Irony Man

If I were a rich man,
Six of us would have a chocolate to share,
A single room to sit and chat in,
And a single TV remote to fight over.

If I were a rich man,
We'd have two bikes or four seats in a rickety bus,
One cricket bat, one ball and three broken stumps,
But six mothers that we could count on when hungry.

Alas, I am not,
For I have all the above, but the five and six,
My house has a TV, the TV has a house, I don't,
For I am but a poor man, who everyone believes is rich.

Why No Knew Why

They stood by the pyre,
 As the flames waited to consume,
The offspring close and the rest a little away,
Wondering what put him there,
For he was always warm and gay,
'He sang the happiest lines,'
'The funniest he wrote,' they said of him,
'He cracked the best of jokes,'
'And could whip up a witty one,
Even for questions darkest,'
And so when they saw him on the pyre,
They wondered why he lay there, cold and dead,
When he should be alive and well,
Entertaining one crowd or the other,
They wondered why he simply lay and made them cry.
In the midst of them all, the confused souls,
Souls confused, naive and so far deceived,
Stood one, in stoic silence, weeping softly,
Knowing fully well why he lay where he lay,
Knowing more than what he sang, what he listened to,
And more than what he said, what he didn't,
What he read, over what he wrote,
She knew he said of comedy,
That it was but a parody of tragedy,
And knew he was an eternal fountain of humour,
Only because life had rendered him in every way,
A living joke.

The Beast Rises

When darkness shrouds,
And the white of the angel, his white, is called grey,
He peels off that very white cloak,
And puts on a cloak, nay, armour in black, of the beast,
Glistening spear in one hand,
And no shield in the other, for he himself is,
He turns around once, before heading for war,
To look at the crumpled white cloak,
That will lay unclaimed for a while, for none can,
He then peeps into his own new armour,
And finds a persistent white strand or two,
Sticking on, stuck over his pounding heart,
Refusing to leave, refusing to desert him,
And when he asks why, they instantly say,
How, after you slay the demon, your torments you allay,
Will you go back to the cloak, if with you, we don't stay?

The Solitary Echo

Alright my dear, dear Mountain,
Shall we talk? At least that which must be,
It takes two to tango, or so they say,
And it isn't just about the dance, you see.


We held the ends of the rainbow,
And our laughter echoed off each other,
Treacherous crags and dried pines didn't hurt,
As the sunshine healed us and caressed us like feather.


And when there were tears, my dear do you remember?
We made rivers from the water run down many a slope,
And as the water made good escape, we laughed,
And the sun rose to wipe the tears off and give us hope.


Today, the echo is now an echo in every sense,
For all I've heard in a while is my own voice,
The rainbow is heavy, and sans hold, it sways wildly,
And I helpless watch as I decay in silence's deafening noise.


The pines drill through me without mercy or care,
And along my dark slope, craggy rocks madly race,
The sun refuses to shine, for it says it needs both,
Will you rise, or will I bleed and whither, and die a disgrace?

Somewhere in a Likeness

Somewhere, somewhere,
In a likeness of our home,
Our likenesses sit together,
And their hands never part.

Somewhere, somewhere,
In that likeness, there is no time,
That brings them together,
And then takes them apart.

Somewhere, somewhere,
In that likeness, there is only love,
That the grasses, trees and moon shine,
They remain without the need to part.

Somewhere, somewhere,
When your likeness withdraws her hands,
Mine shows you and me and our home, here,
How wretched it is to be like us, apart.

Somewhere, somewhere,
In the likeness, they sit and watch,
So they may learn how not to be,
But stay in love, forever, like in a work of art.

How I wish!

There's winter too, as I've come to learn,
And that there is a tributary or more for every confluence,
That the sun sets, that sunflowers wilt,
And that one day, the heart stops beating for-its-ever.

And yet, deep down, like heat from palms rubbed,
Like the fork that still knows the stream as one,
The frozen summer inside reminisces of the times gone by,
Living beyond, like the yellow of the dead sunflower.

Oh! how I wish I were a raft and not the river,
And that I were merely the sunflower and not the sun,
And how I wish I were merely a snowflake and not the winter,
So I can't see the fleeting, and die, not daily, but just once.

Abandoned

I stand here, in a prison of pack-ice of the forbidden North,
The fingers of their ridges molesting my throbbing bosoms,
As untended lustful men would, to a neglected woman of grace,
A bear saunters, looking for the food that the men left,
It stomps angrily before sliding off a ridge on my starboard,
Another with her cubs walks past on the floe,
Perhaps she knows there is nothing more to forage,
And a pack of walruses bask on the adjacent floe,
Laughing heartily at the travesty of my plight.

Then comes the wind that can go South or North at will,
And it asks me, why so forlorn in this divine kingdom?
I smile, at the irony, for I know she can see, yet,
I am no sloop now, merely flotsam, I say, for my men aren't here,
They've have gone South with the dogs on their sleds.

Ah! you wailer, the wind mocks me,
No elephant ever laments that there isn't a river at hand,
It goes in quest, with its herd to stop only when the river is found,
So should you, my dear sloop, leave the ice if you yearn for the blue seas.

I ask the wind then, what is the elephant and the river you speak of?
Is it a seal or a walrus or a auk of a different kind? 
The wind sighs, I'll tell you of men that you understand then, it says,
When I told a man not to lament for there is no river,
He took my word and dug a well to bring the river home.

The same man brought me here, and left me to rot, I tell the wind,
Can't you see the ice is holding me hostage?
Unlike you, I can't choose the sea, a fjord or a promontory,
Or the elephant's home that you told me of.

The wind shakes its head, what more shall I tell you? it asks,
Tell the ice to find another mate, I say.

It swoops down then on the frigid ice,
Now craving to enter me, not merely molest
Ice, the wind calls, why not seek someone that'll stay,
Why not spare the sloop for the sea?

Why not? Why not you then for a mate? the ice asks,
His carnal smile unsettles the uppish till then wind,
It howls, kicks up a storm and leaves in a jiffy,
And then the ice mocks its bravado and turns its eyes towards me.

I am a sloop, an abandoned piece of driftwood, both,
A dead sanctuary, a mother's empty kitchen and dried bosoms,
All of which shall now satiate the cold fetish of ice,
For as long as the crows' nest stands over the surface,
And until the deep water takes me to her eternal kingdom,
Where men or bears or ice, can't lay their despicable arms on me.