I am clueless as to how I have dug a hole in this concrete ground, 60 feet deep. The dust I’ve been choking on does not bother me no more, layers piling upon my lungs like snow upon an exposed carcass. The slightest upheaval of my chest and tingling in my lungs reminds me that I still breathe. I’ve met scaffolds of bones down here. As I stare into their hollow sockets, I could never figure if they were ever esurient for something I held. They taught me how the ocean is never blue but only a de facto reflection of the sky. They said many mistook the sea for the sky, but never once mentioned the salt that contaminated their lungs-  the impetus that drove their feet 60 steps into the waves. A reconciliation it must have been. I doubt it made any difference, when their hearts were bleeding out; a pity it doesn’t make it any lighter. Down they sank.

I wonder if I mistook these soils for the sky. As I looked up, I realised that the sky only seemed further away. There’s something peculiarly comfortable down here, the little bumps on the walls and contours of the craters looked like jawlines of a new-found friend. The sun is so blindingly high in the sky. I preferred how sometimes I could see the man in the moon- shadows cast by imperfections on the moon’s surface. In the vague moonlight and scrawny silhouettes, the fact that the moon always has a dark side makes it tangible a thousand miles away. Sometimes, I lay on this wooden receptacle discovered upon excavation and gaze at the empty skies with my friend as he tells me what lies outside this trough. Happiness is a pack of hungry wolves and when they are done, you are left with only your marrows. I see things clearer down here, than above where they are smothered by smoke from the trees they burned to the ground. Sometimes the skies are dark with no hint of dusk, sometimes the sky is filled with white nebula; but most of the times, the days are shorter than the nights. But it never gets any darker down here.

I figured I could never mistake this hole for the sky. I was just chasing these broken pieces like I used to chase happiness. I have no idea how I’ve gotten this deep while trying to pick up these pieces that I don’t recognise. But the struggle tells me it’s real, and the pain keeps me awake. They say if you spend enough time with someone, you will fall in love. I guess that’s what happened between sadness and me.

I’m staying here.

When I was borne
my mother passed away and
one day father also
left the hut leaving me alone
and my destiny was now
homeless, helpless and orphan
vagabond I was now
roaming around the road and streets
in search of food and shelter

But I also have some dreams
I wish if I were competent enough
I could have opened
an amazing school
where free education would
be right of every poor and needy child
and now no more poor child
would be deprived of education

I wish I could have built a dream home
for every homeless and destitute child
now no more child would
spend dark nights in the open sky

I wish I could have made
a beautiful garden where
every homeless child would play
and run after colorful butterflies
and beautiful flowers of all colors
would bloom in the garden

I wish I could have opened
a big kitchen near the dream home
where every hunger child
could eat to his fill and hence
no more child would be esurient,
unfed and indigent

I wish I could have opened a factory
where clothes could be stitched
for poor and naked children
and no more child
would be devoid of clothes
I pray to God that
my dreams come true one day

(By Kishan Negi)

Floating brazier spews electric amber waves
as a setting sun radiates on the ceiling
a shadow of a ship coquettishly sways
while in the center charybdis begins swilling

another message, another missed call
another debt collector and his esurient talk
watch the ship begin to swirl, this scene so banal
amber feathered tawny eyed peacock

continues furtively to scroll her story and shoe shop
crowded room with a panel onstage
reality and fantasy evaporate and fall as a single raindrop
drown in the muck, don't know how to disengage

and to stay in the sway of fantasy.

I couldn't know you'd need me then!
Just a human with all frailty and much fault....
  
Do you think the wind blows differently
When  it passes over leaves and trees?
That it says: "Wait, lemme stop here a bit
And blow on this one leaf  in a special way"
  
Hardly! Time to get with the manure beneath
And see that sunrays shine on everything
And indiscriminate clouds shimmer on all,
How haphazard, the way the wind blows.
  
So, don't hang your head and moan so much
Time dawns for you to get over yourself
Don't you see that I'm still here?
Now quit getting your knickers in a knot!
  
You rant and rave while I pant and slave
Dissect my every move, make me aloof
How can you possibly go counting
And re-arranging all the marbles in my head?
  
