Late night rendezvous
the carcass of hope
pecked clean by fever dreams
and relief in pain.

Their macabre passion
infused with action
evolves and invades
the pale, sick ecosystem.

Still, the waning moon
tells no tales.
Their urgency of need
overshadows the pull of light.

The night stumbles forward
beyond their collective consciousness
in her dead eyes
and on his swollen lips.

Alone at last in the dead of night,

he reaches for her under their threadbare existence

with one clammy hand.

She dutifully obliges.



Alone at last in the dead of night,

the girl is sound asleep;

the tiara is still askew on her head

after the day’s rabid celebration.



Alone at the last at the dead of night,

the boy takes the unrelenting road

out of the town.

And towards new adventures.



Alone at last at the dead of night,

the dog sheds its skin

and howls at the moon.

A slow twirl of hand

anti-clockwise

and Kronos does a moonwalk.

Earth 5111955

of revision and recreation

mistakes do not exist here.

And as mistakes do not exist

neither do courage, nor philosophy,

nor the humble desire that whispers in one’s ear,

“Be the best you can be.”

He is an earthy fool of morning—

makes the uphill trek of five leagues

and gathers anemones.



He is a fiery child of dusk—

arrives in the quietness beyond fatigue

and knocks at the door.



She is a flighty girl of night—

wears an anemone in her hair

and opens the door.



It is a deranged river of dawn

breaks the shackles that tamed it once

and rears its hood to strike.

Over the chatter of rain,
her vegetable shouts
are hardly heard by him.

The corner where the roof leaks
and corruption draws a perfect circle,
he finds his anorexic love
neatly packed in polyethene bags.

The window is missing a shattered pane
lost sometime last year,
he gathers the curtain into a ball to repel the storm
but rips the silk to shreds.

He’s gone in the stillness between the flash and the roar
that threaten to overwhelm her once more,
she closes her eyes and the door.

Set in its prurient ways,
the sun strips the rōnin down
in the vicious pause after—
the peasant girl stares.

It was the missing decade
of my life that came back,
late on one clammy night.

Wearing your visage
of a foraging girl
at the foot of a tranquil Vesuvius.

Spent though I was,
for those decades still with me,
I sat awake listening to the warmth of open windows.

The decade came for me,
in figments and memories
wheezing a few questions.

This room is known to me,
as is the night,
as is the flaying heat,

and the carved words
on the creaking charpoi
by some distant uncle.

I melded with the light squeezing through
into this dark, sulphurous room
like an exile away from my maker.

The decade came to me
and sang lullabies
of princes who never were.

I have kept my vigil
until the mirror ran dry
and returned to sand.

The decade wears me now
as I am, the hunting boy
by a shimmering Ganges.