Dark horse whines silently and alone
When the festered face of the moon
Leers at bulbous trees under.
Darkness comes forth with tholes he
Lives with, as festal drumming yonder
Celebrates the fickleness of weak champions.
Even trollops reign in circuses of wide-coloured
Buntings for drunken celebrations only.
Dark horse rests on a settle, descrying the
Weakness of every culture from the stems of
......
End-rain . . .
Ebb tide comes from famished deluge
receding fast on clumsy, wet feet
flirting with vagrant soils.
Flung across these territories,
haggard fishing nets of grandfathers
hanging on masts of bamboo,
struck by thunder
and kissed by ribs of lightning.
......
Prided on patience,
I wait and watch the world around me,
Cocooned, concealed, keeping countenance.
Wings full-grown, but folded.
Eyes, mind, sharp but blinded.
All attempts to emerge, impeded.
Restrained by ripples of racing rain,
Suppressed by sight of spying sparrows,
Until at last, clear day.
......
The corn has ripened.
With it is the wizened laughter of a
Mirthless age, showing ashy teeth
Of dappled cowries.
A flavescence so bantered by the courage
Of wilting bloom!
Sadly, sea waves truss the feet of
Burning skies, loosening the tongues of beaches,
Which, with ague, recline on cold, cringing currents.
......
The church bell tolled
Within the village’s yawing spree.
Dawn was calm and deep, easing
Light’s hegemony over lukewarm darkness
And the frailty of post-hour orisons.
I saw the clergy’s bedraggled chasuble,
Cursed by the fierce streak of something reddish.
On his mouth spewed forth wind-caked saliva,
Evidence of a hidden tryst.
......
Metamorphosis
It's not late, never too late
to change direction
only that we should put aside
what had held us in long prison-
to rise above our meagre selves
to brave the roughest tides of the ocean
to explore and plunge into the unknown
......
Verdigris is the evidence of death,
the symbol of ruin,
of waste,
of abandonment,
of incest,
sign of eternal grief...
Dust your BOOKS of verdigris,
of the mould from which penicillin
would dread.
......
End-rain . . .
Ebb tide comes from famished deluge
receding fast on clumsy, wet feet
flirting with vagrant soils.
Flung across these territories,
haggard fishing nets of grandfathers
hanging on masts of bamboo,
struck by thunder
and kissed by ribs of lightning.
......
Dark horse whines silently and alone
When the festered face of the moon
Leers at bulbous trees under.
Darkness comes forth with tholes he
Lives with, as festal drumming yonder
Celebrates the fickleness of weak champions.
Even trollops reign in circuses of wide-coloured
Buntings for drunken celebrations only.
Dark horse rests on a settle, descrying the
Weakness of every culture from the stems of
......
I recall the rural life of the butterfly
Extravagantly —that proud floating mass of wings.
Her wings flutter from sea to coast so eloquently,
Yet silent with the muteness of frightened breeze.
They are banners with buntings of newness — striped,
Spotted, arched, dotted.
Her flamboyant life history, reading it backwards,
Is an exhibition of time and cosseted patience . . . .
The winged one, aged and tried, schleps to the stirs of a narcoleptic pupa,
Hanging on the banisters of a dear larva who’s egged on to
......