#shrine
In the middle of my haste to arrive somewhere acceptable,
I saw a glint in the dark street
I bent down quickly, almost relieved.
I lifted a crumpled wrapper, mistaking reflection for value,
Mistaking borrowed light
For a sacred halo.
Perhaps
I was in a hurry to value something
Or perhaps I was afraid of walking alone at night.
So I built a shrine out of that foil..
Out of convenience
And called it commitment.
No sorrow ever truly belonged to me,
No joy ever rose from my own depths.
I became a container with a hole,
Waiting to be filled.
I deceived myself carefully, over years,
Convincing myself I was wounded by love.
What I called love
Was a contract signed to quiet the noise,
A drug taken to numb the hunger
I refused to name.
I walk the streets of an empty city
Wearing a familiar face,
Pass through tunnels built by meaningless rituals and endless expectations,
Telling myself I was loyal to love.
Only later did I find
I had only been loyal to my own emptiness,
Protecting it with ceremonies,
Calling the cage a home.
And yet
The scent of that perfume still ignites my mind,
Neurons flaring like distant, dying stars.
Cigarette smoke pulls me back.
To that porch under a moon that didn’t ask for promises.
Your skin, the cold air, the heat of the understanding
I wonder if you still feel it
When the wind shifts direction.
I stand now holding this piece of shiny trash,
This foil that once pretended to be gold.
I accept the silence after thunder.
There is no grief in the object,
Only in the hand that holds it.
Nevertheless
I never truly lost you,
Because perhaps I never truly had you.
But I am still here.
Still waiting without haste now.
And for the first time,
The night no longer frightens me.
Feb 2
Feb 2, 2026 at 2:28 PM UTC
I’m maddened at how
one night of lost sleep
launches you
into every shelf
of glass achievements
until there’s nothing
of your lifetime work.
But the way
you kaleidoscope
stained glass cathedrals,
bright chapels and shrines
from the crystal heap
will always
weaken my knees and
be magic to me.
Feb 15, 2025
Feb 15, 2025 at 4:08 PM UTC
The shrine I hold all the important people in my life is beginning to crumble, piece by piece.
All the pedestals are falling and I don’t have enough strength to catch them before they shatter:
The destruction around me is a distraction of the real pain I hold inside.
You see, as I watch my once priceless possessions begin to break and fall apart, I am the one that’s breaking and falling apart.
It’s like I am trying to seek help with duct tape over my mouth and my hands bound behind my back, chained to the floor of my inner mind.
When my shrine is in rumbles, here I’ll lay in the middle of the mess, unmoving and hopeless.
Oct 3, 2021
Oct 3, 2021 at 1:05 AM UTC
Kneeling at the shrine she pays respects,
Acknowledging those before her and the universe beyond her,
Grounded in humility she stills her mind,
To bolster discipline and refine the conscious,
Welcoming grace and bliss from divinity undefined,
Celestial vibrations sync to her prayer's call,
Moonlit gratitude summons heavenly hues,
A moment of fortitude and reflection,
Sheer tranquility engulfing her surroundings,
She is basked in the beloved's protection.
Apr 12, 2021
Apr 12, 2021 at 11:57 AM UTC
He crossed the line
Entering my life
He ignored my resistance signs
Avoiding all my female land mines
There were no explosions
There was no protection
He crossed the line
Desecrating my sacred shrine
Nov 16, 2020
Nov 16, 2020 at 4:06 AM UTC
Your exhausted heart longs
for the pillow
of my beating one
As much as
your weary head
yearns to rest
there too
But do not cry,
my love
That we are apart
in this world.
What is separation
for a single soul?
We are two aspects
of a single breath
Think of
how deeply we are exhaling
Oh,
what a relief it is
to have found you!
though you were in me all along
We are not apart
No, not really
For we cannot be parted
How does one sever an ocean
Or an eternal flame?
You are not my life
But we are life itself
Together
And look how much we are living it.
Life is a veil
And we are the riders
Carrying opposite corners
to vast expanses
Spreading it over the world
and coloring gardens beneath
in the deep scarlet
of our undying hearts
Do not cry, my love.
We are a compound
that cannot be split.
We were always
one element
anyway.
@Sheherazad.poetry
Feb 18, 2019
Feb 18, 2019 at 3:26 PM UTC
I bleed in silence, in
Abandoned cathedrals,
Monasteries, and holy Shrines.
I have looked for you,
Begged the grand idols,
Visited crumbling walls
Of burnt out cities,
And antiquities -
All the places they told me
You had been.
My eyes see red
But I'm blue,
And there's a bruise
On my knee-
A blend of both.
My lips no longer move in prayers
My eyes have no tales to tell-
But my poems scream
And I live - on a middle ground
Between the two
-a whimper on nights,
A sad smile during days.
You're not coming for the rescue, are you?
I ache and long, now
More than I can love
But for what? Is it you?
I never could commit suicide,
But I killed myself, every moment,
nonetheless,
Till I heard the rhythm of that heavenly call
In your footsteps
And how you filled even the silences between us
With grace
And I was seen, and I could see
And I was loved with a love
That I could accept.
If our love had two colors,
It'd be red and blue
Like any God,
You came with your own set of rules.