You're so insecure, you make me mad
So exhaustive are your constant jibes
So tiring to soothe your unfounded fears
I'm having to placate you so often of late.
  
Before it all gets blown out of size
Sit a while in  (h)arboured thought
Confront the dreads which cause disquiet
A trove may wash up....but broken, on your shore.
  
The wind comes not with tardy tidings
For it isn't the what you say or do
But forsooth, the how which carries weight
Let's not over-whip each other so.
  
My thoughts may be wanton, wild or reckless
Telling tigs bend on a riotous grind
Yet feckless deeds don't follow suit
Pardon my slightly-misbehaving mind.
  
Patient and respectful, I remain to be
Just guard against esurient whims
Paucity of faith and clockwork trivial'ties
Will lead us down a road of trials.
  
Fallen martyrs should not feign, see
The wind makes no pretense. It just blows....
Now, I really couldn't know you'd need me then
'Cause, baby, that's the way the wind blows!
  

S T, 5 April 13

And with hot branding, I name the end, it is unknown Obadiah, it is uncompromising Demosthenes, it is ambuscaded Agamemnon,
it is crafty Cain, it is able to pull lightning down from clouds to electrify a world beset upon by forces of great magnitude, vibrations ricochet off of each other, quaking knee's knock as earthquakes rock tectonic plates.

In this final hour what was once to edify is now to petrify and once let free the fire is an esurient monster after being kept so long locked behind the now yawning earthen gates, witness even the most pluvial flourishing plain blister and boil, witness unyieldingly the flesh bubbling in flux as if from extreme cell proliferation, another soul abdicates its husk.

Mayhap this life will lead to another, as If there will be a choice project an air-less voice on the matter, will this If, insist on this If,
hold your breath in front of polyonymous Death, let without a moan a trembling icy finger trace lips of now great pallor and make the word-less decision known, no more cyclical reaping of our worn souls says humanity and beg on the now naked ruth for our sanity.

One day someone asked me a question,
'why not just have fun and live happily?'
I said, 'because that would be selfish.'
He replied, 'everyone is selfish.'
I sighed.

That night, I slept as I always have
In the morning, the sun came out
looked around with a docile stance
he carried in him ember and fire
for some reason

The world was cold and thawed
the chill swept the earth all night
no body sang, no body spoke
no body was awake against the frost
the sun saw it all

Millions of bodies, even rocks and trees
Suckled on its warmth like its babies,
slowly opening their eyes to the morning,
coming awake as the heat kicked out
the numbness of night

The sun burnt its heart to produce
more and more fire for the world,
for many more tomorrows that he had
to tend to, for all that was sought by all
was his ardor

Sometimes, when the sun's heart ails
with its own searing burns and blues,
the blue ocean sends across to it, its coolest
wave, from the deepest corners of its heart,
borne on a zephyr

But oh, the burning world, under the fervency
of its own desires, seizes with excuses each
little effort the ocean puts forth, no consolation
ever reaches the sun, for those who it lives for,
need ever more

Each wind that passes by is never enough
for a world that is more esurient than destitute
all steal from the sun more than they need
all rob the breeze of its soothing touch
and the world lives on

The next little boat comes around the bend as the previous one sets sail.  No sails of course on these amusement park river rafts, but standing on that disorienting moving platform I can’t help but wax poetic.  I say wax poetic and I think of tall, slim candles on furnished banquet tables in foreign countries with languages that yearn to invert our *****, anglophile syntax and say wax poetic to mean ‘poetic wax’.  Wax with a flair for verbose romance.  Tall, slim, fleshy, slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and thinking all along of shattered daydreams, looking into each like shards of glass and seeing not this melting candle but a solid body doused and extinguished with love and certainty.  There it is, my croissance poétique, my poetic waxing, to grow and elaborate, as wax simply does not - under these circumstances, at least. To be sure, I am still standing before my boat as my body moves constantly on the platform with no help from me.  I am thankful such thoughts find themselves so instantaneously or I would have found myself knocked under or over something or other.  I board.  Buckle.  I’ve never heard of anyone in an amusement park on one’s own; it’s usually a pair hand-in-hand, gripping each other on plummeting coaster drops in some panic-stricken foreshadowing of the taught limbs and pounding hearts that will inhabit their sheets come nighttime.  Or else a grease-stained fat lipped boy, esurient for the delicate touch his haggard mother and wicked-stepfather dole out upon his blind and handicapped sister, bound to a chair, bound to her own head, bound forever to her worn-out, frayed gingham mother and her stupid, jealous brother.  Even as my calves squeak against the rubbery seat and my knees bump with some hairy father of some screaming three, I’ve still managed to romance my setting into something far out of the realm of reality.  I’m afraid, though, I may be losing touch with it altogether.

