These keys
That I tap
For sonic delight
And literary sunlight
Produce packets
Of ancient lore
Covered by cobwebs of thought-bore
I blow away
The colluding threads
With the breath of my dreams
So do you see them now?
Lilac-colored tales
From the digital entrails
Of the cyberoptic underground

You lived
In my eyes
As a traveling teardrop

——-

In your hands
I saw the crochet work
Of love corrupted

——-

Across the room
You stood
Waiting for my words
To roll out the red carpet

——-

The night
Came to pass
In the space
Between our raised eye-brows

——–

The stars
Put to sleep
My passions; reawakened

——–

Sunshine stooped
To enter
Our eyes lowered
In mutual shame

——–

Those words
You dropped
Like coins in a box
Now clink, whenever
I call out your name

——–

These tears
Fall on the floor
And turn into
Letters of love

——–

Let me leave
These words
In your heart
As bookmarks
Of our love

The rain fell like warm feelings, wetting my heart with the tears of yesterday. I wandered down the street moving in and out of the long shadows. The street was mostly empty reflecting the state of my mind. My eyes stared at the way the raindrops rolled off the edge of my fingertips, drop by drop, and one after the other in slow motion. I like rain and the manifold forms it takes. The late summer evening shower is the best, washing away the heat and grime of the day with a gentle whisper. Lo! The sun peeked out of the corner of a cloud like a shy child. I bathed myself in this sudden radiance, cleansing my emotions with the weightless photons.

The sky opened its arms for me. I covered myself in the warmth of its blue embrace. Eyes closed, hand folded over my chest I fell into an ocean of dreams. Seldom does one find such a perfect stillness, a stillness which can be sliced with the edge of a sword. I traveled far, as far away as possible to a land where deserts wrote poetry with sand and rocks radiated wisdom with their silence.

I touched red water with my feet and kissed blooming flowers with the edge of my tongue. I held warm flesh in my arms and caressed the sinuous curves of beautiful bodies. I fought ugly moods and played with splendid emotions.

Green memories tumbled over each other in my head in an effort to gain the gift of permanence, each one a box of feelings and hidden insights, each one a window into time distorted by the play of light and thought. I moved on, counting the cobblestones receding under my feet like milestones of the mind. In the distance, I could see my destination appear out of the wet haze.

Nothing mattered anymore. The days may roll and the nights may flow but my memories will still be secure in their niche. I can listen to their mellow voices whenever nostalgia shoots its melancholic arrows again.

I opened the door and entered the white room.

(a personal ode to the utter visual splendor of the Chinese film ‘Hero’)

At low tide
I found love
By my side
Cleansed-
By the blue dawn
Perceptive and indulgent

At high tide
I found love
Tortured by pride
In broken sea shells
Brittle and suspicious

At dawn
I found love
On my green lawn
Lying naked
Vulnerable and cruel

At night
I found love
Hidden from sight
In my heart
Polite and pensive

I wish
When I woke up
I’d find
Your hair and arms
Draped around my
Face and shoulders
In trusted abandon

——-

In your eyes
I saw
A myriad collection
Of my personal poetry

——-

Sooth
My inferior fears
With a touch
Of your inspired innocence

——-

At night
I want to sink
Slowly
Into the torpid depths
Of your weary eyes

——-

Dreams
Fail me in
Recreating
Your physical magic

——–

I want to evaporate
Like a dew drop
In your porous passion

——–

Your teardrops
Forming
Pools of pearls
In my open
Love

——–

On the bed, we
Intertwined
Human shapes
Of intangible emotions

——

Your animal smell
Wrapped around my
Open senses
Like a silken veil

The air smelt of burnt napalm. There were only two of us left. The rest had left about an hour ago. We decided to stay. We did not want to leave. The Americans would come again. We knew that. They would spray the land and burn the blue haze yet again. We knew all that. But we still did not want to leave. We were just tired, tired of running every single day from them. Tired of wading through swollen streams full of anorexic leeches, tired of evading the open spaces and sleeping inside wet woods, and tired of not trusting our own people.

Life has to end sometime somewhere. We decided that for us it would be here by the side of an unmarked road, in a no man’s land between two hostile villages.

I lit a small fire even though it was dangerous. But you know how it is. When you have decided to die you do not care for small things. Comfort always wins over caution in such times.

My companion was quite old and it was remarkable that he had survived for so long. He was the type who did not talk much but looked hard at everything as if he could understand everything just through his eyes. We had met on the road north. He was part of a small company of men charged with the dirty business of killing some villagers who spied for the Americans in return for those ugly green notes that the whole world craved for. I was part of an elite unit assigned to run some dangerous missions behind enemy lines in the north. But we did not know the terrain and were in search of someone who could guide and also fight beside us. He fit the bill and we took him on. In a land of equal comrades hierarchy was still a novelty that did not spoil the revolutionary taste.

After that things went horribly wrong. The old man took us through a forest where we ran straight into a company of Americans. To compound our misfortune they were veterans of jungle and close combat warfare. It was a complete disaster. Those of us who survived drifted back in ones and twos to reach this pre-arranged meeting place. The old man was one of the survivors. This of course caused speculation that he might be a spy. Perhaps that was why he decided to stay back with me and wait for the American death machine. Or perhaps he was even more tired than me. He must have been in a lot more of the fighting. It might be a cliché but war is a dirty business, not to those who read about it in newspapers over their morning cup of coffee but to those actual poor souls who are caught in the middle of it. No, I shall not talk more about the misery of war. Great men have written about it toiling for years over their desks with a fire warming their backsides. I’m but a poor soldier, tired and angry at what war has done to my life and family.

The fire started to burn low but I did not feel like adding more wood to it. It was comfortable just to sit there and see the yellow flame go down slowly and allow the red underneath to dominate. I like the embers better than a fire. Fire is something superficial; it just goes about its job burning blindly everything in its path. But embers are not like that. They have a certain majestic beauty about them. They seem wise. They only burn if you touch them. They are content to just glow with the deepest and warmest of all colors.

My reverie was disturbed by a long sigh of the old man. He was looking towards the east, craning his neck to one side as if to hear something better. Were they already on their way? I could not hear anything yet. But then my hearing had been damaged during the course of the war. Another one of the many physical gifts I had acquired along the way. There…now I could hear something, something just on the outer threshold of hearing. The subsonic throb of rotors slicing through the heavy air like a knife through wet cheese. It was time and both of us knew it now. I looked at him and his gaze met mine and suddenly in that instant I understood why he looked hard at everything. It was a beautiful moment, a moment that transcended all material and temporal divisions. It was like all your life you were searching for that one thing that would define your life and in the end you find it in a corner where only discarded feelings lay gathering the dust of neglect and inaction. I could see the same understanding in his eyes, wet with the tears for the sudden bond between us. A new calm began to take root in my heart. I hugged myself and closed my eyes, savoring the wet taste of approaching infinity.

I wanted
To talk aloud
So I kissed my fingers

Now
You can see
The whispers they weave
From the threads of love and pain, again