Silent Fog

This is an excerpt of one of my works which I divided into uncorrelated parts as its yet to be finished. But after my struggle and at one point of time questioning myself of my writing skills, I was able to survive the bleak patch and come out with this.

Part I

Don’t you weep o mother

In silent smokes hath thee

Thy sons hath glory and

thou the grief of their melee

That old flag of glory flutters high

The towering pride burns deep in their heart

Don’t you weep o mother

Whilst thy sons lay down eternally,

Thou lit the flames of love across the river

Those badlands have taken to mud,

The smile of thy soldiers blinded the sun,

Their valor, our hearts!

In the orchestra of ricochets,

Under a veil of shrapnel in their veins

Our Sons die

Silent Fog

Walk past the long alley

Filled with cold stones two sides,

A sense of pride filled one side of heart

the loss of dear one, other.

The final salute,

Muzzles pointed the ocean-blue skies,

Bullets hit the clouds,

Wrapped in the national colors,

No more tears to cry,

All merged into an ocean of melancholy,

The same blood of courage

I feel in my womb,

A soul lost to another world,

another waiting to be brought.

Part II

Chants

The vast grotto

with the blossom of honeydews.

The autumnal winds carried away

those rustling and wrinkled leaves,

Green, red and brown,

They all collapse till another solstice.

Million feet stomped,

Cohesion unmatched.

It looked like the marching of toreadors,

whose adroit hand tames the beast,

Whose valor, celebrated in a feast.

An empire from the kith

We expand for our kin.

Half a million cubic feet of air,

stairs spiraled downwards

from the pandemonium.

An acoustic marvel,

The echo lived in forever

in the few cubic inches inside our skull,

Our heart

and soul.

In this vast cavern

The chants mesmerized the compatriots.

The aural phenomenon began

With the rifles punching the ground,

Cohesion unmatched,

We all chant in unison

“YOU FALL,

YOU RISE;

YOU BLEED,

YOU HEAL;

WE FIGHT

TO CONQUER,

WE BREATHE

TO WIN,

WE WIN

WE DIE.”

Coda:

Two souls danced to a stream of notes on this darker night. The same old song, they loved, the same old notes, that echoed, but its ever effervescent magic never ceased to leave their hearts. The moon entered a new phase, so did them. He gently squeezed her palm; a smile coruscated the starless night. Cold air whispered in their ears as frost filled the distance between their lips.

The leaves have started to fade and the winds perturbed them to rain onto the curb. A silent whisper into her ear “Can I dig my lips into yours?, Matilda” and she took over “and steal the warmth of my love in this cold night?”

They moved on for another 4 blocks before they took a turn towards his home.

The blinds were down, it was pitch dark. The house was like a dilapidated tenement, with no electricity to light it up. They rummage for the only possible way to light the house and pat comes a reply from him “Life is like a candle,” and it’s her turn “dream is like a flame,” she retorted while lighting up the candle. His eyes transfixed on hers and continued “but this wick of time always burns,” and she finished it “Forever! Will stay, this wax called love,” and finally he added “to build another life.” The same old smiles light up the night and the same old magic carried them onto the bed.

Slowly, the night started to die down as the chirps of the birds were conquering the airwaves, the candle light started to fade and soon its time to be awake to walk through a bright new day.

Awakened by deafening cries of her son, Matilda walks down to his cradle to calm him down. She slowly ambles down the corridor towards the window to wipe the fog, the same old autumnal winds caressed the panes.

The windows are wiped clean but not the memories…

“Joe! is that you!,” she exclaims.

The Chainless Cradle : Suicide

The chainless cradle rocked
To the piper who weaved his waves of notes,
Guiding us weak souls into his webs.

The Chainless cradle rocked,
Between infinity and null,
Between the sparks that enter and leave our body.

The season of fall embraced all the trees, leaves fall, flowers fall and warmth falls. It was another perfect fall that our mother is showing us. There is another fall that has taken dawn, that’s my fall. In the veils of darkness I search for my companion who was the driving force behind this world of mine. Loneliness seems to be the deserving answer that I get for all my deeds, silence for the first time seemed very disturbing and both of them combined have been putting their best efforts to give a deathly blow.

Death seems to be an obsession these days. The only hindrance from dying is my level of craziness which hasn’t reached that mark wherein suicide is the only treasure left to grab. It reminds me of the line “I have lost the will to live, simply nothing more to give,” from one of those older songs. At every signal post I wait for it to turn green, but sometimes that mere angle of punk surfaces as I try to cross it expecting to be hit by a car. Pain is a feeling worth experiencing at this point of time. Every ounce of my blood is thirsty for it. Sometimes I feel like picking up a knife, run it through my hands, feel the sharp edge of it, let it rejoice the color of blood, love its slithering motion and let it drip from the handle onto the ground. There are better ways to destroy self,

Night has been tainted to gray,
Clouds that carried all dismay,
Electrons triggered sparkling display,
I run close to them and pray
ELECTROCUTE ME!

Voids in a tiny atom,
In it lay a minuscule phantom,
Passed on its charge with a collision,
I put my fingers in the socket and scream,
ELECTROCUTE ME!

Past a dying field’s boundary, it sails,
Its intensity never bound to fail,
Transfer your energy through my face, pale
Like a new born infant I wail
ELECTROCUTE ME!