Passionate red, that you brought
And the blues that I always carry
Red and blue icy veins -
With the same emotions flowing through.
But you were taken away too.
And now I'm neither red, nor blue
But despondent brown
The color of the dirt, the only thing
Separating me and you.
You're not coming back, are you?
I walk on,
I don't rest and I don't sleep.
How can there be a God if there's no justice?
And the moon is not blue with sadness;
Nor does it cry with me.
And the stars are just as oblivious and distant.
And the sun, well, it never bothered
to shine on any of us.
I see a world now, as it is,
Stripped of meaning
and all its metaphorical use.
If I could be colored,
I'd choose red and blue-
Burning bright
with a frigid determination.
To save the soul,
Sometimes you must
destroy its vessel
And when a world dies, its gods must die along.
None of you came, so I had to come to you.
Jan 28, 2019
Jan 28, 2019 at 8:33 AM UTC
I wanted to write about walking away
the two of us, fading away from each others view
I'd decorate it in poetry as if it were anything more than another premature ending
but all I'm left with is shrines in the form of mixtapes
and days spent wondering what it would feel like if I was still in the backseat of your car
instead of sitting upright in the passenger side of his
he says he likes the song I'm playing
but I think he'd hate it if he knew it's just another epitaph for the nights I spent with you
Jan 10, 2019
Jan 10, 2019 at 8:22 PM UTC
From the very childhood
I used to go to a temple
amidst the valley beyond the wood
a heavenly place for soul to 'scramble'
Near to my college
near to my home
a divine support
where ever I roam
In groups I talked about the place
that ultimate peace, the solace
My friends though never visited
had that same 'feel' enlisted
Blessings bestowed to them in ample
Not sure behind this was the temple!!!!
Many of them went abroad
and I on the same road
A selfish corner of mine
made a query to the shrine
The answer cleared the grim
“HE WANTED ME TO BE WITH HIM”
Note: 'HE' for Almighty
May 14, 2018
May 14, 2018 at 2:04 AM UTC
Stop with those eyes.
Why can’t I memorize?
More green now than blue
Funny how you
Don’t look like you
Meeting eyes was easy
Like pouring sugar from a jar
Fidgeting with my ring
My heart never beat that hard
I was deep breaths and trembling hands
You remembered what I told you
Such a time ago
Stop making me laugh
You make it hard to let you go
But you’re human too
You have acne too
You fidget like me too
I built you to be a god
My hands loyal to your shrine
But you’re only humankind
But aren’t you beautiful
In your flawed ways
My heart all but sprung
From its cage
And lept into your hands.
Mar 2, 2018
Mar 2, 2018 at 7:30 PM UTC
By Arcassin Burnham
Wishes For the single mothers and their mothers too,
all across the cosmos , their the real protectors,
holding kids inside their bellies and saw no mile nutrition,
while going through a lot and feeling a bit under the weather,
If you think the world is cold then wait til it gets in December,
childhood memories will fade and all will start to become clearer,
some will have room for the corrupt and all of these pretenders,
there's bigger problems here than me and you , we'll have to render,
lies are futile,
let you serve some shrine and move on,
so self-centered, when your born,
it's like letting night play with dawn,
teach yourself, not to swim with sharks,
my time is running out,
gotta get my life together,
i'm turning 20 now,
all this stress i could not compile.
May 18, 2017
May 18, 2017 at 10:08 AM UTC
Writing to relieve this void,
But you're the cancer,
You're more than a void,
The heart break,
The three am screaming into a pillow,
The sobbing that racks my body,
Your abandonment has consumed me,
My words were suppose to make it better, but they're all jumbled broken pieces of 26 letters shoved and combined, into what was suppose to be a goodbye, but dad I made a shrine, out of this nothingness, I wish you would've been a part of my life.
Dec 22, 2014
Dec 22, 2014 at 11:47 PM UTC
My mother once told me
“You shouldn’t make homes out of human beings.”
but I found you
with a vacant heart
among cold hands
and I knew right then that I wanted
to kiss you with a thousand life long promises,
to shout out to the rooftops
“come live in my heart
and pay no rent”.
You have made your home in me,
nestled tightly between the spaces
of the left side of my ribcage.
I hope I have proved myself a rebel to my mother,
And that I also live in the spaces of yours.
Jul 28, 2014
Jul 28, 2014 at 12:33 AM UTC
If you hear endearment in the plea
leave the echoed sigh of sympathy
and come with your libretto lungs
and lips of red zephyr absolution
to purify the black coughs of cumulus
evaporating the enclosure
of my satin-threaded fetters
A failed emblem of security
in solitary journeys
Come and lay your mortal coil
of seraphic incarnation
next to my imprisoned vessel
of corrupted humanness
Slow my palpitating hourglass
of ashen peace-of-mind
with organic visitations of
your marble maze shrines
Here I can placate my warped
direction with the porcelain decor
of your serene skin
Angel
Wrap your light around my being
like the sun around an icicle
then release me long enough
to euphemise the darkness in me
from de-light to silhouette enlightenment
Hear my plea
muffled by annulled identity
Be the angel
hiding in my boiled
satin threads
and reveal me
May 3, 2014
May 3, 2014 at 8:33 PM UTC