One Month Five Days

You can keep this brand of love
because it does not bring me much joy
so you can keep this brand of love
and keep your toys of gloom
And I will go
and you can keep this brand of love
and wrap it around your ring finger
because warped love lives only by its symbols
and symbols there are a-plenty
So you can keep this brand of love
because it does not do me much good
and all the juices of the living
have dried up and are rarefied, extracted
and moulded into a band of Platinum
They say prayer songs to the rain gods were made
because there was no rain
And all the songs of love collected
play on because all there is - is pain
So you can keep this brand of love
And wrap yourself in its tragedy
Sublimate it, you've got good poetry
Degrade it you've got a wreck of me
to keep
so ignore me and keep this brand of love
And frame pictures of it in your room
The pictures are no good to me
They don't talk and look like relics from faraway anyway
Then there are the things of togetherness
the smells and familiarity that will erode with time
but you can keep this brand of love
it will last you all you like
When the tears stop welling
and I am numb and cold
You will still have a piece of metal
around your finger to hold
So keep the symbols for posterity
and you can keep this brand of love
you can keep this brand of love
the only thing that can be kept
You are welcome to it.

some color

One Chapter

1.
A diffuse afternoon and
Quivering hand
I bury my head in diffuse sand
To elude your absence/forbiddance/bane
But you crowd my mind
And I grow insane

A piquant sauce on a palate
A pungent drug part sedate
A heady drug half titillate
Remain undeciphered pleasure/pain
You crowd my mind
I grow insane

Gnats on an afternoon round and round
On bulbs moth wings that resound
On a festering sore that flies hound
Purposeful/mundane or inane
You crowd my mind
I grow insane.

2.
Once upon a time I saw
Cotton balls upon a cornflower sky
And magenta bougainvillea
Snatched to attention the wandering eye

Changing now
From bright to dull
Since one of the clouds went
To meet the sun
Shook hands and chatted there awhile
And one Eucalyptus tree
Waved every branch and leaf
And stood trembling
And breathing the wind
With arms uplifted

To cotton ball clouds
At the start of June
Those Clouds of pre-monsoon

Now I see walls.

3.
In the night
When sounds die out
Winds weaken
Wakefulness makes time stands still

Each whisper magnifies
Silences louden
Absence grows into a vacuum
And the eeriness of a dense black hole

What is it called?
That something between
Presence, absence and memory
Ghosts?

Yea, ghosts of thoughts
A whole host of thoughts

Assail

Prevail

I think of you
I have you near
I kiss my hand
It is your cheek

4.
Each anonymous day passes by
And every next day wonders why
Yesterday is gone

Sometimes we live
And often die
Seldom asking but then why
Is yesterday gone?

Forget sometimes, sometimes memorize
Sometimes doze with open eyes
Sometimes gaze with vacant eyes
And yesterday is gone

Always lonely never befriending
Always correct and never bending
Always assuming or pretending
Quite together alone we lie
Wish and never actualize
And think before we once more die
Yesterday is gone

5.
Protean love
Now sweet pleasure
Now pain
Meander a while
Come back again

Now raring
Now despairing
Then defeating
Then retreating

With what familiarity
Supinely curls
My body on your bed
What deja`vu
When I conjure
You bending your head
At my knee
And then protean love
You are
Straining to be free

Protean love
Yesterday living
Tomorrow dead
Rest a while
Then surge ahead
Take your leave
But linger on
Look back once
Before you are gone
Take wing and haunt
That unyielding sky
Until the lack become want
`By and `by
Protean love
Come back to me
Forever bound
To be free

6.
You will ask me Love
How I am
I will tell you about
How fine I am
I get through the day
I get things done
I know my way

From dawn to dawn
In the twilight zone
Life passes away

Everything

Passes away

With Time

And sometimes when the walls
Of this closed room
Grow closer and closer down on me

I have no expectation and
Hence no Fear
No one will come knocking
To disturb me here

Except piquant Memory
Except Dead Memory

The kind that causes pleasure no more
Because it cannot cause pain
The kind that shows
No rainbows because
It cannot precipitate the dammed rain

From dark nebulous clouds
Those abstract shrouds
To uncertain feeling

Because, when, Love, you left me
Laughter died
Along with tears
Excitement died
Along with fears
There isn't any love left in me
So there isn't any need
To give or to receive
And ever since then
I have not been very happy
And I am thankful to you
Because neither have I been sad
And that's not bad

After all, that's not so bad
I am fine, thank you.

