done
And each rests in its forgotten place,
Will the sky still have the time
To gaze its steady gaze and avert its clear face?

A Stately Saraband

"The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust."
While you and I, here we stand
To watch it fall where it must.

Hollow heads have clamped their brows
Down with music they can hear
Their whispered words are rushing past
Monoliths their feet can’t bear.

Anymore, oh nevermore
Can they glide, or waltz and play
With puppet strings in wrinkled hands
For their heads are turning gray.

But gray or gold, it matters not
Their battered feet will mark their names
On dancing floors and checquer-boards
Ghosts all playing at bigger games.

Sunset Soliloquies

A poem wanted to know

What the sunset makes me feel

What the orange ink speaks to me of.

If it stains me with nostalgia’s lavender

Or melancholy’s blue.

It was clichéd

But I wondered anyway.

And I didn’t know

I honestly did not.

I looked and looked and tried to see

But there was just so much

And my eyes so small

Can never take all of it in.

Maybe it is too much anyway.

It is like apaixonar, perhaps

A single moment, but never one you can point at.

Or Banjara, a different kind of nomad

Roots everywhere, home nowhere

Like gypsies riding a Catherine Wheel.

I’ve never been to the sea

Sometimes the sunset tells the nemophilist in me about it.

But feel? I don’t know.

It is trouvaille, I suppose, a lovely windfall.

And retrouvaille, the wait always worth it.

A dull, constant entity

Like the ache in my being.

It always does invoke toska, though

Brings it out, hammers it home

My perpetual longing for nothing

Adding to the atlas’s weight on my chest.

Of Sins, Souls and Swords

I know, my love, I have sinned
In a glorious show of slow contempt
With a step too late in good defense
I know I have died, and killed.
And slept by morning light
Stinking of yielded swords too many
Yes I was damned, and so did damn
In return, fallen souls too many.
I know, my love, swords and souls
Are my pride, my one forte
And I do claim so with good graces
Enough to wear my sins in places
Kept, in contrast, otherwise for things
Which are but still of my own makings.

I know, my love, whatever I say
Whatever I do, whatever I show
Will never be enough to take away
All I didn’t tell, secrets I didn’t say
Which is why my swords so hang
Always so ready at a moment’s touch
To be taken in, and used, and put
There where laughs are volatile.
My humour is well-spent, you see
Not on spilt blood, but on unspilt glee
And I yield, and laugh, and fall, and damn
Claim souls with my sword so good
For sin is too fine a word to use
To call my makings with a name, you see.

Correction, please

No, my dear.

I do not fill voids. I create them.

I seep in, suck the marrow out of you, empty you of everything. Wide, gaping abysses are my forte. I negate everything you know, annul all you are. Rescind without reinstating, overturning the tumult in you and scooping you hollow. Quash your atoms, turn them into mass-less dust, and let them swirl off into some unknown dimension. Leaving you with more than an absence, profounder for its dearth. 

I am the scythe personified. I am the poison you think is balm, and all because you fail to see. Your voids are more for my presence, blindfolded mortal. I kill and hack and dissolve, scooping and disbanding. 

What are you, compared to ranks of fallen humanity? If ever I have served a purpose, it is this and this alone.

I am the Void that was created to create more voids.
And you? You are one of my masterpieces.

The stars' to wreak

I have bared myself for the stars to wreak
The stars’ to take, the stars’ to deck
In ancient scars and unbloomed flowers
Breathing life from long-dead bowers;
And mere shards they are, nothing more
Fallen from glory, scattered on the floor
Beneath His feet, above my head
Mocking my Sanity’s drunken tread.