It's that time of the year where "a prophet isn't welcome in his own land".
Why do we feel alienated in the midst of known faces yet carve out a niche for ourselves in a stranger's land?
Why do the urge to run away always cross our mind as we tend to grow older, leaving all behind?
Was it the scar that hasn't healed yet or the demon to face as soon as you enter the hell.
It's that time of the year again to wear a mask, to prepare onself; face the wrath with a stoical heart, only to die everyday in a confined ivory tower.
The Mask we wear,
The Pain we bear,
Surviving everyday in a world where no one hardly cares.
#RitzWrites ♕

The night is going to come,
To take your light away.
You will set with the sun,
And you won’t rise with the day.

It doesn’t care who you are.
It doesn’t care about the colour of your skin,
It doesn’t care about your ***.
It doesn’t care if you are rich and famous,
It doesn’t care what you do.
Death will be the end of you.

In the end it doesn’t care.
It doesn’t care.

You can be anything:
A president,
A successful businessman,
A celebrity,
A beautiful person.
It will make you into nothing!

You are all specks,
Stuck to a spinning ball,
Your life means nothing,
Nothing at all!

From nothing you came,
And to nothing you will return.
You were snatched from the darkness,
By the hands of the selfish.
They’ve put you through this life sentence!

Conscious of your birth and impending death,
Unaware of what came before or what’s to come.
The Gods you created cannot save you,
When death comes to pull you down.
Watching as your fleeting life passes you by.
We are all going to be delivered back to the darkness we came from!
It is inevitable, everything will die!

It doesn’t care who you are!
Whether your rich or poor,
Death will make us equal!

it takes you to the frosted basin
it wraps you in the floating glass
it means to make you mindful
and you
must

make yourself louder

and rush the ice from your veins
and you
will
make yourself the peace
and you will breathe
from over the colder water.

----
There is no Hamster #1-3
----

The Hamster wakes up,
pounces straight out of bed.
He oils himself up from hip to head.

He goes to work in a big machine.
It turns and turns, round and round he churns.
Rodent mouths stand agape at his speed.
He’s an important hamster; he has his own wheel.

There’s a card on his desk, it’s his one year birthday.
“1-year-old me? I thought it’s just another Thursday.”
All his friends join in, from rodents to whales.
There is a big party, he even gets some tail.

Next morning he wakes, it feels like a new dawn.
“One year? I can’t believe it… A third of my life is gone.”
He has a moment of crisis – “Is this all there to life is?
It’s time for me to face the bitter truth.
Just for money, I’ve given up my youth.”

He skips work and goes for a sip in a bar.
From the corner of his eye he spots a Sloth.
Just idling on the couch, chewing on a leaf.
It could be food, but more likely it’s ****.

Next to him sits a dog, slobbering.
“Excuse me Mr. Hamster, sorry for bothering.
I couldn’t help but notice, you seem to be in a mood.
Your furry whites are a shade too blue.”

The Hamster says, “Let me ask you something.
If you could do anything, what would be that one thing?”
“Oh dear, I don’t think about this poo.
I am a dog, I am happy, no point thinking through.”

Eavesdropping, a parrot glides in.
“Why, that’s a silly attitude my friend.”
Life is what you make it, says the bird.
And promptly flies away, dropping another giant ****.

A Tortoise strolls in, and takes a seat.
“No rush, Bartender. I’ll have a whiskey, neat.”
Struck by awe, the hamster enquires.
“Sir, did you ever find what your heart desires?”

“Ah young Hamster, there is no magic spell.
Every night before I sleep, I look inside my shell.
I don’t know your truth, but one thing I can tell you:
it’s that you should look inside your shell too.
It takes time, and you do have to go far.
Before you were born, I was already on my way to this bar.”

The hamster leaves to do what hamsters do,
Ticket to India: “hello, just passing through.”
Spend a week in Goa, and start doing Yoga.
Takes care of his mind, and no sugar or soda.

And so after a week, the prodigal pup returns.
His mind is clear, he starts his own little firm.
He makes time to be outside with his horde,
Energy renewed, not a single day he’s bored.

