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A measure of distance outdated, decayed, replaced by the sonic that serves both benign and ballistic, of wills.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?

Back-trackers

I had a thing for talipes,
A way of living, that torsion of heel
At 3, most tender of age,
In learning to walk, upright, away
Not the walking, that faced
Rear end to what’s all being left
Behind, for the memory lane,
Rather
A mystery in the martial
The art of recoil, in footwork, I learned
That movement of misery that makes
Evaded, near lethal a blunder -
A flight at sound, sight, smell
Of temptation, repelled, rebel,
Rewind of back-stride
A way to save soul, and life
And I wonder, which, of the weary
Ancestors of mine, took flight
From the surly, snatch of the underworld?
Which of forefathers met Mama Dlo’?

Earborne

Parable flew like cockatoo,
Passed overhead, swept softly on ears,
It knocked, unanswered, left
For new soil-
Sweet and evergreen, fields
Of blossoms, of wisdom
With heart of listener
Like shepherd on call.

Rear-flection

In rear-view lens, I witnessed, one morn
What seemed, a string, of surreal
In sequence of living, in likeness
Of backwardly dance, perhaps
With odd slant, of glass, peered back,
Saw liars, then lying when passed
At 50, looking back
Now standing right-
Angled to earth, erect, up-right,
Then zig-zaggers, now, on white
Solid line, while vendor and vagabond,
Veered and vanished, in silence of street-light
Shadows that touched, at tips, almost
As arrows, and buildings
Made bridges of length, in Lego,
Then men, once metal, side-walkers
Of vehicles, sat sidelong, swingers
Of songbird that perched, on threading
In unison of wires, that waved, in whisper
Of winds, and I peered, from within
My world, of glasses, of prism
And played, with planes, of angles
Of light waves, and saw
How sidewalk had tapered, like tunnel
And saw how pathways, aimless, gaping
Are trained, with focus, to narrow
With vision of change
As I witnessed, a world, what is
Then carved, and sliced, and sutured,
To visualize, what ought to.

Paradoxus

1.
Martyr spends agony’s
Coin in return
For lost cause
While protest-
Action on feet and plaque-
Cards do not play
To public belief.

2.
Can’t steal
What never was
Can’t give
What’s not yours
But greed gives
Gold with a pound
Of sorrow, with tear-
Drop and drivel
Though never once
Had self-gold with
Pinch of sorrow

3.
Light of world
Through which all form
Made visible to eye-
Sight may well blind-
Sight of man who
Gazed its naked-
Bright staring awe-
Fully.

4.
Easy for camel-
Walking thin past
Threatening eyes made
To condemn rich-
Man-made unable to
Fit frame, fatted
With money-baggage
Blocking fixed door-
Way to exit
Though smaller.

5.
Learn by mother-
Nature’s art-
Work of wonder-
Fully absurd
Mammal of fur
With fowl-feature
Fish, and flesh
With ways of duck
Wading with nest
Of eggs, among reed-
Beds that folly sleeps
With irony

_other

First letter of life
Preceeding that which gives it
E_pty in absence

Bait

Fifty silver stars
Swamp scarlet sea of terror
Trapping a king-fish

Douenic

Tales of talipes
Dancer's back-leaping in shade
Of silk-cotton trees

Opportune

Half-full and gaping,
Empty-full of promises,
Thirsty and drinking.

Lupine

Canine cravings creep
Through pine-trails, leaping vines
Climbing flyward yapping
At the moon-lit night sky
Letting the by-gone of twilight
Be silenced
In worship to Norse
God’s twin-dogged dialect, driving
Dusk and dawn behind barking, and paws’
Bounding at midnight
To Seneca songs
Impounded
Lungs and bone-cage where dogs
Were held, where hounds are fed breath,
And moonlight was sung, to become

To hunt, for Hecate
Survive and stain-
Scarlet the skies, and rain-storm
Born-to-stalk, watchdog, made-secure
High place of Greek gods,
Olympus,
Where ground was cloud for
Heaven
With effeminate-crown of silver-
Crested spear cross-bowing to an altar,
Mourning
Prayer like incense had longed
For Heirs to Artemis, to huntress’
Tumbling of age and mustard
Seeds sprouting that took mountain below
Us Sun-Daughters of Eve and soil-skinned
Mothers toiling at mills and milk tins
In land infested by white face and windmills
Of English, twang and tea leaves
And son-shepherds afield, tending their sheep

