Tag Archives: poetry

POEM: Mundane Magic

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The girl cast an incantation —
and as her words bore fruit —
they burned her as a witch.

-Blaming the woman
-Blaming her magic
-Blaming a Devil,

But granting amnesty to the words.

What human endeavor is unswayed
by the force of words?

What marauding army was sent off
without a flurry of furious words?

How many Generals have tried
to match the grace of the St. Crispin’s Day Speech?
And though they fail,
their words aren’t without kinetic effect.

What lost cause found victory in words
spewed by a red-faced coach
in a half-time locker-room?

Hasn’t the stab of careless words
been felt more deeply than a dagger?
— splitting up couples, if not Empires.

It may be true that words don’t kill people,
that people kill people,
but when did anyone ever get lethally worked up
in the absence of a well-sequenced string of words?

POEM: The Devil’s Face

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Can you see it?

That which the natives call the Devil’s Face?

Sure, you’ve seen Jesus in a tortilla
& the potato-face Madonna,
and you wrote them off as something
in your brain circuitry that loves a face.

But turn up the sun, pull out all the water
and you start to think…

Stormy Shore Haiku

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I
waves bash stone —
volcanic rock walls pocked
a grain at a time


II
crashing sounds —
perfectly formed waves to
sizzling foam


III
beach sweeping
waves push and pull sand
step tales erased


IV
gray skies
the typhoon unseen
but expected


V
wave doubles back
upon hitting the stony shore:
return to sender

Poems of the Introverted Yogi Now Available

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I’ve got a new poetry collection available on Amazon. Check it out at:

Amazon.com

Amazon.in

Goodreads Page

POEM: Instantaneous Change of Fortune

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The muddy cotton clouds
that shouted threats of rain —
packed in shouldering crowds,
oh, will they, won’t they drain?

I blinked and they had ripped,
growing a gap of blue.
How quickly fates were flipped,
and sun was shining through.

POEM: The Zen of the High Mountain Pass

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Each step through the scree field must be judged on: angle, stability, slipperiness — but the flat, dry, and robust rock is the one that will roll on you — heaving you headlong, rolling over brick and boulder.

Crossing the glacier, each step is taken both like it won’t fail and like it inevitably will.

The former because one can’t fear one’s hips will slip out from under one, but the latter because one needs to be ready to stab an axe into the snowpack without the other end puncturing one’s ribs. 

When you reach the altitude at which stepping is a series of singular activities — not a seamless sequence — you will love breathing like you haven’t since that time you were dangling upside-down outside the womb being smacked on the bottom by a masked man.

POEM: The Veil

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They call it the Veil —
an invisible world scaffolded against our own.

The thin space between is as a two-way mirror —
from the Veil we can be seen with crystal clarity,
but, from here, the Veil is obscured
by our own reflection.

Everyone wants a ticket to the Veil,
but it’s a dimensionless dimension
so your meat vehicle can’t be folded inside.

Veil-dwellers could come here,
but our world makes them agoraphobic —
tormented by the feeling one gets in a sci-fi movie
when the astronaut’s tether is severed,
and you imagine what it would be like to float
in a vast void until one’s oxygen runs out —
or one’s high-tech diaper catastrophically fails —
whichever comes first.

POEM: One Flower, the Sunflower

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If you can keep a heavy head high,
and facing that bright sun —
you’ll be able to lose, but still
feel, in a way, you’ve won.
Sunny, still, when the clouds crawl in;
gay though the day is done —
And in the dark hours you’ll have the
time to become unspun.

In a field of festive flowers
there’s one that’s lost its line.
Its face droops down, shyly twisted —
its sun refused to shine.
But its sun is surely the same
sun as is yours or mine,
though its coy stance speaks its own truth,
and follows its own sign.

POEM: Landscape, Ancient & Alien

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It was an alien landscape,
in red-brown Martian hues,
but built of boulders older than
the skies have known the blues —
or so the locals always said.
But no man knew those views.
They date to days primordial —
before artist or muse.

Medicine Man [Prose Poem]

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He was unkempt and disheveled, even by the standards of those primitive living people of the tribe. If you could find a translator to speak with his tribes-folk, they’d not be offended to hear you refer to him as a madman. They’d find it surprising that you considered that some sort of insightful revelation.

They would part company on two points. First, you believe the fact that he thinks he speaks to spirits and devils is evidence of his insanity. They believe the fact that he has to speak with spirits and devils has made him coo-coo. Who wouldn’t lose a few screws? Second, where you think his insanity makes him fit for nothing — incapable of a worthy contribution. They think his insanity makes him uniquely fit to do a task no sane person would ever do.

He lives by himself, outside the tribe’s clearing, and people only have the nerve to visit when they must. But he’s never for lack of a conversational companion. Though only occasionally does he speak in the tribe’s language. He’s just as likely to caw like a crow. He fears nothing, even those things sensible people would agree are rightly feared. The tribespeople fear him, but they value him for the fear he inspires — in those unseen things that bump in the night and in their souls.

With one foot in this world and the other in another, his world bears only a passing resemblance to yours.