Epiphany

There is this unusual moment,
When acuity of perceptions epitomizes
And oft-read verses, never really understood,
Breathe their many legends
Like permeating whiffs of stardust
Entering my being through my ears.

The scent on an infant's breath,
The crinkled eyes on an honest smile,
Melting inebriety of dark chocolate...
All - moments of pure unadulterated beauty.

And history, with its many deceptive twists and turns,
and countless revisions and derisions,
Seems suddenly stripped of all gaudy apparel.
Everything makes sense, every single thing,
Each fabricated lie, each untold truth,
Poignant joy of stringed instruments,
Infinity of the universe,
Secrets of life...

I even know,
[Unseeing]
How metallically liquid,
The brown of my eye looks,
Serenely flowing and filling
The dark depths of my pupils.

June 22, 2010.

Trust

What makes the old wiser,
Isn’t so much the things that happen,
But those, that halt short of just happening.
Those disturbing lines we save as quotes,
Come not so much from backpacks filled with memories,
But from piled platters of putrid promises; unkept undertakings; unfulfilled pledges.

The slick edge in a precocious gaze,
Sometimes,
Cuts deeper than blades of gray hair,
Leaves you more exposed than a cackle of ridicule.

You perhaps wish you could un-know –
That it wasn’t the guy who brought you cookies to make you smile,
But he, who never wrote back when you reached out -
That taught you of the hurtfully feminine vulnerability... of trust.

A shy corner in my hollow chest quivers,
[still tenderly trembles when it thinks of you]
Disseminating shivers of baffled goose-bumps…
You cross my mind in rainbow hues –
Pacing though the mist,
Eerily like a chameleon.

June 22, 2010.

A Place called Home

Memory lunged into me,
Like a sweeping gust of west wind,
Memory of the slow scent of skin,
The liquid comfort of a once omnipresent embrace.

The beeping crowds in the square are stilled,
The commotion of day, for a brief span, stalled,
I am left suddenly void, vacated –
Ghosts of things lost have me moth-eaten.

In this consuming terror of desolation,
I wish I could hide again, cocooned,
Like the infant I once was,
In your belly, your arms…
.
.
…O Mama!

June 7, 2010.