Lullaby

Sing me a story tonight,
The stars shall lend us a jealous ear.
Tonight the dipping moon
Drips with the teary-eyed pearls of your affection.

The indigo shade of nocturnal desire,
The blistering flames of parched separation.
I watch the shrinking birds in the distant sky,
Reach out and touch me, my love.

Retreat

Scar of the spirited word,
Shine in thy secret glory.
Attuned to new webs of fiction,
Caress the dark, soft mirror.

If you knew,
If you knew all along,
Would you go back?
Would you swallow the story whole?

Fitted labels,
Bracketing the name, left to right.
Diminishing voice,
Speak when you're all alone.

Disquiet

Sparks igniting half-muttered questions,
Inescapable in their urgency to speak.
Curious shades of hesitant blue and abstract green,
The tedious search for answers at the peak.

A certain walk of withering will,
The lone certitude of blank adversity.
Fall of the noble oceans,
Over edges, boundaries, and myopic corners.

The mirthless urge to perform, create, kill.
The rage of the savage fire.
The caged voices sing as they die out,
Drowning in their overwhelming sorrow.

Ridiculous, the veil of material normalcy,
I look beyond a life measured in coffee spoons,
Not knowing,
What I seek is what I do not know.

Tempest

I existed
Just about.
A wisp of starving air
Almost
Not there.

Taking care,
To recede into the background.
To drown like the ebbing sun,
Into the unknown horizon.

Suddenly a hand,
Tugging at my soul.
Seeking my live breath.
Shining light.

Flame in the dark,
Distant nebulae,
Adrift wanderer,
Chase,
Chase after the falling leaf.
 

Night

The weekend night burns,
In memory of an old waiting.
The ringing onomatopoeia of a hammering heart,
A stirring song of a knock from the past.

The potent intoxication of unbidden expression.
Proximate, unlimited, in its intimate immediacy.
Your soft smile reserved for the wordless moments,
Forging a parallel story of sweet sundries.

Delightful in their melange of little nothings,
A pastiche that weaves together a memoir worth everything.
Somehow all this tastes of meaningful contentment.
A gratifying taste my palette has never met so far.

Tonight I could write the finest poem,
Or achieve the highest merit of excellence.
And yet I would trade it all,
For a quiet walk with you, in all its prosaic mundanity.

And so this cold night burns on,
Weighed down by one muted breath after another. 
The slow dance of the lamp plays on,
As thoughts of you wash over my heart.

Name

Drowning in the permeating apparition,
Throbbing vitality,
Incumbent life of flesh.
Show me your face.

Search beyond the fire and brimstone of empty spaces. 
Eyes that speak of raging storms,
Battering my curious mind,
Lost land of old secrets and forgotten forests.

Shifting memory darkening the afternoon,
Silence of retrospective hunger.
Echoing through my pages - two ceaseless syllables.
The beginning and the end, the circle of your name.