Poem

How fares the child whom sire forgot,
whose veins run cold from lying bare
against the wind, his bitter lot
resigned 'mid strangers to despair?

For I can't now conjure in mind
the sweetness of our early days.
Tonight, when even stars are blind,
my pain and tears their only grace.

Where are you, angel? Dearest friend!--
can parting be so final now?
For years I've loved. My eye and hand
forget the sight, the feeling? How?

And even mem'ry shall betray
amid adopted company;
to think I'll never tread the way
returning all so dear to me!

How fares the heart thus turned adrift,
bereft of familiarity?
Not knowing when the darkness lifts,
both past and future lost to me.

some short works

I have recently stumbled upon poems on my mobile, and though I blush to read them again, some of the feelings they encapsulate still ring true to me. And so I present them here--maybe some other person will find comfort, or see some "emblem of a secret brotherhood" in them.


Silver, silver pouring forth
from ebon skies,
why came you here?
My heart is filled enough with ice,
my soul with lies.

Unbearable weight

yet wisp-lightness, we indulge

in the sin of love.

'Tis a small distance

between earth and perdition:

space 'twixt waiting lips.

Can't let you kiss me, 

lest I be betrayed by scent

of bitter almonds.

I can only claim 

memory, you are apart,

achingly other.

poem

Put your feelings in your pocket
and let them stay there, safe.
Walk unmindful through the city--
now there's nothing they can take.

Or stay at home, where they can't get you;
shut the door and pull the blinds.
Set the music to the volume
where it can save you from your mind.

Write your poems and hide them somewhere--
is there a reader for them here?
Hush your inner soul rebelling;
that's what they did before, my dear.

a storm - poem

This is my kind of weather: cold,
windy, the type that sends leaves knocking
on my bedroom window, only to be laughingly
denied admittance--I would shut those panels
to have the pleasure of feeling
the brewing storm from the other side of the glass.

Inside my shuttered room, I now feel
a muting of the present's nagging sounds,
the prickling tug of the irreconcilable past, and I find
joy in this torture. I am back in my old school,
walking in a shower sans umbrella, dampened hair curling
against splashed white clothing. I call

and he answers, mingling laughter and rebuke
in the warmth of his cracking teenaged voice. I wish
for the thousandth time, each time this scene
has called me back, that with rainwater as his glass
and with darkness and dampness contrasting, he would
read the claim of soul's kinship in my eyes.

But it is always too much to hope for. Outside the window,
the rain had ceased falling, and I am here again,
immobile, awash with stagnant emotion. It is
during a transitional state like this, a pause
between showers, that we parted--sweetest
and most bitter of all misunderstandings.

M i n a h a l k i t a     p e r o    'd i     m o     a l a m.