Perhaps it was too soon
but time will tell me that
it was the right time when
it got loose out of my pocket.

The agony of the lost ink pen
given to me by my grandfather
is not that it had a thick nib
that glided though sheets
of stories, gave track
to trains of thoughts.

The agony is that, I wanted
the pen to be the living proof
in his posterity, or mine
that he was a good man, and
only grabbed by the ills of habits
and inability to control one's mind
did he speak bad with others.

I had a hard time, gulping the loss
like the hardened blob of mucus
too difficult to shove down the throat
but too difficult to push it out.

But then I had no other option,
I could sulk in the moment for long,
or I could imagine that these poems,
are what would show him a good man,
despite his odds of the world against.
I'm the ink and the ink pen
and not what got lost.

For this body too is borrowed,
expenses not more than
what bought the ink pen.
Of course grandfather would
probably get angry if told.

So the agony of the lost ink pen
is that it got lost, but also found
by someone. May the person
find good use of it.

My road deeply potholed
  with those left behind

Resurfaced with pain
  all casualties mine

A road often fatal
  to family and friends

No roses to line it
  as it twisted and bent

When forced to look back,
  I see nothing but blood

From my hands to the cradle
  on those that I’ve loved

If you ask me my reason
  for acting this way

With eyes straight ahead,
  I’d have nothing to say

The road getting shorter
  compressed in the light

Behind me those bodies
  that questioned my flight

The deeper I travel
  newer endings begin

This toll mine to pay
—heading further within

(Villanova Pennsylvania: July, 2017)

I'm scared of the tears

that I don't cry

The days like this

that I don't die

I'm scared of the pain

that slips my mind

It comes back harder

than what I left behind

©

you keep on saying
you'll get back
to the way things were
when i'm finally done with you

and even though
i still want nothing but to take those
midnight phone calls that lasted til
the early morning hours back

i finally,

finally

can
let you go
now

because i know
that this time
it's better than
holding onto something
that would only end up
*       r                         i  
b                a       k            
           e                                 g
                                     n*  
                                      

and

f
   a
      l
         l
      i
  n
        g
in the end

i've drained out
all the hope
that was left

*when you
left

The heart wanders at night
searching, searching, searching,
for what remains
or for what has been romanticized,
but was never really there to begin with.

Combing through the debris of failure
with such regularity
that it resonates like an owls talons on cement-
- down a dark hallway.

Yet sometimes in the starlight
the heart finds something that makes everything
brand new once more.

I couldn't decide if the light attached to her
or if she swallowed it whole,
or was engulfed by it,
but there it was, in her hair -
diaphanous strands living in the ether
a little closer to the Gods than I was.

She burned extravagantly in those soft hues,
pining for the garish light of day.

The light plays tricks on you sometimes,
and the heart finds its way out of the woods
remembering sailors tales and old
Aristophanes.