You would run through fields of mommy’s flowers
Stallion legs ripping the air; a horse, a cat, a hare.
Fervently, we wished to contain you, two children
Racing through barb-wired fences and backdoors
Cornering and beseeching, crying out your name
Tuffy! Come home! tutting and whistling in the sun.
We pelted the tin roof with pebbles, clever imitations
Of langoors wreaking havoc, frolicking atop our heads;
So you were summoned, securing the perimeter.
Comically with a bark that made you seem bigger-
Mightily you fought the lizard with the whiplash tail.
By day, conducting clandestine business and like a miner
Coming back with ***** paws and a hunger for supper.
In our compost pit, you gave birth to 6 babies-
Your placenta on the bathroom floor for each came
With a shriek and motherly refrain, your bed divided
Among 7, the black one died before two dawns.
The rest went with the unit shipments and you were with
Your cradle empty, the untethered child once more.
You ran miles with dad, reeling out like a kite in a storm
Always pulling towards freedom or the scent of mother.
In another new house, scared to walk the hardwood floors.
Little paws screeching, pup in the carton box again.
And yet lithe as a cat, lying in wait for the languid pigeons
We found their warm bodies in the terrace, and your
Mouth, full of sugar and tail so conspicuously constrained.
Always running towards danger, those neighbourhood dogs
Roughed you up pretty good, a visceral scream and your blood-
You shook like you had never before and still barked at cobras
The size of little children, much bigger than you, so vicious.
We took you to CI ops, uphill walks in pouring rain,
I saw you descend the mountains with the mist and
For hours we lay in the winter sun staving off the cold-
Your white fur lined with burrs and yellow grass, your pink
Paws gleaming and ears always like a sail at full mast.
You had grown skeletal with a protruding leg
A 14 year old dog, a cat dog, an agile hunter dog
I see your picture in my mind, the sleeping one
In which you were really dead, in your round blue bed
mommy says it was me you came to see then,
I saw you running like old days with your tumored leg
What sorcery, what miracle I thought, what joy
To have you back, ***** and span,
And you were lost to us running and running.
I came back to find you sleeping coiled up like always
Next to mommy’s bed so peaceful and when I came to
She had called to tell us you were no more.
WIth your white hair, your ear medication still here
Somberly they buried you in salt and rose petals
But you looked asleep like you haven’t been in ages
Free from the midnight bouts of asphyxia and snoring
She resents you left her without warning, but I wonder
If after all this time, you finally could run free -well
We keep your bed in the sun and your bowl in the kitchen
The backdoor stays open, for you were lost so often
But you came back, always you came back Tuff Puff.
Apr 5
Apr 5, 2026 at 12:36 PM UTC
We sit triangularly, some satanic ritual waiting to unfold.
In the menacing strobe light music, between dull musings
Of a week, a month, a lifetime ,I enclose the cold pitcher
Sizing it against my face, I look into it to find life.
And like muddied ocean deep I feel distant dorsal fins
Guttural cries in coffee flavoured beer, of creatures slipped
In the abyssal zone and dying for lack of oxygen-
On the dark dark ocean floor, this table for three or four.
The triangle now stretches like a catapult, his long limbs
leaning, so taut in temptation of far away loneliness
I reach out my amphibian arms, my gelatinous tongue
and he dissolves like a fly upended mid flight, shaking
his head over the foam from the mug, I'm okay, It's alright.
The waiters wait on invisible trays like weighed down wraiths
and ask us if we're old enough to swim; we hold hands
like a cult of dolphins, this table is our ballast, these green
napkins our sail and our age far undermines our agency,
If we choose to drown, it would be at our own mercy.
He's flung back by something we say and I am far removed
Into the reflection of Christmas lights in July, evaporating
into pleasantries and digressing golden tears into the pool.
Someone breaks this exorcism of rationale, scraping a chair-
restroom, I need to use the restroom, oh this uneasiness of habitat.
If we were truly fish, our insides as salty as our outsides, gracefully
I would be gliding in the water and fumbling not for the phone lock.
We take turns breaking the geometry of friendship and acquaintance,
of corporate hellfire, footballers and friendlies and the difference
between sweatshirts and hoodies, these ****** diuretics.
