Rainbow

What makes you think
It will disappear
When you tell it to,
That it will fade
If you close your eyes?

What makes you think
The images will stop
Changing form and color;
That the birds that hover around your head
Will fly away?

What makes you think
Your words will heal, kill, purify,
Resurrect, or chain to graves
All colors that change
From green to red, to orange, from black to blue to gray?

Not to white
Not to white

What makes you think
You can wash all colors in the rain
And expect a white canvas
To throw colors again?

What makes you think
All colors will remain frozen
And not change
Within the wall
You build around it?

You and I

You and I
at times resurface from under water
where we choose to live
most moments.
Till we can hold our breath,
till the floating aqua and the marine
entice…
till thoughts bubble
and draw us
back to the surface
for a glimpse.
Where time breathes in air thin
and we have only as many moments
to gulp in the air,
keeping up the chin.

Where visions are far in between and few
so we just exchange pleasantries,
and maybe a word or two
that gingerly allude to the
tempests heaving within
and before the lungs threaten to expend
those breaths waiting in abeyance,
we dive on the double…
to resurface
only when those thoughts
yet again bubble…
Ones that hold within
a world of dewy dreams
that is blithely singular
amidst echoes of discordant regimes.

Dreams....

AD.
(Double click on painting for higher resolution)

Silent.

PERMANENT WAY

This poem was prompted by the news that the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the highest, and surely the most spectacular in the world, is nearing completion.

***

The centuries were less than kind to you.
But then, virginity's a tease for both bully
and suitor alike: you could hardly think your coy
rebuffs would keep either away, you knew fully
what history meant, that empires destroy
to thrive. And there was the odd flirtation too.

The suitors left but the ravisher, none too gentle,
gorged in heat and scourged you with his lust.
A cynical world watched your screams abate,
your flailing spirit ground to conquest's dust,
a desiccated carcass. And now the tourists wait
like vultures, for tickets to Lhasa Central.

***

On Letting Go

These years will soon go by a-blur.
In a lonely room somewhere,
I'll live the past, the times with her.

Voices trilling in song or cheer,
Frills and laces, ribbons in hair,
These years will soon go by a-blur.

I'll think of eyes of twinkled laughter,
Monsters in closets, dolls in her lair:
I'll live the past, those times with her.

Of a child's kisses that healed a mother,
Adolescent fears and misread care,
These years will soon go by a-blur.

Shadows will sweep a desolate shelter,
No more now than a threshold bare,
and walls that whisper of times of her.

For I must know she's not mine forever,
Or else the rest is round despair.
These years will soon go by a-blur,
I'll live the past, the times with her.

Soul satisfaction....

AD.
(double click on painting for higher resolution)

Requiem

Gently please, don’t mind the dust. For this was organic too,
and shared air and breath with him, as did the roach
and the rodent. Step lightly round those scribbled scraps
that lie like leaves on untended graves. Sounds encroach,
even footfalls desecrate the quiet which wraps
this home turned cenotaph. For here silence grew

like an anthill, a maze of byways, histories trapped in a womb,
the fluid conscious of ages. Those books once lived and talked,
chattered to him like squirrels, or spoke gravely like the owl
as he fed them or was fed smiling, or laughingly mocked
like a master by his wards: a benign terror on the prowl.
Tread softly. They lie like children, dead now, in this catacomb.

***

The thirst.....

A.

Lets paints this world

Lets paint this world
to rival the songs
on the lips of that raindrop
falling
or is it dancing
maybe a half twirl?


Lets paint this world
and turn the sky green.
An audience in your show
the sun, mixes blue to its yellow
when it blows hot and cold!


Lets paint this world
using lipstick brushes
even if its just the air
it connects you and me
and many-a-times is the space
you demanded vociferously!


Lets paints this world
I have to paint it today
I cannot, any longer contain
This smile, the irrepressible child!