The Almosts

That silence is full, almost
When tobacco-roses
Fly out of old diary pages,
And ants crawl across the table
Like love’s own mischief,
Crumbling fancies reach the feet
As we touch the river with our toes
To be tugged by the heart
Of our soliloquys.
We knew romance
As the flute of solitudes,
Dulcet enough to be drowned
In the laughter of
The priest and the disciples,
A young God tells us
From the depths of leftover wine,
Being ancient isn’t the spirit
Of our history.
Love, the startled lover had wondered,
If worthy of a letter written with blues,
Between our disquiet we feed sparrows
On our unpeopled paths
For nobody remembers the silences
Held in our fists like spared verse
Strangled by the spoils of worldly means,
What then is the calling of conquerors
In the defeats they love to be immersed in!

A craft worthy of you

My verse will be sleeping tonight
Beneath our barefoot walk
And listen to the quiet retreat
In rhyme with the clotting images

Of the dark, pounding no sense
Into why we ever lean on
A lover’s vintage moon.

My verse will bend like
A medieval slave
To craft worthy of you,
And agonize like unseen after-life
In a condemned mind,
So carefully clutched
In a fistful of storms.
And when the forestline will tremble
Like the searing notes of a tramp,
My verse would plunge like a fallen leaf,
To rest on its own shadow,
Sleeping with the agonies of birth.

John Doe’s troubled bridge

So i step out of my shadow
and walk behind
in lost brilliance,
as the road winds
into anfractuous turns and strife,
i hold the secret of knowing
the vanishing point of
love, hate and surprise
somewhere down the dusk,
when I pass a stone in the wild
i can see in stony silence walking,
an untouchable child.
the harvest moon shines
incessant light into

measured harmonies,
empty seats fill with
nascent god particles
no one can contain,
like a perished pirate’s song
in lonely depths,
lives for the unreal
our reinvented solitude.
….no primal stone mark is alone in a cave though, and yet no
stranger fears the stealth of being wistfully empty like a
nightjar, still, you are versed in practiced scales of mourning,
penitence is your epilogue, demons rise to die, in the call of
the seraphic sermons.
let me tell you why
a void is a sense grown,
it’s unreal, a fancy or a folklore,
only the creator can be alone
come close then
to the river beneath our troubled bridge
to the rustling juniper and its red skin,
let your soul drop the blues,
and i shall steal from your tired lips,
…Now and forever, the sins of solitude.

Flea-market dreams

The night lamps burn weakly
With cringing divinity,
A million people or more
On the sidewalks watch
The clouded empty streets
Lament the missing stir of the mind.
An old man on the third floor
Reads the need for solitary pleasure
From a flea-market book,
Written by an unknown misogynist.
A child sleeps in the corner
Wrapped in worthless dreams,
A serpent coils the moon today
There’s no harvest to sing for.
Only the wine flows

Between the breasts of a concubine
Into her belly-button deeper than pain,
On a breathless night of contradictions.
The silence of the night is white
Yet, a deeper quiet has hues,
Bringing back from evanescence
Poetry to its creator.

Pencil stroke

I live in a village where women fish, men carry firewood, and
children listen to Granma lore, where religion isn’t a harvest,a
river is left wild, and old twilight songs rise in pepper harrow
mornings, where birth and death are flustered narratives of
yesterday’s news, between them my village awakens in
… lifetimes and yearnings.

This is where mothers open doors to drifters on singed
afternoons, a soldier of time, passing through the moors,
unschooled in the noise of war, as women in my village light
candles to aphonic boots, and sing ancient songs
… nothing is too far.

In my village, nobody wakes up behind sofas as insects, in their
simple creed, men and women are a facile line, ride the only van
to a local fair, where no urban craft of dreams sell inventions,
where lollypops, fritters and colored bangles drown into the
space of
… unbidden chamomile air.

Dragonflies pirouette on mustard fields, and toads croak to
answer sparrow tweets, under an old oak tree is learnt birth is
why all die, and pastures sleep like a gentle refrain, a pencil-
stroke smile dances in a sharecropper’s eyes, his barefoot
struggles are
… innocent as rain.

My village is a play, mornings and nights without a day.