A Poem by shari kadirur

DREAMS

Inflated colored balls,
Light as air, dance...
Figments of imagination
Set free to roam...
Rises up again
Unable to stay down...

Two children on sand
Not time-driven at all
Lost in their own worlds
Experiences... the first time

( More Poems by shari kadirur )
 

A  Long Poem by Sharanya Manivannan

KARNA CONSIDERS YUANFEN*

I dreamt of leaping over your corpse, naked and loose-haired, with an army
of women. I dreamt of you burning and me eating your ashes, the way you
coated so thickly my tongue. I chased your ghosts down. I stalked you. I
carved your name in smoke, seized you, and hung you about my neck like an
ornament. Run, if you'd rather. Live your life any way you choose, lover,
but you will die in my arms.

I know only this: the way I spent my whole life daydreaming about what it
would be like to wake up with your hair in my mouth, your feet curved
against the soles of mine. Learning your texture long before I knew your
touch. And so I find myself on this beach I stole from you, a basket of
flowers on my hip on this morning like dusk. This, I return to the water –
Karna reenacting her own beginning. My arms are stacked with bracelets. My
hair, heavy with orange jasmine. Oh, my conch-bearer, my coral-lipped god,
I ripped the armour that was my skin for you. I bathed you in my blood. I
drowned you, I drowned in you – and little by little, I ebbed away. I became
nothing.

Let me enter you in the partitions between your ribs, in the echo inside the
hollow of an elephant's tusk. How long I have pursued you. Hunted you. Past
galaxies of cosmic sagas: bitter conflict and staggeringly beautiful bliss,
piercingly celestial yearning, my longing bright as auroras, the nebulous
years where I could not have been more than a speck, star-dust, when I only
existed because you willed me to.

Does it never stun you that of all the things we might have been, this is
who we have become? I am not a woman lying screaming between tall green
stalks giving birth in the cornfield where I was raped. I am not a czarina
slipping my foot into the sensual red velvet mouth of a shoe held by the
servant who I eventually will be killed running away with. I am not a mother
drowning my firstborn in a river, weeping as I stuff the girl's mouth with
cloth, strangle her with her own umbilical cord. I am not a starlet
powdering my nose with cocaine in a plush room with mirrors on the ceiling,
seeing my life through haloes of smoke. I am not a guerrilla in uniform
breastfeeding even as I polish my weapons in the sweltering jungle heat. I
am not. I am.

And you, a constellation of brilliance, you who could have been anything.
What stings is that even then you would never have chosen to be mine. Still,
you shredded me with your teeth and screamed your madness to the skies,
brought the moon down in a apocalypse of envy. For you have always –

I return you to the sea I know only because of you. I invoke you. Come,
dance for me. Come, come with the northeastern wind that rattles my door
bearing your name. I will make you forget it. I will make you relearn it. Of
what use are the tree's roots to the moulted leaf; of what use is the river
to the ocean-bound stream? And so all things must loosen from their origins,
stray. All things must abscond, must lose their destiny before it can be
found.

– You have always belonged to me.

(More poems in this sequence )
 

Bone


War Paint

When you made your play
for a married man,
with your combat eyes made up-
you looked in the wrong direction.
Signals were fired-a warning-
from my eyes, if looks could kill.
You took your stance, with your
war-like dance,sending smoke signals
and I could only retaliate.

( More Poems by Merl Bone )
 

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A Poem by Susan Marie


Pieta

I have always envied Michelangelo.

Not that I have met him
but in my mind's eye,
I see David

standing

in all his glory.


His pectorals and abdominals

intact

and Mother Mary
cradling her son
frozen in time

an ice princess.


No one ever noticing

the woman

and the crows feet
that hide beside her eyes.

(More poems by Susan Marie)

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A Poem by Kelley Jean White

How soon before the seed

senses moisture, Before its thick shell
loosens and germ of the plant within
releases its rest and begins to unravel and unwrap
into light, How deep in the earth
must it burrow. And what of the dry husks
fallen off of the edge of the world?
 

(More poems by Kelley Jean White)

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A Poem by VIKRANT SHARMA
A Poem by Felino Soriano

Scenes and Takes # 20, 1

So many cradled the leaves
ignoring the
falling,
the symphony of swaying,
alphabetic origami
silhouettes,
forming silent interpretations
in the aspects of neurotic,
fighting felines
atop graying, antiqued oak fences,
falling,
reminiscent of arcing canoes
reaching toward avenues
of crossing white paged novels—
falling,

within a structured gaze of illuminated
glare,
spinning inside the epiphany of death,
the cliché of leaves atop ground:
a photographic opportunity
their last definitional
chance to remain beautified.

( One more poem by Felino Soriano)

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A Poem by Bhuwan Thapaliya


What type of poem am I?


“What type of poem am I?”
I am as formless as the clouds,
and as elegiac as the silence,
in the itinerary of the noise.

I am not a classic
written by the author, “God.”
The rhythms of my verses are supplied
by the parable of their tears.

I am not in me,
though I abide within myself.
I am but a colour,
whose colours have worn away.

Maybe I was written as
an ethical effect of modern art.
Or maybe I was not written
but just replicated from the lives of others.

I wish I could read the critics’ minds.
Is it true that a poem cannot read anyone?
I loathe the way they recite me,
pretending to understand me.

Maybe I am
the monologue of my rhymes.
Or maybe I am
the literature of my own life.

However much they hate me,
I am that poetry they cannot write.
I am the phantom of the world
crawling, with a rose in his hand,
through the boulevard of the thorns.

However much they praise me,
I am only a drop of verse
drawn up by time
to become the formless clouds
in the wilderness of the literary sky.

O Poet! O my maker!
“What type of poem am I?”
O strangers! O my readers!
”What type of poem am I?”

I wish I could read myself
and discern my spirit.
Is it true that a poem
cannot read a poem?

“Am I a poem?”
or am I just a rhymed hoax?

This cyclic curiosity goes on eternally.
I am lost in a synthesis between
the dualism of my readers
and the monism of my maker.

No one knows what it is like to be a poem.
No one knows how vague its core is.
There is nothing as genuine as me.
There is nothing as deceptive as me.

 

( More poems by Bhuwan Thapaliya)

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A poem  by  Bini.B.S

Another Alice, in Wonderland

This is another Alice
Curious and nubile
Venturing into wonderlands
Her mind was raped
In fact, gang raped
By too many wonders


In front of the looking glass
She stands, weeping
Unclad and bruised
Wondering whether it was fair
Curiosity kills many a pussycat
The grin of the Cheshire cat
Stays on the sky
A nascent moon of many moods


Alice cooks thick rabbit stew
For her nocturnal visitors
Sets bread and wine on the table
Thinking of someone's flesh and blood
Lights a candle before the crucifix
And waits for the devil to knock at her door

( More poems by Bini.B.S)
 

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A Poem by Ram Mehta

Buddha

Staring for a while at a handkerchief,
Buddha started making small knots on it.
He asked his disciples the difference
Between the plain one and with knots.
It is the same but not the look of it.
Mind of a person is just like that.
We must know how the knots took place
Then only we know how to untie them.

If the knot is that of infatuation,
To untie that knot be steady in desire
If the knot is that of anger,
To untie the knot be in peace.
If the knot is made of enmity,
To untie the knot be compassionate.
If the knot is that of miserliness,
To untie the knot be generous.

At all times, in pain or pleasure,
To prosper is the only measure.
 

( More Poems by Ram Mehta)