"algal" poems
~
Sheltered within her cryochamber, the offspring of Armageddon dreams of play. She swims in an algal bloom that no longer stings like jellyfish. She floats on the surface of content, far removed from the synthetic sea and its plastic isles. She dwells in a bubble, but her mind hangs free as a halo, soaring with clouds. But these are not the skies that sense their own act of vandalism. This is the space and ceiling of a child's mind, in her capacity to absorb disturbance and rest her tiny, fragile hope in pretended, unclaimed worlds.
~
Oct 26, 2021
Oct 26, 2021 at 11:26 AM UTC
On a certain July, she found a new home,
Unused to the idea of openness,
An open terrace called her towards itself.
She was nine back then,
And the terrace was bright of sun,
For a long long time.
The terrace overlooked the horizon,
The clouds would merge and submerge,
Forming unadulterated child’s dream,
An imagination growing in itself.
She is seventeen now
She came to the terrace,
And closed herself to the sky-
It helped her, the tears of her first breakup;
She took out a cigarette and smiled her first,
The clouds were of smoke,
And the terrace took away her sorrow
She is twenty five now,
Cigarette butts have cornered their way,
Her father had arranged her marriage,
She didn't know him -
She didn't want to.
That day, amusingly, she didn't cry.
The tears wouldn't come.
Assemblage of marriage went through her home.
Her home wasn't her anymore;
A new family awaited her existence.
She couldn't go to the terrace that day,
And someone locked it inside out,
That night, the terrace flooded with rain,
For a long long time.
Nobody busted the terrace anymore,
The old man had arthritis,
And his wife had passed away.
Clouds still merged and birds still flocked,
It was closed for years.
A taller building got made, it obstructed the horizon.
Now its horizon overlooked windows of nothingness.
Algal invasion and cracked corners,
Weren't taken care of,
Wasteland of wasted memories;
The terrace was of no use now-
A girl who used to run, a teen who used to weep,
A woman, left it all behind.
The old man died, and the house was sold,
The tall building wouldn't let the sun come,
And the terrace turned dark,
For a long long time.
Maybe a girl would run again,
The lock was getting rusty;
Maybe the shade would light up open,
Maybe the life would take a toll,
And the rain and sun would come again,
Maybe her sorrow will make its way?
Apr 8, 2016
Apr 8, 2016 at 8:03 AM UTC
The wet lichen
and I
sit upon the dew-slicked
outcrop of boulder bits -
both preternaturally verdure
Each seeking solace in the
space
each seeking what we need from
air
Inclined to commune here, both
'til
the sunrays fade-
my companion soaking sun from
without
and I, I seek a subtler, silent
inner light
We two ourselves
had thought perhaps
to sitstill alone
here
And having found (of course,
of course) a fellow
sit-seeker here
changed course (of course)
and sat astride this
same (but not for long,
only for long) stone
What'd've been an I
(grumble,sigh)
was now a we you see
and I, as well was never
only I but, rather I
as I'd not yet known
and my body and its songs
The lichen too
composed
of two
sat as seeming One
but was as much
a fibrous mesh of fungal
strands sit-seeking
along with its
(not hosted but self-same self)
algal (not plant, not animal; not
either, not both) or cyanobacterial
bits of cells and life material
So together, apart and as much
as One
we looked down
in late-October dawn
into the pond
(to see the sun's rise and blush)
and each and both of us
hoped then to find and feel our Light
Then, through the rising
warm mists,
I sought the Sky -
cloud-filled with cattails’ tufts
and there at last
(of course)
through the irreal fog
(annihilated obnubilation)
I saw the fog
and clouds as One
We two, too
were One.
Oct 26, 2018
Oct 26, 2018 at 7:14 PM UTC
Reticulate my mistakes
Entwine me in the filaments
Of one billion years of algal growth
And allow me to explode into
revered ******** nostalgic bloom
So I may feel once more
The fossilized whispers of love
On my petrified wooden ears
Smooth down my hair so that
I may lie beside you like a guilty dog
Incapable of culpable tears
Just the fear of
Our sound raves refracting
Like shattered light
Into the pedantic lexicon of lives
Leaving this world
Thousands per minute
But still your sweet
Sweet moss on my grave.
Feb 13, 2015
Feb 13, 2015 at 8:35 PM UTC
mermaid purses,
vales of kelp,
swinging skyward with the swell
of nautic rhythms
- submarine -
with incandescent, algal green.
in underworlds,
cathedrals blue,
we waltz in coral halls anew,
adorned in silks
of woven foam:
forgotten cold Atlantic home.