The sense of ‘hatred on thyself’ grows stronger every second, to such an extent that at one point of time I believed that lives of all those would have been far better had they not known me, my journey would have been smoother had I not lived in temple of lies. I am nobody’s hero, a force that succumbed to itself in the sanctums of its temple.
On a chainless cradle I swing between living for dying and living till dying, unable to take a stance, stuck between the words and worlds. A metaphysical world built around my ideals starts succumbing cataclysmically. The answer at this point of time is hitting ‘living till dying’ like everybody else in this world.

This is part two of self-destruction. I can sense blood oozing from the bowels of my soul, aggrieving of my naïve notions.

The frost settled on my lips spreading the balm of death. The hope of salvaging a part of the hurt soul, tying a tourniquet to stop its bleeding is still there. The battle will go on…
Till the day when I find a path to move out of my solitary shell.
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day and Paris wasn’t conquered in a day.

LIE

The wires are entangled, I am clearing the intricate twists and setting the wire straight. I turn my i-pod on and am jogging past the Locust walk. These days I have control over nothing, not even over my Ipod as it selects the songs that I listen to. It did select an apt song to start off with “there must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. there’s too much confusion in here, I can’t get no relief…..All along the watchtower, the princes kept their view…,” I feel like the joker in that song who’s agitated from lack of freedom.

Many days pass since I let imagination kick in. I try to think while jogging but unfortunately I am panting. Within ten minutes I arrive at the Schuylkill park, finish a lap around it in another ten minutes. Its time for a break, I sit down on the bench, take out a piece of paper and try to write a line, atleast a word. Its not as easy as an impulse from the brain that passes through the nerve activating our action to hold the pen and move it in a rhythmic pattern, its more complex. It requires an impulse that comes from the soul stinging our heart and forcing our brain to do the above action. I can feel the inability to rearrange the universe, suspend the stars from clouds, the force in me is fast becoming a lost possession. I feel like a droid controlled by the world around

I ask myself a simple yet complicated question ‘who am I?’ – a question that has been asked many a time in my life but never leading to a perfect answer. This time the answer is a rude awakening from the person whom I have deserted myself from “To the truest of senses and the most bitter of tastes I am the TRUTH, the truth you love to hate, its presence you hate to have.
I am the TRUTH my friend, so better not be in my world for sweetness is all you love.
This is the fortress without boundaries my friend. Once you are in there is no way out. “
It took me a moment to recover from this violent outburst. I realize that I reached a point where I am not only hating myself but also faking personalities to impress others. I escaped from my fortress sans fringes and got stuck in a cell surrounded by a system that defined the parameters of my world.

The night is fast growing old, filling the avenues with cold. People heading back home, those conversations on roads about democratic convention, about the eagles odds to win superbowl grew sparse by minute. Midnight joggers are tagged weird entities in this world and so I have grown to be weird. All these days of living a lie, bragging about lies, I try to reconnect with myself. I pass through the spruce street, with lights going off at my every passing step as if I am carrying a decree of darkness from a cast off world. The old story about the pied piper of Hamelin flashes in my head at this weird coincidence.

Another day dies a silent death. Not a word on the paper, not a thought written in my head. I move on like a dead man walking with his dead eyes glancing at the world with nothing registering in his world of numbness.

Socializing is the catchword that spread various aspects of humanity, that is believed to have connected various cultures, but it often produces a weird and unnecessary chatter yielding wasted minutes. On such unfortunate meeting happened once with the people around the table choosing to talk about their fiancés. A sweet topic to be brought up until the brag-a-thon begins with the perfumes to clothes, none describing why they were the chosen ones for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately, my thought process loves to parry such useless banter. I know at one point of time the baton will be passed to me and I also knew that there are two ways to answer this one:

The truth is that I befriended with death, I promised her that she has the choice to come to me and propose any day and I wouldn’t say no. There are very few tomorrows in this life of mine, fewer with every passing today. One day she comes eventually for the final proposal to take me home and I would just walk with her on the altar. All that impressed me to be with her forever is her promise too take me into a completely new world when my force conjoins with her.

That’s a bitter truth my friend and in this game of socializing truth gets least love and is tagged bohemian. So I go ahead with a lie talking about the Polish girl, Megan Sczowinski born and brought up in Krakow and how my interest in Poland has become our subject of regular meetings. How easily this regular meetings blossom into love which happened because of this mutual exchange of information about Poland, how easily our relationship is leading us to a trip to zakopane next summer. People around the table start paying more attention to this newly burgeoning relationship. A well crafted, wily and imaginary lie might make the society happy and accept me to be part of it but truth is always a crude reminder of reality, a reality that always mirrors our truest self.

I have come to an understanding that truth has more enemies, lie has more friends and these days I seem to have more friends than before. I seem to find many people who want to grab a slice of my happiness. But where is happiness, my friend. I chose to sacrifice it, I chose to sever it from my life. There is no happiness in the shots of vodka that I buy for you nor in the home runs that yankees score.

In a world where the “money is the root for happiness” had become axiomatic, I am a pariah. For a person whose true pleasures cost no penny, he chooses to be part of this wicked axiom. That was stage one of self destruction, part of the soul has been sold to stupidity.

There is a deep abyss in this world that requires to be filled.