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Vamika Sinha Sep 2015
Ambition
without effort
is like blowing into a flute
without
pursing your lips.
Vamika Sinha Sep 2015
braceleted skyline
under fog
smog
silver-fish grey
under street food breath
No punctuation because this city does not stop or pause or dwell; it charges.
Vamika Sinha Sep 2015
the shadow picks
a nice path on your face;

across planes,
                        in wells
I never drank from,
                        on a pink bud
from which I stole
sugar
        instead
of
tasting.

Where words slipped
I thieved, not
                       kissed.

shadow hovers
as a bee
             searching
for pollen
in darkness.

It loves all
the places
                I missed

because

I substituted French phrases for
your limbs;
spoke to your
light
in a language I didn't quite
know yet

but

sounded
         like
              like
the poetry found

in light's absence.
  Sep 2015 Vamika Sinha
Conrad Aiken
Light your cigarette, then, in this shadow,
And talk to her, your arm engaged with hers.
Heavily over your heads the eaten maple
In the dead air of August strains and stirs.

Her stone-white face, in the lamp-light, turns toward you;
Darkly, with time-dark eyes, she questions you
Whether this universe is what she thinks it--
Simple and passionate and profound and true--

Or whether, as with a sound of dim disaster,
A plaintive music brought to a huddled fall,
Some ancient treachery slides through the heart of things--
The last star falling, seen from the utmost wall...

And you--what sinister, far, reserves of laughter,
What understandings, remote, perplexed, remain
Unguessed forever by her who is your victim--
Victim, of whom you too are victim again?

...Come! let us dance once more on the ancient asphalt:
Seeing, beneath its strange and recent shape,
The eternal horror of rock, from which, for ever,
We toss our tortured hands, to no escape.
  Sep 2015 Vamika Sinha
Dreams of Sepia
She takes her beautiful bones
& carries her woes in her purse

                                                          ­                      the shadow-men haunt her
                                                             ­            the men of the world taunt her
she is both an egg-shell about to crack
& a phoenix about to soar

                                                           ­               she's not asking for sympathy
                                                        ­                  she wants much more
than empty tears
& dry dust in her throat
Vamika Sinha Sep 2015
Do not abort words from love's womb;
she will choke herself
because she could not be a mother.
Stitch lips together. Let silence,
nothing,
be purity.

Words end.
They
are hot and furious, oozing
sores relishing in their own
blood.
Organisms,
dull black embryos, eyeless
until
roiled on red tongues;
spluttered, screamed, snaked
out into being.

They heal themselves to death by the hemlock of Time.
Dying is a definite thing - words are not
immortal, not greater than us.
Not love.

Autopsies reveal varied, unwanted truths:
either
heart splintered too swiftly
or
poison turned flesh to gore,
cell by cell.

Do not abort words from love's womb;
you are wrapping the umbilical cord
around your own neck.
Does love turn us into monsters?
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