Jul 17, 2021
Jul 17, 2021 at 11:51 AM UTC
On the surface of her eyes,
An algal pool in full bloom.
He wades in with his lashes, caught,
Stumbles around in the fishing nets
Soaked to the knee.
The place in which the oxygen should be
Is choked up now, perplexed, verdant,
A floating city of jealous skirts
Buffeted by a harsh March wind...
And further down, he has her pinned
Tracing paths in shallow waters
Close yet distant to seashell ears
Roughening the lilypad surface
With a single feather.
Through algal bloom, she wonders whether
He'll bother wading down to meet
The covert Atlantis beneath his feet.
Mar 18, 2019
Mar 18, 2019 at 5:06 PM UTC
Lips split
To lick and swallow sallow tears.
Heartbeat in ears, I
Choke down my words
To sit through my fears.
My brain is electrified with the acridity of lemons –
Dashing through cemeteries
Fumbling with etched wisdom
On stones older than enlightenment
And smearing it with fingers trembling on my forehead,
Clammy and numb
While mouths split and shriek into the paralysis of dreams shattered.
I am
hooked on sadists and social delinquents
Lost swirled in the lotus of stinking nightfall,
Gliding through clouds of memory lost and memory found,
With
Jugular arched bare smooth desperate for sunray.
Impassioned strings of rhapsodies intertwine my fingers for
A raptured fractured moment, but
Still I am zygotic, weeping in the embryonic stuff of life.
But reticulate my mistakes -
Entwine me in the filaments
Of one billion years of algal growth
And allow me to explode into
revered ******** nostalgic bloom
So I may feel once more
The fossilized whispers of love
On my petrified wooden ears
Smooth down my hair so that
I may lie beside you like a guilty dog
Incapable of culpable tears
Just the fear of
Our sound raves refracting
Like shattered light
Into the pedantic lexicon of lives
Leaving this world
Thousands per minute
But still your sweet
Sweet moss on my grave.
Apr 6, 2015
Apr 6, 2015 at 6:40 PM UTC
In that algal bloom marshland
Lived a frog with his wife once
Feeding his wife every day
The frog was now tired and tedious
"Oh! My beloved, I can't feed you much
For I'm already old and broken"
His beloved was no longer in delight
As she was in a frenzy of fright
"We can't leave our birthplace
We're not in a great haste
Let us gobble up anything
A twig, a bug or a little fish
Let's settle up our lives
For we have to thrive"
Slowly and steadily
The marsh was empty
All it own was dump like a bin
No pathogens, no bug, no fish
Except two souls counting days till death
As they worked hard with their breath
The marshland was now the property
Of a government official at duty
He called for drainage cleaners
To build there shopping centres
To disappear the marshland
In the crystals of water vapour
As workers dug deep inner
All they unearthed was algae
Nothing more than that
Nothing less than this..
Feb 16, 2018
Feb 16, 2018 at 12:13 PM UTC
Sneaking smoking into diseased lungs on wet lonely spring nights
Jumping! Free falling,
Heart in stomach
Twitching in sleep as birds begin to sing
And strictly internal weeping
On trails less travelled.
Thusly, I am
Cold like asteroids
and
out of orbit
Chardonnay until
I can reject reality
Sleeping naked sweating shivering
And teeth grinding into
My tree trunk soul
I will see you
one day
Worse for the wear and tattered
And I will be caulked and
stuffed like dead dreams
But with you,
I want
to curl inside your decaying cavities
And breathe smoke out of my own coughing lungs
to smooth you to sleep
Your head on my hipbone
Is time blinking her eyes
in a seismic convulsion –
The outlier of our data
and
we have finished before we’ve begun
Despite the marrow in our bones surging in the tide to
one another ourselves
Moss could grow on our interlacing fingers
And have more intention
than we,
Skulls and vertebrae
Click-clacking off beat
To the tune of no drum
Algal lined membranes
effloresce and become
rainforests of decay and renewal
drip dripping on the tip of my tongue
Apr 11, 2015
Apr 11, 2015 at 8:29 PM UTC
parasitic
poached goats
are not for
petting zoos
but that has never
stopped them
before
and of course
there’s cream
in a little hollow
place tucked
so very deep
inside them
(almost like custard I’d wager)
they know
all about
the lobster
and how she prefers
to lay her
eggs in a
tight cluster
all grape-like
on the
underside of the
algal frond
where I dream
that we too
might someday
find cool shelter
from the plastic bits
that rain down from
the tortured sky
the 3-D printers
that spit
out pink toes
and little
baby corn
holders
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 at 6:57 PM UTC