Words

They are just words.
Tell yourself often enough
you might make believe it.
Words strung together
into a necklace
no throat will ever wear.
Written, seen, read, spoken
have you not woken
from a dream
with another's words?
Weapon-like words
knives, arrows, bullets
rend the flimsy armor
of false beliefs
Could your words not span
bridges over chasms
of misunderstandings?
Like painful stitching together
of torn hearts and broken minds?
Like salve on open wounds
can they not undo?

Dancing with Surya

Tiny tendrils of my wonder
are snaking their way
through the cement of my endurance
in a wall, started by my tormentors,
but built, brick by back breaking brick,
by my own unnourished soul;
what was to have been my fortress
became my prison, brick by brick.

Tiny tendrils, stretching and growing,
awakening after a long lost sleep
match the wonder of the walls
fallen brick by broken brick
creeping, crawling, twisting themselves
through the crevices of my daughter's sunlight
forcing the mortar of my prison
to crumble, made gravel by her love.

For Vibha: At Gautam's Death

In the heaps of fallen leaves
among the hoards of fallen faces
I stand, an oak, sheltering all:
all around me, the sky is falling
in jagged blue pieces
the sky is falling.

The Flight Series

One


Brown and tan and dark
earthtones
yet so unearthlike.
No green of grass
no blue of quenching thirst
Brown and tan for miles
earthtones stretching before me.



Two

Dallas at 35 thousand feet
cloudy and dark
silver and gray
bathed in fog
and swirling mist.
I fall into
its shrouding arms
fearing myself
fearing the fall
torrents of tears
torrents of pain.
And the first drop of manna
to my parched lips.



Three

Rivulets in stone
running through gashes
on the sides of
improbable majesty
running red from the blood
of what wound of mankind?



Four

In slanting waves
what once was
a trickle
has turned into
this storm.
Covering all our
windows, all our
views, all our sight.
But in ferocity
it loses to the
storming in my heart.



Five

The window was small.
Still, bigger than
the window to my heart.
And the droplets
of tears that clung to it
flicked from my tainted fingers
were darker than Desdemona's blood