Another week passes, and all is well.
Many pits of despair, he saw but never fell.
And one day he finds a large present in his room.
“Where did this come from?” – no one has a clue.
He feels a wet tail, as it starts to reveal,
“Oh my god, not this, not a Hamster Wheel.”

----
Hamster Facts:
- Hamsters have a lifespan of 3 years (depends on breed)
- Hamsters have scent glands in the hip area. They groom themselves to spread the oils secreted from these glands all over their bodies.
- A baby Hamster is called a “pup”. A group of them is called a “horde”.
- Wet Tail is a common disease in Hamsters, usually caused by stress or a sugary diet (but may have other causes)
----

A cracked screen,
A face made of glass
Televised
I broadcast, to an audience, a laugh

Glee isn’t it?
Time matter no more, the days grow longer
Your potatoes may be boiled, baked, stewed or fried
But none compares to big Chungus

I

When we are still combating the problem of evil
With our vicious guns and metals of empathy
An invisible enemy much more clever and stealthy
Has been sneaking behind us
Suffocating us with the suddenly plenty
On this battlefield of seeking

We seem to be caught in between
Two grotesque foes, but are we really?
The gloomy autumn sky is covered with change
Perhaps we judged too early, unclearly-
The red leaves fallen with grace of leisure
Have obscured their countenance, and we see
Only a tattered fool holding a scythe of nothing
And a soldier looming with righteous perfection
Yet, perhaps behind their foliage masks
The fool has his brow raised with love and longing
Cherishing his tool for harvesting
While the soldier with his bullets ever ready
Smirks with an air of violence
Perhaps we have failed to distinguish
The unwanted, cleverly disguised humble friend
From the well dressed yet poisoned with greed, foe

II

Where I come from we used to send
The youth not to the land of plenty and above us
But to help the poor, those who after hard work
On the land, lie beneath a clear sky full of stars
Unwounded by the pale light polluting the cities
With nothing but the vast dome of possibility
The moon and specks lighting up nothing
But a heart full of hopes, love, and dream

Now we climb and climb
Till the new sprouts are already at the peak
Or they are struggling under the shadow
Of the giant trees
Unable to find higher climes
Or
Unable to break free from this lack of oxygen
Of the giant canopy of already achieved greatness

III

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Was not supposed to be experienced by us
In a couple of generations, in a couple of decades

And the speed of the waves of boom and bust
Of our stability and the longevity of great things
Is only getting faster and faster
In this ocean of constant rise and falling
In this new age
We lift up the logs above us so quickly
And then let them drown so rapidly
We are more like volcanic rocks
With so many holes floating, to ask to be filled
And when fulfilled, drown as we fill, purposeless
And empty

IV

Youth in both poverty and idleness craves for unrest
But those on top should never be opposed with
Proud antagonism
With cries of illusive victory the restless rush towards
The king who tied himself to the top rung of
The wheel fortunae
Who is yet unaware where his inertia leads
Till his destined demise as it turns
To lift up the newly rich
And the new enemy
The vicious cycle of wanting to be above all
When the unwanted truth is glad humility

V

The oak trees stable at its roots, undefeated
Sends us in leaves and birds chirping
A warning to heed that we are losing our depth
In our growth and rooting
For we have rarely seen the valley empty
Yet with all the space to fill with everything
And now live and dream on a slopeless plain
Some with it all and unable to hold anything
Some struggling to breathe under the shades
We are all waning, waning
For our fingers had never dug through the earth of life
With the desperation of the fear of being swarmed
By the dark clouds of timely locusts
Yet,
These wizened words are being scoffed
For being too connected to the past

Are we proposing to cut off the rope
Connecting us to the very beginning
Just so we could get faster to the end
To the depth of this pit
Where no traveler would truly return
Without the past guiding
And we will fall again and again
Ever repeating

VI

I was filled with guilt and despair
That while people are still with next to nothing
With no luxury and sometimes not even family
That when others try to bring them necessities
I can sit in cozy idleness writing poetry
Yet filled with nothing but shame and the empty
In a world less and less occupied with reading
Why I must be a poet sole and wholehearted

