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Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
Sliced orange shades,
your visage in evening light;
Bright forehead, dotted red,
Chandelier-ring, square-cut
ruby, on either ear; silken
streaks in hair flowing over
cheeks by the wind;
Ripples in the pond at night:
dimpled smile, broken
as in a dented mirror.
Lost from the front, lost
from behind; doubt rising,
like incense, ladder-like
the rib cage in x-ray vision;
Broken pots, moss-filled,
collecting the last rain,
bits of moon in the puddle
skinny-dipping after.
Totem pole, towering
light house, Zeus-thunder
zipping past the sky, my
Babel ego. Zorro moments.
At the center, a fulmination:
spreading front of a quake
ripping space and time apart.
A cubist perspective on love, loss and reconciliation. Cubism considers and presents intense multiple viewpoints of a subject. I have added an interior cut. Abstraction, analogy and symbol are the artist brushes.

Ma Jolie is one of Picasso's celebrated cubist works: you can see it here http://www.pablopicasso.org/ma-jolie.jsp
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
And when the days grow on the soul
like a shadow at noon,
the night sets in deep, after
the stars retire,
the winds go silent in the valley,
there yet comes a time,
when that throb
of nameless pasts comes alive.

You have everyone,
yet, I know, you have no one:
is this how I love you?

I see you disappear:
the last bird into the swallowing
cloak of the fast-setting night.
After the rains, you disappeared
into the pond, hopping on lotus leaves.

An anger at my lapse,
smoulders on in winter's moist depths;
An anger at yours, hovers over
like the last cloud of the late monsoon.
Yes, when the sky weeps her
agony out,
all the hidden embers glimmer.

Now I open the window and sit longing
for the mellow autumn rains.
My Neruda moments... The  italicized 'I know' in the piece is the protagonist's assertion - her belief, irrespective of what the reality is, and that is what sets the question up - is this belief the way her love manifests?
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
Day and night vie for each other
now, but the darker is winning;

The moon mourns in her ruddy veil:
tonight, the garden's wet by tears.

Incredible, the attraction,
of carbon for carbon.
Even more, the attraction
of carbon for gold.

In the wild, they rarely bond.
But in man, inseparable.

Carbon and mammon: be not yoked,
says the jewel diamond of our race.

Who cares? The cross,
an adornment nice.
Mammon in mud? Silicon
too, says the IT guy.

Fullerenes in the sky: on this
Guy Fawkes night, sparks truly fly.

Carbon will **** for gold.
This the oldest maxim of old.
Matthew 6:19-21....

Incredible connections emerged once I started mining this subject: Diamond is a form of carbon...so too is fullerene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene (pun on 'like a diamond in the sky')
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
Mary's son is here and my, what a flutter!
Folk come from far and near, just to hear:
say some a Rabbi is he, others, the Christ;
quelling the ghosts, he turns water wine,
the dead walk back to life at his command.

Mary's son is here and my, what a flutter!
He's cast his glance wide, this humble
son of a carpenter, is too, a fisherman wise:
he pours forth his love, like none ever can,
to his disciples, he's a friend and kinsman.

Mary's son is here and my, what a flutter!
Where they see sin, he only sees the light,
and nothing can anger him but unholy
commerce in the temple right. Who'd have
thought, God's son, was thus in our sight?

Mary's son is here and my, what a flutter!
Christmas has arrived a bit early here :)
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
In the stark valley,
by wheezing winds,
eyes puckered,
hope, gone afar:

solitary peaks

snow-capped at
summit, rising,
parting the clouds,
for opal skies.

An aspiration.
A lighthouse.
This 'picture poem' was spurred by a conversation with Victoria, on the appreciation of the vast and the bare in art...

Incidentally, the words 'gone afar' have a hallowed meaning in Mahayana Buddhisn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bh%C5%ABmi_(Buddhism)#The_seventh_bh.C5.ABmi.2C_the_Gone_Afar
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
Floating on restless waters, tonight,
broken moons breathe in waving clouds;
Time is a colander, through which
life escapes, never to return; Yet tonight
the beanstalk remains tangled;
I sat watching swans in the moonlight
where the canal and stream met;
Rock the boat! Peace is a botheration.
Could the road that diverged loop
back to the fork? Walking backwards,
tonight, leaves and assorted bits of paper
fly forward; After the off-licenses close,
someone's dashing for the last bus
before dawn, running in reverse; three
hooded figures lost in the cemetery,
walking backwards; The moon
weeps tears of mist, that
ripple spreading inward in the puddles
after the rain; There's a weeping firefly
crawling in the sink; Or the kitchen-lamp?
Bubbles die to the siren-song of crickets.
Is there is an Ithaca fabled?
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2013
One-sidedly decided arrows,
vacillating ellipses;
equilaterally considered triangles,
biased Isosceles;
worlds, whorls, rectangled
squares, afflicted rhombuses;
A self-destructing nova.

The night opens up,
a book of wonders across the sky,
shining in the stars; broken moon;
Wading across ancient expanse.
Flashes of illumination:
lighted mountain bush,
cross rising on the eastern sky;

One look at the visage,
blooming out of this figure
wrapped creeper-like around faint
sight, flower emerging in silver light
out of the shadows: bubbles,
rolling, nonagular, collapsing;
Oh pointless ratiocination!
Have you experienced the intense churning we sometimes face, considerations of so many angles and view-points rising like bubbles in us, confusing and confounding us? And then the answer - that was always there, just we never noticed it, love blooming silent, at the edges of life?

This poem is an ekphrastic reaction to Kadinsky's 'Composition VIII': a fascinating art work, you can view it here: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/kandinsky.comp-8.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis
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