Birthday Blues

A quarter century ago
I came to this world
Crying and kicking
Maybe it was wisdom
Mistaken
Maybe it was warning
Unheeded
That with every anniversary
The World will love you
A little less
That with every year gone
Life will slip away
A little more
But still, it is a milestone
And I mark mine
With my words.

Alone in the past

It’s like going back in time

To the places you’ve been before

But this time they are bereft of people

Empty of action

Silent in words

And there I see the ghosts of our past

Walking down the cobbled alleys

I see them smiling, fighting, eating, drinking

Just walking….walking

It’s a yellow town

And a white lie

It’s a rocky coast

And a sea with salt from my eyes

It was the shortest of lives

And the deepest of all

****

 

To this place I will return

Without choice or effort

It’s here that I saw beyond myself

And fell into the abyss that you seem now

 

I might have clambered up the slippery walls

Into what the world believes is real. Practical.

But.

My soul wanders the yellow town

Alone in the past.

We

While the world assumes its focal point to be someplace,

The real events unfurl elsewhere

In the peripheries of eyes, just round the corners

Pitched battles over pitchfork issues

Come to a close when the Sun’s gone behind the lantana bushes

To scorch ground and sinews on the otherside of an ending.

 

We think it’s over, when it hasn’t even begun;

We think we are dead, when we haven’t even been concieved;

We fear we are losing, when they haven’t even begun taunting;

We decide we are the ones moving, when the Earth turns one last time.

I have…

I have your number and a phone without numbers to dial

I have your picture and an empty album

I have your voice and ears without their facility

I have your clothes and a body that fails to hold them

I have your breath and some skin that lies dead

I have your flowers and some stalks with prickly thorns

I have some tears and eyeballs that have dried up

I have more of my love and no more of your demands

I have myself and the knowing that you aren’t mine anymore

 

 

 

Having to live

Why can’t I decide I’ve seen enough

Of life, never mind I’m just a laughable 23?

What ought to be looked forward to, but

The gradual happening of life…the movie

You wished would end, the pages you wished would

Run out?

The sadism behind every living moment

When I submit to its whims: cry when Life deems fit

And laugh in between for comic relief;

Bear children who are unlikely to see me as anything

But their Indian brown version of the ‘White man’s burden’;

Share “moments” with another, who is set for

An all too similar fate.

And if Death were to favour him over me,

For all my desperate longing

What should I do? Or rather, what can I do?

I’d join the billions, wandering through

An accumulated loneliness,

That was once fervently hoped

To be never gathered.

But like dust, it has gathered over my memories

I would think after all those years

When I try to count using my fingers

The way I must have

Once upon a time.

Attempt

I walk on feet that don’t
Stop for me to hear
Your words

I see with eyes that fail
To grasp the glimpse within
Your folds

I watch mindless figures
Walking and talking lines
We should have shared

And your faint overtures fill
The peripheries of my eyes and
The insides of my eardrums

Below

I look down at the milling crowd

I see you, that tiny black dot

Standing six feet above ground

Yet, several feet below me.

As you will always be.