Cheek down on the table, I steal a pebble from a fancy bush to
introduce my brain to my hands and my hands to cold relief,
Buzzed like a doorbell I am regurgitating smaller fish into porcelain.
I eat with cutlery intended to serve and talk myself into hadal trenches,
Here in the underworld I look to my thoughts like Orpheus;
they die before taking shape, once more I am questioned for my faith.
I sit in the back of the cab, little plastic bisleri in hand, ocean ****
lining my mouth and I understand the traffic lights like a child;
We sit quietly chattering with our sobriety and hold each other
like children, we must look like dead fish with those boney shoulders.
Jul 15, 2023
Jul 15, 2023 at 10:55 AM UTC
Is it raining out on those rotten barks,
Or is the sun killing green leaves
Into an autumn without crimson beauty?
In musing and in hope,in fear of knowing
The true shape of a fire lit inside
A burning house,I have dwelled in dreams
Of reality and thus forsaken the reality
Of dreams;With my languid hands,I've
Painted half a brook,quarter of a moon
And half of me stares at the sky,but when
Were half the stars ever enough for
A moment's night?
Mar 29, 2020
Mar 29, 2020 at 9:52 AM UTC
We are creatures of perpetual pain
And pain us,He will
For all the hearts bound to you
To me,In loitering uncertainities of
Fleeting human affection
Will at once keep pulling the strings
And like puppets in hands of
A meek infant of a few months
We are hurled,every which way in
Answer to our conviction.
Mirthlessly,the world laughs,accuses
Us of love,the sin every sinner walks
The evil that cuts evil,should it stay.
And we keep handing away
Our strings to people with debts to pay
Their nuisance lures us to fix the
World with congenial evening walks
Their eyes are ever so sacred,for when
Their mouth runs and runs unholy,
Look in their eyes and all your strings
Come taut in unison to haul the weight
Of lies comforted in muted acceptance.
From far away enough,the streets that led
You looked like shimmering little
Shards of ice,blinding.
Unearthly,so much so that you'd walk
In bare feet and love veiled.
Your soles run red and blue,numb and
Somehow throbbing,
Like the love you once knew.
Keep on walking,these strings
Will keep thinning.
Jan 17, 2020
Jan 17, 2020 at 11:08 AM UTC
I think that it's beautiful
When you lie to keep my love
And you scream out the words
Seconds after the song has died out
I'm scared of the way we say
Nothing at all
And how I leave you on sidewalks
Even before you tell me to go
But we always hold hands
When the crowd wouldn't let us breathe
Mine's always colder
My stride a little shorter
And we walk towards the sunset
Like the paintings in my bedroom.
Sometimes when its raining
And the sky falls onto my hair
I think of good things
And bad things
And love,
If it only lasts when
Two people
Have the same hands.
I lose you in the crowd
Because you lie
To keep my love
Because we never hold hands
Without a crowd to tear us apart
And I shouldn't love you forever
Like the pictures on my wall
And see you in mornings
When you don't see me at all.
Dec 31, 2019
Dec 31, 2019 at 1:45 PM UTC
Only human to fall,I've been told
In love,into the sorrow of bad habits
And should you fall into yourself?
Inside your childhood cottage,
In an unknown neighborhood.
The curtains limp in quiescent dust
The scarlet recognizes you,
The chair creaks in remembrance
But in its fragile wooding
Could the arms hold your hand,
And would this ebony bear your soul?
Look around,before you go.
A hanging clock that doesn't tick
It reads nine o'4 and you sit awhile.
The mattress is an indentation
In the shape of your past
That won't cave in to the way you are.
The walls stare down the floors
You are no sight to behold
And on the mantle in a picture frame
You fight battles in a red cape.
In the haunted attic
Where you looked for ghosts,
You stumble across yourself
Fall all over the opaque darkness
And hold hands
With the phantom of yourself.
When you fall into yourself,
Don't shy away for fear
Of not catching yourself.
Dec 7, 2019
Dec 7, 2019 at 4:31 AM UTC
Swaying in a blur of drops
With hair clinging on to my brows
And the street whistling in pebbled vows
The last of a dying season,
Holds me close , akin to a broken lover.