Thanks for asking.
No I am not sad.

I am getting along and that after all
Is not so bad

7.
I cried because I was unhappy
And was made unhappier still
Because you were not here
To chide me out of my tears
Or nag me out of the issue

I cried alone many times
For no reason or rhyme
And wished you were here
So I could waste my tears
On something other than a tissue

8.
A sad song
And a sunset
Sit through the evening
They sit
And whet
Hopelessness that is flailing
Directionless in the nocturnal sky

There are stars that cluster
In meaningless Morse
And expectations muster
Courage to find beaten paths in the gorse

Hope is Vain
Hope is in vain
And does not know
The degree of pain
It causes to Belief
Sleep is one relief
And even sleep lets you down
Every morning
Unsuccessfully muffling
The shuffling
Sounds of dawn

And consciousness spawns
Pain with renewed virulence

Acknowledge the passage of
One more day
Before Hope charts
A meaningless way

Among stars that cluster
In meaningless Morse
Hope to map
One more course

Is that why
You sometimes cry
In your dreams?

9.
Patience wearies thin
I feel your calluses on my skin
You knead me until I am pliant
Your hands are heathen and defiant

Supplicant to my deity
Willing food to hunger
First morsel to starvation
To exhaustion slumber

Death and/or resurrection
Blessing and/or malediction

And fool enough to want relief
In foolhardy suspension of disbelief
Am I.

10.
I was hanging by the end of a rope
And twisted the ends of well worn hope

In my lap

I was looking out the door
I was looking for more
And I looked out the windows too
I was waiting

I was baiting my chances
I was hating the fictitious romances
Where lost lovers come back home
All I ever got was trips
To the door
And back to the window

11.
I am waiting for the night
For in the night no questions are asked
In the dark no answers expected
And in a sliver of stray moonlight
Out of the corner in the window
On the edge of the dark curtain
Your love will show
And the faith remain

I will be blind but to your kiss
And in the dark I will not miss
The quickening of your pulse
I might miss all else

But in the dark we will forget
All doubts unasked and un-replied
In the dark there is no regret
All the noise has died
Died.

In the dark all else is still
And through the night we will
Shut up and shed our vanity
Abandon all thought of sanity

Hush! Listen

Those that glisten

In my eyes are stars
And in the silence
I will hear your dream
A quiet requiem
That is your love.

12.
Caught a crescent in sunrise
A bad dream's chased sleep away from those eyes
They are up early
And scowl while they dream
The lashes are surly
And protest it seems
But something is melting inside
Molten blood in melting hide
You are melting.

13.
The carryover from
The glacier my rib encloses
Are the stones
In my eyes, here pandemonium reposes

I am checking out the reasons
And the various responses
Between the various treasons
The answer curiously dances

Communicating meaning
Or the lack of it

Quite nipped
In the terminal bud
And twice bitten
Where am I growing?
In lateral directions?
Where am I going?

14.
I am drifting
I have left your hand
And have not clasped another
A single feather
Adrift

I am sifting
Layers of the sand
I was buried under
Sealing together
The rift

Only bubble weight
And feather light
No course, recourse
In undirected flight
Adrift

Like dry straw on ripples
Adrift

Like air in space
In a strange universe
Like a strange face
Adrift

Fickle, fickle
This air tickles
My lungs
Tonight it is free

Ahhh! I exhale
Musty and a little stale
My heart is lifting
I am drifting, drifting, drifting

Seven years and two days
I missed the ways
This relationship ended!
My fence's mended
I am drifting, drifting, drifting

You moon child
of dour face
You, so wild
You happy disgrace
Obscenely happy
Drifting.