Year’s end

Red Doors are closing in on

parched leaves, studding the sidewalks.

We have crossed out yet another season

on our kitty calendar and dressed the meager

backyard in ghoulish rags.

The procession of witches and ghouls

too shall pass and not much else will happen.

Some birds will be washed down with wine and

“thank you’s” and then forgotten.

Gifts shall be found and unwrapped under plastic trees

while a tired old man escapes a make-belief chimney!

We shall cast aside our hopes

and wait with abated breath for next year with

butterflies in our eyes. Nothing much ever happens.

Room in a blur

You can count the perfect patterns of her expression
in the creased symmetry of her blue-green curtains.
Measure the dimensions of shadows or flashes of smile
that rise and fall on the contours of her face.
You can trace the magic inside the creases of her bed.
Even capture her colored energy in the pale peach taffeta ribbon
lying on her dressing table.
Admittedly, the color of her skin is harder
and more fleeting to taste
like eclairs au chocolat melting in your mouth.
Everything in the room is where it was when she left.
She took nothing with her
but the lily-white brilliance of her eyes.

Daily Post

Naked as the Maple Tree

Courtesy: http://www.naturepicoftheday.com/archive/2008-11-05

It’s almost naked now.
The days have grown shorter and the temperatures cooler.
My world has shrunk to the size of my heated
1000 square feet apartment. Maple leaves have covered
the footpath in a mosaic of yellow,
orange, red and brown.

It saddens me to think how the maple tree must ache for its loss.
To shed the very leaves it nurtured all year and then to do it over
and over again each year?
How hard it must be for the maple to detach so completely that it
has nothing left but it’s own trunk to pine for?

And the leaves that scuttle at its feet like red and brown rabbits.
So far removed from their binding truth, fallen from the
heights; unable to churn the green juice of life. Do they
beckon out to him like children to a father? And in punishing them
thus, does the maple punish itself?

But then I remind myself that come Spring this very Maple shall be full again;
thick with its vibrant foliage. Once more it
shall bleed its rich nectar, and the young leaves will cover the
length of its skeleton; embalming the pain. Life will find a way.

For now, I must liberate myself of your memories;
stand belly-naked from your binding thoughts. So that one day
I too can feel full again.

Soul of the World

Tea leaves settled at the bottom of a crystal glass
portending uncertain future with certainty.
To believe or not to believe
was never the question.
For is it not against the grain of faith to question?

Symbols of pilgrimage strewn like dried bougainvillea
in my garden. An oracle worth of signs on every junction.
Some that we missed, some that led us back home,
and some that are calling our names with their plump siren lips.
Mirror; is the soul of the world.
Why else would it bring the best in us all?
Your sexiest smile, the twinkle in your eye, the boyish grin
that gets people to let their guards down.
Even the old freckled librarian who deals with books all day
but never finds time to read them,
Or the driver who drives his yellow taxi all over town
and then takes his 1990 Chevy back home,
Or the old balding meat seller who carves the finest slices of turkey
and then goes home to his mother’s basement
for mashed potatoes and green beans,
They all find time to practice their finest smiles in front of the
souls hanging over their medicine cabinets.

Faith is a glass of warm milk
that never lets you sleep empty stomach.
It’s the promise that never fails;
the regal lager yet to be uncorked.

No monocled palmist settled into a chair for $10 a reading on Venice beach
can foretell a future more glowing than the one that brews in your heart.
You know tomorrow is the day you have waited for since yesterday.
Yet once more, the tea leaves have settled
into a mosaic of promise to a world made up of smoke and mirrors.