And when the missionaries
Send the doves through the screen
Asking for awareness and money
To support these bodies with nothing
I was suddenly filled with hopeless shame and pain
For only one thought echoed from the words said to me
"They have very little material things, yet they seem to be really happy"
And that was the way it used to be
That the suffered and now living with peace
Seems to recall with loving longing
With great sorrow and gladness, I ask you
Is it really monstrous to say they are in a better place than we
They have the most important things
Love, hopes, and dreams
And the nothing waiting to and could be
Filled with anything
While our shaded and sheltered youth
While we hold our cups full
Filled with useless glamorous materials of our own
Or
Constantly poured out for others to keep
Wailing for something more
And lasting

Conclusion:

At the core of our ever-hungry souls
We only really needed one thing:
To be filled with something.

Hopefully more permanently,
But nothing of materialism, or even rationalism
Last more than
A mirage of permanency
Even the century tree of sunset dunes
Eventually sets as whispering dust into the sand
And even the wisest man fades away
Into the senile body whose soul
Has already bid farewell
To this temporary land

I sought and sought
And only found that  
The Word is true
Only Love transcends time and space
The embrace between two condensed hearts
Of pure longing could exert
The gravity
And gravitational time dilation
Of such self-forgetful density
That would wrap entire fabrics of reality
Around us, immersing us, with brief
Merciful revelations and trials
Of the unfathomable
Eternity.

I want to be an enigma
I want the words to fall out of my head
And into your hand
Or maybe into nothingness,
That would be better
I’m begging to feel nothing
And I’m dying to feel something
Just let me disappear, God
Let me fade away
For Forever
~

I

Men must slumber in the darkness
In order to be truly awaken
Men must be desperately lost
In order to look up at the endless stars

The young love to sing about death
While the old worship life like the sun
The young are hopeless on earth, dreaming of flight
The old fear to be parted from the land without a raging fight

II

Who wants to be from War and Peace
The Fly against the loft sky
But we are all just flies
Traceless, each life in a dream it lies
Always to be awakened, bringing nothing and taking nothing
Why must we seek truth in a dream?
If we will forget them when we finally open our eyes
With joy, with sorrow
We witness death
Just so we would strive to stay alive
But why are we alive?
To prepare us for what?

III


Is it just for that half asleep, half awake
Shadowy, faint, and veiled memory?
Is it possible that when we truly open our eyes one day
We would still feel all that we’ve felt in the dreams?
Yes, in my brief nightly drowsiness, I have felt
Despair and happiness
And existed so profoundly!

Slumber or Awake, Illusion or Truth
Reality or Dream
There never was any true death or an end
I was always
Alive Alive Alive

I

Life is the only route
Between nothingness and the endless
Our birth on earth, and our perishing to dirt
Are both equal ends for the existing

And fools will simply rejoice in the illusive brevity
While sages prepare for the everlasting dance
And fools will take comfort in the darkness obscuring his sins
While sages prepare for the brilliance of the yonder light  
By already shining and basking in this life

II

I want to be from War and Peace
The Bee of such trivial and insignificant life
For we are all just bees
Unnoticed, but must exist
Why were we ever born to fly,
When true height is beyond this life?
Just for the pollen and nectar, taken and given?
Till bees return to the impermanent or the forever?
We will regret their absence then, bitterly and barrenly
Witnessing loss, just to learn to cherish
The existing.
But we exist, for what?

III

Is it just for that half asleep, half awake
Shadowy, faint, and veiled memory?
Is it possible that when we truly open our eyes one day
We would still feel all that we’ve felt in the dreams?
Yes, in my brief nightly drowsiness, I have felt
Despair and happiness
And existed so profoundly!

Slumber or Awake, Illusion or Truth
Reality or Dream
There never was any true death or an end
I was always
Alive Alive Alive

Conclusion:

Being alive
Is not just so we can die
That is completely meaningless
Being alive,
Is the only route
From nothingness to endlessness

Only having been once alive
Can you be resurrected
Only when you walk this road to the end
Will you find and continue the pave to the
Neverending Land