How can fingers that cannot hope to lift
The alphabetical keys of the lives they perceive,
Catching only strained movement behind dimly lit curtains,
Possibly enrich those stories they feel compelled to weave?
How can eyes that have never traversed the strokes
Of a redeeming sunrise, through crystal prisms
Scattering light, envision scenes that hold
In all their verbosity, even a candle to reality?
My pen has exhausted its limited store of wit,
Fickle insight leaves behind but inkless dents,
Screeds brimming with empty eloquence,
No gyves bind me; I know not wherefore I seek out agony.
I am no armoured bearer of the truth,
Nor a magsman infatuated with frippery,
No glorified beholder of Time’s unabating blows,
but someone who someday aspires to see.
doors are difficult to open,
ridiculously easy to close.
oft they shut themselves,
if the wind but strokes their sides.
suffering, though prevalently ignored, is apt to
slip into the very crevices of the consciousness
if only one hears a whisper of its enslaved multitudes.
suffering, therefore, is not a door.
writing about suffering, on the other hand
is a different matter altogether.
it hits you in waves; individual bubbles
lost in froth and salt--
for no amount of research,
no volume of graphic detail
can truly ensnare
half a portion of its true nature.
sometimes one wonders why the mind is
as dogged in its pursuit of beauty; enough
to wilfully speak over the voice of another
for no better reason than to dissect the latter.
In tendance of what seems to have been,
I cannot help but see the semblance of a machine;
An unbroken chain of causation in the abstract
Dioramas I unwittingly create.
But if determinism is the cover of life,
Surely, cucullus non facit monachum;
There is a lot more to be learnt from living
If only one gathers scattered wisdom.
Yet, when meandering fancies chance upon shadows cast
By dying cressets, stoked solely by guidelines drawn
from history, who is to say that benign verses
Will not shrivel into sanctimonious platitudes?
beyond the door, there is noise,
the overpowering sound of incessant voices:
of speakers blaring, of people speaking
over speakers.
limp against a closed door, bounded
by space i can call my own, lies a bag
shaped by the weight it carries, only to be
emptied someday, just as surely as it was once filled.
each time i gaze upon my satchel, i realise afresh
that i lack control. all those bits of paper scattered ‘round
within the frontmost pocket, remnants of lost trails i never found—
well, i do not recall thrusting them in in the first place.
tile-joints criss-cross across my room, fine lines of brown
dividing a perfect lake of dappled granite into a network of squares
contrary to its geometrical kismet, meeting to form an elaborate low-stakes
tightrope—that I wilfully tread every day
the juxtaposition of control and the lack of it never fails
to fascinate me—i am, in theory, master of the situation,
but being untrained and distinctly clumsy,
my feet inevitably flounder, unchecked.
there is much i fear,
but it hides beyond a wooden door,
i haven’t the faintest inkling
of what i’m doing, but i can zero in on a moment
construct illusions and pretend.
yet i can’t hide from the fact
that i cannot pretend away
the thought of those two lives
my words are too light to do justice to.
I fear that my being, overfull of paper crystal and paper gold
Inveigled itself into believing that it belonged in the fold
Of those affected by Levana and her Ladies of Sorrow,
Too invested, now, to leave.
But for the exaltation of leaning against the closet doors
Facing the east window, watching glory trickle down glass
And cement alike, not leaking from the heavens but from
The outwardly prosaic things themselves.
i wonder whether
this manuscript is destined to see
the light of day, if i’ll ever see the day
i ’ll fold it up and put it away.
i’m at my desk, i cannot move,
i can only survey this wrecked room,
i wish I’d never written this wretched thing,
and yet…i’m glad i did.
Perhaps a lens is false solely because it is tinted gold.
I know that falsehoods uniting to form
The semblance of a grand idea do not justify appropriation,
But glory is blinding.
and i am
just
a magpie
blinded
by
light.