"ballasts" poems
As in cargo ships.
Fear takes pictures below.
My heart inside stone ballasts.
Saving letters.
I burn it down.
I burn it down & walk away.
Correct.
Ate, now sick.
Years ago fruit grew.
My wound grows skin with wine.
& she burns.
Price payed for pale beauty.
Still alive.
My torch home.
I search for my children
Frozen in winter's grace.
Jan 9, 2013
Jan 9, 2013 at 8:04 PM UTC
suds fall on black like endless snow.
tarnished paint to spry—
engine's diminutive breath
clout of metal coil, ballasts of portent...
defacing the fog and giving
it a brand new meaning. beside the rice fields in sullen Bulacan,
i ache for the frog defecating
on this tortured piece of land.
birds in migratory V-positions cleave
the azure, vanishing behind the tough ornate. to whence they flee
and to where they shall land
on their poised talons, i do not know.
underneath the dermis and over
it, a long stillness of waiting,
trapped is this
man of Earth.
Nov 4, 2015
Nov 4, 2015 at 3:43 AM UTC
Remove the mask
Strip to essentials
Remove the ballasts
A crossroads
An intersection divine
Don't rue the darkness on a boulevard of light
Lucifer's here
Will the deal go down?
Or are you hedging on up?
Flying in on the back of truth
As an agent of change
Write your own contract
Be just and align
Oblige yourself with Self
'Be like water my friend' (Bruce Lee)
Fill that vessel up
To overflowing
A soul is pedestrian
An overflowing soul leads to changency
An over~soul (Emerson)
Define your cosmology
Uninitiate is a good initiation
You have to strip your house down
To ensure true pitch
Attuning for those forks
A hollow reed
For a river of truth
Nov 25, 2014
Nov 25, 2014 at 8:41 AM UTC
Breathe in deeply,
an inhale to sustain life everlasting,
then submerge beneath rolling waves,
drifting like a feather on a breeze,
to cleanse a heart, a soul.
Relax,
release,
pressure washing away,
waves rising and falling,
water flowing by,
a babbling brook silenced,
flushing out fears.
Tokens of pain,
once heavy ballasts,
now feather-light,
rise to the surface,
recognised,
remembered,
understood –
let go.
They float away,
carried by ceaseless currents,
going,
going,
gone.
These waters are beautiful,
swirling pools of blues and greens,
ice cold and unreachable,
warm like a fire on a bitter winter's night,
reflection of purity and cleansing,
a looking glass.
These waters are ethereal,
they are treacherous,
dangerous,
uncontrollable.
But this is life, my life,
unknown,
unexpected,
electrifying,
exhilarating.
I surface slowly,
new like the first winter's snow,
taking one step, then two,
running,
leaping,
loving you.
Feb 23, 2012
Feb 23, 2012 at 4:48 PM UTC
When Archimedes jumped out of his bathtub
Shouting ‘Eureka’ naked down the streets,
He had finally found a way to uncover
The deceit on behalf of His Majesty’s goldsmith.
Had he stolen gold replacing it with silver
While carving the divine wreath commissioned by the Tyrant?
The Golden Crown of Syracuse to be placed on the head
Of a goddess to be tested without being disturbed.
It all began with overflow as he dipped his body in water.
It was evident and easy to observe
That some objects floated while others sank,
Occupying more or less, tri-dimensional space.
Fluids rejecting or enveloping the intruder,
Displaced proportionally to the latter’s
Volume, density and mass, led to the revolutionary
Discovery of buoyancy, sparkling new beginnings.
The understanding suggested, that if an object displaced
An amount of water heavier than its weight, it would float.
The opposite being true, an object displacing
An amount of water lighter than its weight, would sink.
Fluid’s volition to reclaim its legitimate space.
Although the system was unable to assess the fraud,
As shape came into account and a kilo of solid gold
Was smaller than the kilo of golden wrath,
Dipped into water discrepancy ignored the math.
Unpredictably, the genius found higher purposes,
Buoyancy to determine whether a steel ship would sink
Or float, make it through the Mediterranean and beyond,
Where the Pillars of Hercules warn sailors to go no further.
Non plus ultra to the realms of the unknown.
The understanding suggesting that if an object displaced
An amount of water heavier than its weight, it would float,
Bigger volumes, lower densities, empty hulls and ballasts,
Succeeded in opening the gates to new oceans and new worlds.
Buoyancy to explain why our bodies float at sea
Apparently rejected by expelling waters claiming back their territory.
Gases being fluids, air acts the same,
With the extraordinary result that a kilo of feathers
Is indeed lighter that a kilo of lead.
By 0,9 grams.
Jun 4, 2017
Jun 4, 2017 at 6:45 AM UTC
Encrusted ballasts flicker
over processed lines
and those predatory octogons
Follow you
with its clicking clicking clicking
mandible clocks
count is rhythm
fluorescently
Apr 2, 2015
Apr 2, 2015 at 10:23 AM UTC
Falling as recalcitrance of movement – seeks completion – yet the ground
ballasts.