These, nights are lazy-rundowns
Of cots and little ones
Tucked-in
Blanket of fable flung
From maiden’s tongue-
Hinge on bedtime, where tale came alive
In legacy, legend of chasing
Little boy who cried
Wolf
And aftermath of countryside crook;

This paedophile,
Pounced on little girls
Turned, red coats of child-
Hooded dreams in disguise of
Grannies, embroidery, sly
And wide-eyed trickery
And I, turn pages in wonder
How wandering ladies made
Tupperware laughter leap bounds
Inside bellies of toddlers
In pre-schooled, moral and textbook
Definitions
Of hounds’ black-beard and feared
Menace of fur-coat and
Staunch breath-howl as he
Bellowed
Then broke before brick-house of swine
Letting in,
Letting laughter resound
From sulphur-bind sheets, as brown
As teak-table tops, and what
Tupperware feel would make
Napping in nurseries so pleasant
That dreams are dragged-over
Historical delusions;

It takes
Back tumbling of age and mustard
Seed back to Greek and brush-mountain melodies
Of growing back to Seneca songs
Into humming, and humbling of kayote key
Notes of learning to read between
Yapping at the moonlight
To know, this canine.

Night-mare

Sound of thunder
That surges violent storm of wakefulness
And will flatten our frowning bedsheets
Of stringent terror seizing sinews
Neath her bounding of silvered heels.
Lightning will lay scorch as it travels
Bolt through bracket bones of bare flesh
That hovers amassed in silhouette stature
Like blackened skins of clouds so lofty.

O’ lumbering lady of mirth, now eclipsed
Take the groaning bitter of darkness
And saddle now its poignant promise
Of broken dawns we’d yearn to see

Cast recall of dreams you mounted
Failures flung from whithers so steep
Thrones of kings brought crashing at her feet
Buckling at her fetlocked mercies
And of blissful hopes now trampled
Soft memory blown through her muzzle
To breath of howling storm, exhaled
From blackened belly nursing your dreams

Lady of moon and macabre misgiving
Will thunder in nightly swarm as you sleep
And spine of bounding mane, entangled
Stabbing fears deep into psyche
That laces regret through formless memory
Of the rider you once knew.

Lie-ability

It’s easy for you to claim that it’s truth
Merely bending onto its own frame
Perfection at its best
And nothing else...
But not for me.
Bitter be last of those days
Swooned over your slicing of syllables
Days of vaulting those virulent vowels
You said were harmless...
Beauty set to sleep by your rhythm
Razor of grass as blades of your tongue
The bullshitting babble buttering your lips
All gone
With irony, that synchrony of motion
Writhing hip touching hip as you parted
Slits of legs to give you liberty
With all i had left...
Nought but frigid breath of lies
I devoured thirsting and trusting your depth
Could sanctify truth
Ungodly, and lied to
Like puppet clenched between your fingers
Bending must be heaven for you
And hell beyond that brazen fantasy:
Everything I’d ever wish to see
Can only live on the tip of your tongue.

Temporality

In this world
Eternity begotten, not made
Forgotten
And played with
Far too often.

Years are yearning
To have you back
Between their jaws
To grinding pulp
Of bitter moments
You pressed within

Months become monsters
You cringe at counting
Twelve to 1
Three-sixty plus 5
In this world
Days be numbered
Dates on calendar you flip backward
Do lie closer than they seem

The hours are "we time"
Between us only
Keep it like this
Or loose what it means
To love
To be

A minute, just that - minute
Miniscule
Misused
Muse
And gone

Seconds don't always
Give second chance
Make most of them
For first time round
Is last you see
In this world.

Shards

Mirrors are fragile...
Bending as borne lassitude of image
Cracked as irony caved on its own weight
Broken, but laced well
If it jams, you force it
Or rein-force-mentally frame it -
Bits and pieces of you
Peep through spiked ‘n cynical boarders
To shield what then was reflection
Of yours
In a thinking far too fragile to endure
Stones of truth bombarding conscience
Only to catch yourself in splinters
Over and over
Tossing and twisting shards into your slit palms
Subtly embraced in the ecstasy of bleeding’s
Tepid feel
Of crimson flow
Pooling glass at your feet
As footpath
Made to bless heels in what bleeding
Began with piercing edge of denial...
Caustic blades of untruth being told
And one pain pane of glass you shattered
In battle of self