the sky is falling

RAIN SKY OVER FELL by Jill Campbell

it is irresistible
to let the grey matter light up
when the sky is falling into shards
of silver-sighs and golden-rushes
to achieve something, to get there,
somewhere,

without the connivance of the mind’s vault,
where my sensibilities & sincere(&saturated)
goals are locked, as if in a fragile (no ex-
posure) condition
of a lifetime that isn’t passing by,

an unintended way to know what mind
creates and subsumes is to let it be,
building palaces and sculptures out
of ruin, birthing poems without labour,
or perchance (the sky is the colour
of an ink-stained favourite shirt)
it is all already fixed,

this gamble is a faux-irony of living,
i am measuring the length of my silken-
hair with dirt clinging to the strands
that are unwashed but tidy on a rainy
day, when the sky is falling,

and moss is growing through my hair
&beard (lichen, fungi, almond cyanide)
having left the matter to the falling
(fervently dancing, finessing,
fighting without fulfillment)
sky.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 17
(Inter)National Poetry Month

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first meeting

of an igniting kind,
your eyes held an allure,
the iridescent gaze never touching me,
but keeping stable the carefully-crafted
space between us,
between restraint and desire,
demarcating our manner of speaking,

i wonder if you knew of my need to forego any
responsibility, why i did not take the first step
towards breaking the hazard of a first meeting,

i had held my words close to my chest,
tasted eucalyptus at the back of my tongue,
crafting the sounds of my voice in a way
that they shall not dissect this set order,

i was scared, i am scared, still, that i can
not be trusted to peer through a pair of eyes
to know or begin to know, all that i seek
and all that i may want,

your resting pose only perplexed me,
i seemed to be lost in my sapling-like
mind, a single thought rising in warmth
(this is where it begins to fade)
drinking the sunlight off your face, and
the silence of my dusk-enamored smiles.

your leave-taking compounded my interest
in that yearning, and not your absence —
i keep it near and vanquish the details
of the loneliness, of that solitary evening,
which is not mine to hold on to.

it is also yours. i accept,
pulling back my heartstrings.

.

© Anmol Arora

Image source (Man with a heart-IV by Stanislav Bojankov)
Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

on loneliness

can i believe my own empty sighs
when they appear too far and too little
between my symptomatic need for
despair and disrepair?

“be strong,” they say, “exercise your
agency over your adust remains,”

i wonder if wisdom lies in being aware
or being a practitioner of that awareness —

i, for one, seek redemption in verifying and living
the knowledge of destruction, holding it like
a cosseted corolla of memory,
that is becoming of me — a spoiled sepia-
sequestered detail in the possibility of
existence — a fierce idea without a fulcrum
to safeguard harmony.

“you are not lonely,” i say to myself,
but i do not know where it becomes me
and when i become an evidence to
breaking, and a splintered sensation
of nothing.

i am the last inhalation of smoke,
a testament to the fallacy
of my name.

after all,
where did loneliness surge & stage its act
if not at the juncture where my words trigger
an acid reflux, and transmogrify into aphanitic ash?

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Falling by Clara Lieu)
For “How Does the Story End?” at With Real Toads.

 

an evening reverie (iii)

bricks, mortar, dull-white paint shedding
down the wall — the iron rods sticking out
like the full flush of loneliness — pennies
stuck to my palate — empty eyes stinging

with an evening demand for staying, clay
pots scattered, broken melon lips linking
skies with mouthed words, those unsaid
are never too dull – fuchsia pink – boiling

tricks, sweating armpits, a pulsing heat —
smoking, sweltering, steaming —

.

Image source

That kind of an evening — linking it up with Poetry Pantry at PU.

an ocean story

by Samantha Keely Smith

down the lanes of persistence and sweat,
there are waves lapping at the mind’s cliff,
seeking restoration of things wild and vain,

I see with my squid eyes the promulgation
of morrows bound to my brows, lives are tarnished
by the salt of this ocean of continuity, despite
a range of cul de sacs of mediocrity,

I ache to parch my thirst through drowning,
I seek virtues in the bleeding sun touched by
paints of this allegory. I have seen tempests
and treacheries, I have witnessed moats
of luxury, and the contrasts that lie within
these stories.

the vastness doesn’t exemplify loss but transcends it
into a lonesome lore,
I can feel the brush of drops and sand coming
awash, on my face, as my limbs stretch out
to become the shore, where

sirens sing and muses muse a melancholic hymn,

a reverie is lost and found, thus becoming –

it was meant to lose itself in turquoise ripples,
for the fates of my nature and your culture
are misaligned.

.

Linking it up with Midweek Motif at Poets United

*16 June: Linking it up with dVerse OLN

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