How To Scold A Mirror

Time to have a chat with your mirror
Through speech-less and more leveled gaze
Letting it subtly sit beside thought
To hit deeper than skin-talk, and say
That luminous flaws aren't your fault
That glass content ought not to contest you
Nor judge your character
Having turned its back, to face you with film
That cowardice is sin
And that having you stare yourself to nothing
Is best an inflated, weightless tactic
Of war with the helpless
That gazing games aren't played by oneself
And that rapport is more
Than resonance of tongues to be swallowed and spat
Like brick-wall commands
That eons could pass
Somewhere between light-beams leaving your iris
And the image
And back
And how everything between is emptiness
And how quietly you question this;
How long is a second, nanoscaled?
And is space an illusion?
And how you might change before replies are relayed
To expired enquiries of who you are
From whence you came
And from hence your state...
To render them irrelevant
To question your relevance
To make relevance irrelevant
To move on at once
Leaving only an image
To end an argument with, and of
Yourself
As nomads do.

S-t-a-p-l-i-n-g: Reflection

Ear-length

Arms-length:
A measure of distance outdated, decayed, replaced by the sonic that serves both benign and ballistic, of wills.

Ear-length is what matters, most modern of measures.

Javelins, made before time, tore tiger-hides. Men paid by limb, or life, at rebound fury, of big-cats’ bellowing return, of mutiny, bezerk.

Time. Pressure. Selection. Sapien.

Saw-tongue shaved and shaped. Weft of vocal nothing, made substance, became.

Language art, lead to artillery

From thrones fell Kings and Queens, in broken self, abolished esteem

Bombarded minds, departed peace, left behind

War-heads, filled of hate-crimes, waiting

To be.

Earthbound

Well beyond fifty and folding
As legacy leaned over doubling form,
With grasp all steady, hinged at fingers
Flecked of age, of agony’s wilt
Of forgotten years, flung
As the carefree of youth, unfurled and flayed
With weightless of wings, timeless,
Unbound –

Caught wind with patience, wound
With belly-nest of hands, a trifling soft
That nursed and nurtured
The blossom of rose and brilliance, of recall
That followed the felling of flesh
And the certain of autumn, that death
Was alive in the undertoned, echoes of earth
In what solitude the silence of maggots, have churned
With fervour, endless
Like flow of your fingers, now pressed
At the seam of your last days.

Dying Room

Where solitudes never sleep
On the crusted browns of bamboo, latched
At flank of newborn, slung
By the flaccid gaunt, of their forearms –
Fastening the ritual frail, of frames
In etiquette set for the feast, of gangrene.

Where the wasted shroud of reject
Is etched as an echo of truth
On every wall that dare face, the defaced
And vow never to expose, the entrails
Of end-trail moments, of gasping, heaving
Corpse of toddlers’, belch and breath of acetone.

Walls have been torn, by look-aways
Left in the mulch of decay, made stomach
Of swallowed sympathies, saw infants rot
By rites of abandon, sung
With the séance of sîwáng –
Like rattling, rickets of bone.

Where parents are the savage, of spectres
Stalking glass-blades, of gazes
Through abyss of orbits, gorges and gape
Of the rugged fonta
nelle –
The first fruit of famine, displayed
By the famished, of fondle.

Dying room: a place where love and nutrition-starved orphans are left to end their days.
Sîwáng: Chinese word for “death”.

Queen of Co(r)pse

She is Queen of Copse,
A quiescent land of leapers
Lying in limbo of light, subdued,
With coarse cracklings of life
That linger to slack, and slender
Of side-branches swaying, on shoulder –
The head-weight of canopies; crowns
Communicate by leads of lianes;
A trellis of tresses
Trapping in arbour the song, of cicadas
With hums of tree-houses, hollowed
By hammer, the woodpecker’s home
That holds, more honour by craft
Than aphid, whose silent steal of sap
Had stifled soil and soul of lumber
That left lordosis, locked in lumbago –
The season of sawdust and severed thrones.

Bipolar

In my deciduous youth, I recall
From childhood bliss, pondering
The art of being paid, as loser
Of tooth and what irony I faced
In paying, painfully to lose, at dentist...

Am I a loner?
Or has beloved tooth fairy
Gone bipolar?