Verdant eyes, translucent pearls
speak in silent witness,
wounds unfurl
meaning revealed,
interrupted girl.
Safe in solidarity
prolific eccentricity,
the scandal of particularity.
Pouting mouth
grief - filled lips
alluring, set sail a thousand ships;
tempt me to leave harbor.

Arousing euphoria as such,
resistance, amity and distance
amour sans touch
her sense of humor transcends,
appeasing the mind’s thirst
a vogue sultana,
seasoned swagger
hair resplendent flame,
alternating cool, black
asymmetrical coiffure;
nonconforming demure
the renegade metaphor -
singular for sure, no cure.

Muted vanity, bathos piercing
the jaded circumference of banality;
pale protagonist servitude
the sapient palaver of the urbane,
covered patina of pretense,
induced coercion,
the commodity self
appearing abased
wearing lesions of lassitude.
Artistic chattel - eminent domain
preempting genius,
subsidiary of consuming narcissism
external locus of control;
surrender to the tentative,
fettered pendant, Venus in chains
arrested visionary bane
sterile savant, edifice of pain.

The soubrette, dubious incarnation
gravid ingénue of prevarication
imperceptible venue -
theatre of the absurd;
withdrawn siren,
solitude of necessity -
skin - slender veil of shame,
nearness loitering redemption;
moments envisage
the appointment with the soul;
ambiguity eschews clarity
awareness; ineluctable anxiety,
imago - centric confession
sacred pardon, seraphic venation
intravenous textures presume,
the tactile margins of liberty.

Therapeutic retrieval,
Sanguine,
beneath the portico of
individuation;
Your smile I hear,
recovered autonomy
blessed emancipation,
The scandal of particularity;
peculiar treasure
ironically captured
film, canvas,
prose profundity.

Ciphering as an ambling book,
I peruse you,
rendered captive
hypnotic avant-garde fiction,
spectator of denuded opacity
analogous reflection, I Mirror you.
A modest proposal - pontificate the imperative,
forgo the disposal, adapt your narrative,
the scandal of particularity -
resonate the echo, cogitate our propinquity
Love, imagination and destiny.

©2008 & 2011 W.S Warner

Am I really complex
Like the reticulate venation of a leaf?
An abstract art on the wall?

Why face can't be read, why?
Should I promise to be an ice-cream
melting upon tongue?

Truth may looses uniform
and puts on the fake costume
But I'm a shade of 3bs:
bell, butterfly and bonsai!


Poem 19
Book 'Beckoning Jade-Dreams' April 2007
Copyright Musharrat Mahjabeen
Mizan Publishers, Dhaka, Bangladesh
ISBN 984-8700-82-X

is the tendency of the  reddish sunshine
to become drenched some more

let us hear
what the milky-way seamed by pins
says

and it’s you
how much can you be able to read
the venation of the Barringtonia acutangula

can you touch the season of making apples
in the aquarium

the empty bottles without any co-ordinate
that shoulder with endless grief
the hands of the wall-clocks

in a sudden depression
they’re also making crowd
at the beauty parlour

you have promised someday
to present a flower-vase to display some drops of blood
in the circled face

do you remember it

you haven’t floated that turnip
till now

here the month of trumpet-flower
covers everything
with reedy grass

with the festival of colours of the white horses
the new leaves of bananas become associated

the total dipavali rows
along the evening-balcony

taking it as daylight
will any bird fly towards it

then send a walkman
for the bamboo plants

you must go today
in search of the source
of the hand-woven lamp-post

from the pitcher-worship to the kantha-stitch
it is a  very large
twelve-horned deer

the mango-marrow
demands more land
demands more kingfisher

the breath of the Ravenala
touches the chicks of the black-pepper

in every evening
the flood that tears the button
touches the bowstring

that passes through the centre of  magnolia

With its sinuous green edge and its delicately
decorative white venation this dewy cress laid
on a fine crystal platter would fit well next to that
chunk of cement facade ensconced in a vitrine
at the Art Institute’s new Louis Sullivan exhibition
There’s little cause to wonder why these particular
atoms once afloat on inchoate seas and awash
in the hummed mumbles of humble vibrations
chose to decohere into this one captivating pattern
from among an infinite variety of mattered schemes
even limiting their choicest range to those paired
colors A tree frog for example its narrow lime toes
suctioned on a broad leaf and its watchful pearl
eyes misconfigured with a blind spot too soon
exploited by a beak spouted peril Or the gallant rider
in uniform myrtle and mounted atop an albino steed
who at a mirthless gallop through routed troops
delivers this message Mother I am so far away
from everything They’re oddly jarred couplings but
with any choice whether slapdash had or carefully
considered what’s our guarantee it will live up to
the iron of romantically clad expectations I have
heard It’s always the salad that gets you in the end

The bridge between us
stands in the wind stoic
with indifferent strength,
resigned strength.

Static trusses of steel
withstand without a sound
as forces crack through it
and propagate to the ground,
like how the lightning through your
mess of veins
is grounded in the rubber soles
of your sneakers.

We are stalling, looking for veins
in everything to prove our alive—
a dragonfly’s wing on the floor,
a leaf’s venation,
the Arabic graffiti lost in translation
on the railing
and the rivers creeping
outside their contours.

Your lips are turning blue in the storm.

The bridge is strong.
Nothing can go wrong but
every bar is under stress,
yours in tension and mine all compressed
and the bars don’t move but
underneath is a storm of forces
pushing and pulling us at once
with the cold magnets
of the poles of the earth.

If we jump off this bridge
instead of across
we will not fall

starry eyed dew, amber chamomile,
a mixed american short hair trying to climb on our 111 inch wide window seal,
faint venation, opposite leaves,
we close the curtain, destroying everything we've seen.