There is no path that leads forward as I live backwards.
There is poetry in the way
a woman carrying a bilao moves away from the vicinity.
Sound departs.
I took a deep drag and fell into a thick web
of smoke, recoiled to fetal nature, into the womb of my unbecoming.
What seems to contain endlessness: dark.
What punctuates this claim: moonlight.
In a house that continuously aches,
I am grateful for windows.
Night-erased repeatedly, the dance of blades of grass.
There is more stasis when words flay
themselves to pass as something more resolute than there is
the kinesis of life’s steady abbreviations. We shorten like this,
when we curse the destinations upon movement’s mindless
approval.
We collect ongoing afternoons
and cohere to trees. Say falling like you mean it,
the way we commit to breaking though unwanted, feared.
Feel the hands accumulate warmth when propped
into the sun’s permanent daze – face becomes glare,
a day becomes a scar.
This is where I do not know what moves to become fully stationary.
Days crumble like this.
In a poem that is not a poem.
In a sound that is only sound and not music.
In a dance that is not life, but stillbirth.
In notes that are purely rambling, not reportage.
A voice that champions a fiasco.
This is where the throbbing afternoon becomes a part
of me that falls into a chasm of a fateful night,
lassitude of debris in tow,
starting measures everywhere we left and returned –
Apr 25, 2016
Apr 25, 2016 at 8:51 PM UTC
Once one crosses the forbidden line on the wrong side of sixty.
Not to venture further into the next arithmetical digit.
There begins the journey to another world, even where the angels fear to tread.
All on a sudden one comes under uncountable whammies.
A jinxed land you stray into, full of a craggy jagged reef.
Razor sharp rocks you feel at every step and bleed.
Another shell shock I devalued you are as a condemned jalopy.
Looks of all you love, speak a strange lingo: you get a creep.
It is anything but the old warm vibes of those years golden.,
Rather an overdose of pity and compassion over-laid with mushy emotion.
A good enough gesture to an infirm or a ******* or one in dotage.
A man past his prime and relevance like a mast broken of a boat sunken.
Written off the priority roster, stowed in a corner,
Dusted, sprayed and showcased as a piece of curio rare.
mothballed with care in medicine on rationed air.
Lest unseen germs of umpteen infections catch them unaware.
An appendage fit to be dumped in old age home.
A social cure-all, as they say, concerned so unwillingly,
A haven as safe as God’s Elysium for progenitors.
To be lionized as the epitome of pride and wisdom.
So adored they are but shunned cannily by every social connection.
A persona-non-grata in all spheres save for gratuitous complimentary doles.
Being in the jinxed circle of seventy is the sin only committed.
A few blessed ones manage to wiggle into the favoured positions.
A few ministerial ballasts, a lottery coup, or a few sine cure slots, a safety net of power & pelf.
The rest for a wallow in the morass of delusive expectations.
Oodles of stale dry sympathy, deceptive tears and bogus bonhomie.
Old raw sores get abraised-the world turns deaf.
……….
It’s a poetry by late Mr S M Ghosh, my late father
An educationist, history teacher and retired principal of Central Schools, in India.
Nov 2, 2018
Nov 2, 2018 at 8:55 PM UTC
As in cargo ships.
Fear takes pictures below.
My heart lies in stone ballasts.
Saving letters.
I burn it down.
Burn it down & walk away.
Correct.
Ate, now sick.
Years ago fruit grew.
My wound grows skin with wine.
& she burns.
Price payed for pale beauty.
Still alive.
My torch home.
I search for my children
Frozen in winter's grace.
May 13, 2015
May 13, 2015 at 1:44 PM UTC
Sin with your kin.
Spread amour for kindness
Begin with acts of evil chagrin
Sin with your kin
Bin what's within
Greed is vileness
Sin with your kin
Spread amour for kindness
Jan 17, 2019
Jan 17, 2019 at 12:50 AM UTC
Across the initialed table,
thin-limbed within
a pink NKOTB sweatshirt,
flicking pencils at my lap,
nest of blonde hair glowing
under the humming ballasts
of the lance-long bulbs,
she still perches, smirking slyly.
I can't shake her.
She is installed somewhere
I can't reach. I remember
all my childhood crushes,
but only this one is so vivid.
She invited me to her birthday,
at her house, knowing I liked her.
She fawned over a boy
from a different school.
Every poem I've written
about her names him: Adam.
I cried in her yard, bundled inward,
went quiet, waited for my mother.
On the ride home I stared
as the green fields striped by.
She grew up, married,
started a family. I kept track
only through hearsay.
When she died in childbirth,
I surprised myself by crying.
Aug 14, 2018
Aug 14, 2018 at 9:55 PM UTC