"leanness" poems
Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares -
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?
19.5k
even the gulmohur looks confused
--"where is the sun?", it seems to ask
the dark rainclouds
as it sways distractedly
outside my window,
its orange flames
flickering rhythmically,
engaged in a waltz with
the falling rain.
the bamboo --wiser,
greener, stands unperturbed
barely reacting as the
water rolls off its leanness
nothing seems to surprise
its experienced being
- Vijayalakshmi Harish
06.03.2013
Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish
Mar 6, 2013
Mar 6, 2013 at 6:48 AM UTC
Dressed in the tatters of her latest mistake
she will tiptoe into your life like a passing thought.
She will offer some token of herself
while collecting the emotions which tumble careless from your lips
to nourish the leanness of her soul.
She will pour herself into you
and like gasoline ignite your smoldering loneliness,
and warmed by that heady inferno
she explains that she long ago traded everything constant
for a frantic ceaselessness
and a freedom borne of detachment.
Now her flesh is made of smoke and shadows
that pass over your senses but cannot be held.
For weightless as she is,
a passing breeze might carry her away.
So though you stand before her naked as a smile,
anchored to the very earth with promises,
you are not surprised to find she has shrugged off the hopes
that you draped so carefully across her shoulders
and tiptoed out of your life,
for she was never yours, but only her own.
Sep 19, 2012
Sep 19, 2012 at 1:45 AM UTC
her
curvature
enhanced a
perception;
a woman
yes,
an articulated vanilla
doll most certainly. this
can’t be what you want,
he said to himself.
you’re a child,
he thought.
but her figure moved like
he wanted,
tight on the chest, a slight bust
with hips to accentuate her
leanness.
her purple lips did not worry him,
but the lack of eye sockets
may have.
as his hand fell into his jeans
a managers hand snatched a phone.
he turned and left hurriedly
the same way he came in;
through women’s outerwear and
alone.
Oct 12, 2013
Oct 12, 2013 at 11:25 PM UTC
I feel the immediacy of things. The imminence of objects. I feel the keenness of a glass in my hands. The instantaneous dribble of condensation over a knuckle. The spontaneous aroma of a summer night. I am enthralled and enraptured by the crisp mint of toothpaste, after a barely slept night. I feel the rough twill of a garment and I am in love with it. I extend my hands into the rapid amber slats of the streetlamps on my dash, as I speed beneath them. I watch them wash over my hands and I feel somehow indescribable.
I am in love with beautiful women who pass me on the street. Every one them pretty. Every one of them a neat mystery. Every one of them in skin as lovely and soft as breath off the ocean. I know myself least when I kiss. I know myself best when I am kissed.
I feel myself in the world and I feel IT in me. I love my friends and my family. I love the rough smell of fire. I love the wisp of spring, grown into the verdant pulse of summer's heat. I love to sweat and feel the movement of my body through open space. I love the sharp itch of a tattooer's vibrant needle. The splay of colors. The tang of my blood.
I look at men and I see boys playing at what they think a man is supposed to be. I see excess, increase, and birth. I see leanness, erosion, and death. I somehow know that neither is life a beginning or death an ending. I know it as I know the tip of my finger. I know it as I know the taste of sweat and hairspray and sunscreen, distilled in the instant of a drunk kiss, in a tent just inside of Idaho.
I am for life. I am for pain as I am for pleasure. For I know that one is nothing without the either. I wish to be known and to say myself. I wish to know you and to hear yourself, said by, yourself. I am simply. I am a man. I am just what I am.
I may die tomorrow. I urge you to love those dear to you and to say it everyday. I only try to do that. I only try.
Apr 15, 2013
Apr 15, 2013 at 6:33 PM UTC
You’re at a journalism conference
a few years back,
a welcome bit of professional development
that's become increasingly rare
in a time of budgetary leanness,
a rote exercise
whose attendance was padded
by college students, deep discounts
and last-minute appeals.
A speaker said,
look to your left and to your right.
The number of working reporters
has shrunk by a third over the last decade.
Only two-thirds of you are left.
After the last round of layoffs,
another slash of the scalpel
that seems unsustainable,
that seems to bleed off too much,
you notice all the empty desks,
all the absent computers,
how sparse the parking lot looks.
Feb 8, 2018
Feb 8, 2018 at 3:44 AM UTC
Truth, be told
On an old fashion gramophone, they played sweet
music in a small cove made for two, the young man
smiled this sleek woman was to become his bride.
A big seal came on to shore dragged the woman in
to the sea and under, when surfacing with the seal
she smiled and waved but didn't come ashore,
kept on jumping and playing and her leanness made
look like a seal and she was indeed turning into one.
Finally she and the bigger seal com to the shoreline
she told him her life was the ocean and she and her
the new man was swimming to the Azores where she
would meet his family. The young man took his
gramophone, sun cream, towels and walked home.
No one believed his accurate explanation, he got
life for drowning his girlfriend.
Feb 5, 2016
Feb 5, 2016 at 7:00 AM UTC