Much of the jolly good showers
Were exhausted in a catharsis of firsts
We spun till our hearts were drenched
Palms cold in reverence to a summer lost.
Banyan leaves that drooped like water beds
And a fierce grey sky of relentless love.
My palms shrivelled,my fingers withered
The banyan bowed down in a brutal fit
of lightning rage,
I shook the water from off its branches
Because I thirsted for all of the rains
But I'm dancing on a dry street
At peace with my ephemeral pursuits
Watching the seasons change.
Sep 8, 2019
Sep 8, 2019 at 10:03 AM UTC
The road is long
Dreadfully so,
Broken pavements and bruised tiles
Hold out for the end,
Ambition tramples the sidewalk
A couple more steps and then a couple more.
The unruly audience lands their feet.
The orchestra on the finish line
Crescendos to the breaking tides
The gore of happenstance,
The aftermath of destiny and other
Abstract notions of victory
Belt out the song of defeat
For all but one.
We crash where the footpath ends
Comprehending the day that's not ours.
History cuts up the margins of loss
Into a glaring wound of all the wrong things.
Somedays, you exuberate all your best traits
And still end up on the grass
Where you bury your perseverance,
And the society in your head
Cheers when you lay down the casket.
The stars never fell down for you.
The sun rose like it did
In the possibilities of yesterday.
You seek the warm embrace of cold tiles
Leaning against the faucet
That races your tears to the mosaic floor.
You lost, you didn't win.
You won, you never lost.
The voices hush away as the high fades
Into a new day.
Your feet take you to the finish line again
Run, run for one more day.
Run,I'll meet you there
Where another pavement ends.
Jul 14, 2019
Jul 14, 2019 at 11:40 PM UTC
My hands envelope my lips
Quivering,breath laced in disbelief
Gravel, under my feet
Quicksand under his feet.
Rain, rain in the sky
There's a thud
He falls and I stare.
People,they help him up
I fall and he stares.
I died a stranger's life,
He gets up,unbridled
Rooted to my tears
My hands envelope my eyes
Because people don't die.
Silence for my epiphany
You might have to leave me
Before I leave you.
Glittering meadows and living brooks
To a broken pavement in a haunted nook
He must have run a long way here
Every night, I stare and I stare.
He looks warily young,
Too young to have sprinted
All the way to a dead end.
In the pragmatic corner of my mind,
We fall and we stare.
Jun 23, 2019
Jun 23, 2019 at 1:10 AM UTC
Storm Of A Decade
A photograph of four.
Teeth glistening,
A haunting ivory
Dusted in years
Of quiescent hanging.
The night trembles
As lightning caresses
The horizon into flames
Birds screech in diquietude
at the storm of a decade
Uprooting a run down mansion
That has loved and lost its days.
Often,the rain spills
Through the crevices
Onto the carved frame.
Tonight the dark whistles,
A sombre melody
To the bright eyed Jill.
Clad in a polka dot red,
she stares at a lady
With the same shade
Of chestnut curls.
An archaic banyan,
Loses the anchor of earth
Leaning in to shatter
Some stained glass.
With a night sky for eyes
Starred over in tiny freckles
Johnny grins a feckless crescent
As drops splatter onto his desert hair.
The family sways in reverence
To the storm of a decade
Portrait of some forgotten May
Shivers and rubs in friction
Against a forgotten place.
Some wires, they tangle and twist
Some sparks,ignite the damp wood
Of a house, of four and maybe more.
The lady and the gentleman
In an ugly bermuda and a straw hat
In a beautiful summer dress
Embrace their progeny,
In the storm of a decade.
The sheer moth eaten curtains
Burn in a hunger for sabotage
The rain pitter-patters
Over the ashes of a half burnt house.
The fire rages against the nonchalance
Of a silver rectangle with eight eyes.
Only a fire as mighty could celebrate
A pretty mansion that sleeps
Through the chaos of most hurricanes.
The photograph takes a last swing
And ends up on the mahogany orange.
They smile through the heat
That shatters their castle of glass
They smile in a holocene blue
An offering at the altar
Of the melancholy mansion
That has kept them smiling
As it fell into a state of subtle disrepair
As the nights got darker
Outside the frail walls.
Jun 10, 2019
Jun 10, 2019 at 4:24 AM UTC