Poison

this piece is written after quite a few days… it has at least been a year or more since such a long break was hurled on me and i guess the unease and rage are obvious in the words… by ‘silver poison’ i meant my craving for the beauty… in my customized color chart silver is beauty, red is fame, blue is love. the other two not used in this piece are black and gold standing for sadness and wealth respectively.

This poison, silver, red and, blue
runs in my blood like a fire through
the crackling timbers of a forest, parched.

For a thousand years the timbers,
that stood beneath the brutal sun
and became as dry as the very core
of nothing lesser than the Hell itself
are burning now, up in vicious flames.

In thousand years the poison too
has grown even more elusive
and its potency ever on the rise.

Now, the poison, unleashed at last
swiftly spreads through the plasma of my blood
to murder and devour me from inside.

The Wind, Too Sterile and Dry

The wind in violent groans
ravaged the cityscape
yet no rain clouds arrived
across the empty sky
to wash away the scars
left by the day’s cruel sun.

Crowded structures, tall and the ground
in fear of the tempestuous wind
shook against my cold, anxious skin
like pulses from a throbbing heart.

With no rain however
we cannot multiply,
nor can we cultivate
with no shades to hide.

In the end when dawn arrives
to blaze on the overcrowded place,
the city lies too spent from a fear, dazed
by the vicious wind, too sterile and dry.

The River of Life

Coming across the river stream, I gasped aloud,
stopping dead on my track with a jolt to wonder,
if she is the same that I used to have,
the one who flowed before my mind was civilized!

I can still remember how wild she used to be
with both her swollen banks and fatal curvature
and those overflowing waves, crowned white,
when the sky got swollen too with dark monsoon clouds.

At winter though much calmer, she was never meek.
Then her banks, like two checkered boards of gold and green
would come to life, both thriving on the silt
deposited along the ground by her fertile flood.

Now she can be hardly called a river at all,
rolling towards the brink of her grand extinction
dragging death on its trail like a crippled snail
and I thought this river of life would flow eternally!

We Too Shall Have Our Feast

Though weeks have passed, the wind is still heavy
with wailing from the crowd and the stench of decay.
The humid sun, glaring down from above,
worked like a catalyst for the flesh eating worms.
They are having a feast to celebrate
our negligence, below the rubble of death.

Some place too far away from the stench, you and me
with our faces puffed white sitting in a table, round,
in comfort opined on the matter, grave, with words
chiseled with care but our eyes belied the haughty frown.

Later, we too shall have our feast and talk
some more on the tragedy, a pair of wise heads
bloated with knowledge, memorized, nodding or shaking
and leave the empty plates truly enlightened.

I’m A Tree

Barely past my prime I stand upon
this cruel land of dust and bricks, all alone.
My leaves already have started to curl
with whispers of yellow, hardly audible,
spreading from their edges towards my veins
but the thought of death gives me no pain.

For years I have seen how the city grows,
while my kind was hunted down for human cause,
so inhumanly. I have witnessed too
how open spaces shrunk to quench their greed.

The humans have spared me, I don’t know why,
letting me to live and burn from inside
with a fatal thirst from my roots to buds,
the monsoon last year was too dry and harsh.

Each year now is drier than the last, although
when I was born, I remember the wind
was temperate, neither hot nor too cold,
here, in my childhood and adolescence,
the rain fell in plentiful abundance.
Through human greed the place has now become
an ocean, dead and vast, of barren sand,
what was once a firm stretch of fertile land.

Still amid the receding snow lines around the world
feeling sad for the death of a single tree would seem too rude.