Am I really there?  Something about the sensation of spinning and twinge in my core that feels like sickness tells me that is probably the case, but even so, I’m relying purely on a hunch.  A literal gut feeling, soon to be joined by the cold barrage of cascading water and my shoes turning wet and making my feet feel somewhat like jelly.  Physical experiences that root me in this world, while my thoughts, it seems, have died and transcended some time ago.  One blink and my transformation is complete, soaked to my center and the ride is over.  I’m exiting my little boat, orienting myself onto the platform that has kept spinning this entire time, unrelenting to anyone who would wish can this all stand still for just a moment my shoe is untied! The father of the three follows behind, but I fail to find a story for him. The faces I pass as I exit are not delicate, they do not carry with them tragic imbalances of the past, or beam with the pride of a love that seems to last forever (because it has lasted so long already, right?), they are blank. They are blank and wet and dripping like mine and they drip like they’re melting, like they are slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and it is now that it has come full circle. The world as it passes has caught up once again and will continue to spin past, allowing only a moment where we both whirl together, where we are in sync and both of us have wicked step-fathers and both of us have soggy shoes and then again she will be gone, to unite with some other fleshy entity and reduce me again to my *****, anglophile syntax and my shattered daydreams and my wax poetic.  But she will be back.  And until then, I’ll drip into the floorboards and perhaps when she returns I’ll have something to show her.

My shackles are tight, my body is tired.
I think of my plight, and feel I'm mired.

I watch the approaching sunrise,
I wearily close my eyes.

I remember the work I've done,
my efforts not for a meager one.

The esurient corvine looms so dark,
I look into it's eyes so cold and stark.

With great avarice, it lunges into my flesh,
rapidly tearing as if to thresh.

I feel myself slip away,
I wish that this was my last day.

I wake to see the approaching sunrise,
this endless death is my prize.

The esurient corvine looms overhead, my only wish...

...I wish to be dead.

He said "I love you",
And I believed him,
I hate myself so much,
How could I be such a *****?
I'd fallen prey to his sweet breath,
His glistening, white teeth,
His strong, defined muscles,
Like he'd done to so many other girls,
But I had an insatiable hunger for love,
And he just fed my esurient heart

I hate how anxiety even affects my sleep, its black sickly tendrils slithering into my mind and wrapping around my dreams, one by one. Gripping tightly and ensnaring its prey as it twists its scaly body around my soft dreams, suffocating them with its serpentine embrace. A ****** mist permeates my mind as I awaken from my slumber; dead dreams are all I see now. A mental battlefield strewn with the cold corpses of my hopes and dreams. Anxiety came like a thief in the night and took nothing, but killed everything. Sorrow is quickly snuffed out and replaced with rage. Rage and a new kind of hunger. My esurient soul is now ravenous for vengeance. This corpeal soul shall wage war of the likes only seen in legends of ancient battles between deities and monsters of long lost myths. My demons have won this battle, but the war has just begun

Be thankful for
Food on your table
Might as well be
Your last meal
Eaten in peace

Meal ready on the table
Taking it for granted
No more on a full stomach
Being are told its enough

The reasons multiple
Nutritious intake to maintain
Good health and living
Might no more be coming

Might have an Icharus
Right in the midst
Need not snitch your presence
Could test the tolerance

Earn your bread
Best lesson ever
Passed on by elders
Knowing how much it matters

Dependence on others
Two square meals a day
Is the greatest curse
May or May not be a ruse

Never put the mind to it
Was always readily available
Empathy with the poor people
Led their lives yearning for that table

Getting rid of this
Mans greatest challenge
No one goes Esurient
Basic values forsaken

Getting used to it
Seems like the only fit
Not asking a luxurious Viand
Basic food now a demand