The Essence of Winter

I am Winter, scripting dryness,
smearing a white silence
upon life.

That right now,
a million violins are grinding
air into tiny chips of music,
stings me -

I cover what I cannot undo:
my poetry is a shroud
upon this chaos.

Maybe I've Succumbed

What is it that always deals me the past?
I look back, thinking it’s a choice I make.
And yet in moments like these, aghast, 
I feel the choice is a trap, a snake.

Light comes, though is perpetually late
in telling me the truth that I have sought.
What all it brings me in a laden plate 
is the mirth of Time, a murky plot.

What use is knowing what’s forever lost!
The night sky - a story, a lie, the past.
I look; am I merely not the frost
that settles for an ever - melting part?

The leash of time has had me but numbed -
maybe my death is past, maybe I’ve succumbed.

I've Run Out of Irony

I’ve run out of irony.
I’ve run into the tyranny
of existence.

Stopped short
at the nothing that 
pervades my lungs -

I see every reckless passage
that unfolds before me.
I must walk,

I must help it fill
with my breath
until

there’s none
and I am done
being or not being.

There Isn't Enough of You

There isn’t enough of you in the mould.
Not that I still bank on the liquid gold -
it is only that I notice a power
reducing our eternity to an hour,
long like the lines that spell my sorrows,
long like your lines that tell tomorrows.
When you’re right here, I do not see enough -
enough of you, and it gets really tough
to watch more and more of you getting sold.
There isn’t enough of you in the mould.

The edges of the leaves I keep in books
shrink into syllables, these little crooks -
every song that I have been beading
into our story is only weeding
out the necessity for meaning -
and the urgency of all feeling
that I contain, that I confess to you.
I’ve now known that no music is true -
pain isn’t sung, hurt remains untold.
There isn’t enough of you in the mould.

Skull

I do not know if I am within
an insipid hollowness.
Or whether it is I
who contain the frosty skull.

I hear water flow -
blatantly congruous
to the congress of all
that is living.

But all I see is the
inevitable skull,
shorn of its connects,
and colours.

It can never look at me.
And I -
I always choose
to look at it.

Apostrophe

I purge the apostrophe
and shrink into neatness
the curl
that is my gravity.

Curtailed thus,
I find my toes flout at the limit;
there’s a wetness somewhere,
I tell myself.

Suddenly, words reveal plurals
and I slip into the interminable -
dash after dot blur
the poem.

About the Truth

About the truth, it has always been -
about the long road to all feeling.
Is not it what I have asked for, kneeling?
Is not it what has but made me sin?

Rowing my breath down the nothingness,
riding the dwindling presence of it, 
I’ve hunted the truth in every bit.
Scavenger, stooge, scribe, and poetess!

And my own truth that I long to be treasured!
Memories, that now spell differently!
Truth, labyrinthine. Truth, that gently 
reaches you, a snowflake, small, yet measured.

And at times, the truth is only a myth -
lost in its echoes, I die, a wordsmith.

The Illusion of a Horizon

What has vision won for me -
a crisis of blurring shapes?

I witness my tracing what grows
as it goes.

At times, I yearn
to tear these waves off the shore -

wear upon my shivering fingers
these shorn limits.

And then I see my fingers:

they lead me to
lines, lines, lines.

Everything that I am
is the illusion of a horizon.