BLACK AND WHITE

The nihil extract seeps into,
hungry roots of thoughts,
doubts the doubter.
I do not abandon the
flame of nil shadows.
Try to find the way back to home,
where I was born,
breaking my leash.

Equanimity suffered when
continuity bargained for
substance, while I opted for
emptiness where the space was enough
to turn the pages of life,
and I listened to the unhitched
voices of virgin lips.

Moon shadow in a self portrait
hangs on a tear
but I worshipped the sun;
Its heat melting my contexts,
entombed in scaffoldings of hope.
The crisp day witnessed
a miracle when no body
complained in black & white.

Satish Verma

UNWORDED

The search was absolute,
truth was not.
The shades of impermanence
and flowing emotions merged.
I stood between the reality
and tilting shadows of time zones.
The distance had created
metaphors and I was weary of pretentions.

The deep sorrow nurtured
a grain of truth
an essence of time.
Earth shuddered in the
process of integumentation.
I trampled on the grass
as if to find the ozone.
Impatience scattered the wings.
I smelled the stone.

Take me not to gloom of death,
the immeasurable pain
I will find the ultimate path.
It was not easy to uncondition the lips.
Mute genes had become my potency.
Unworded a voice rose in the east,
I squirmed.

Satish Verma

COMPARISION

Alone with an untouched,
untainted voice in me
I blunder into a rarefied
mist of thoughts,
listening, holding my breath.
A pause amidst thunders of vocabulary.
Gratefully the end comes
liberating the sap from earth.

Intense pain isolates you
from the drama of life.
Maimed by three dimensional
negativity you walk straight
inhaling the scent of death row.
The tapestry of pain outlines the path.
Your shoulders are broad with pride.

Nostalgia of a blooming tree.
Grateful to summer
gives you the aloneness.
Like stars we are sailing
in our separateness.
The perfumed gathering tenders no apology.
I always detested the comparison of heights.

Satish Verma

SEA SHELLS

I was not there
where you are.
Non-stop travel, half the world
to meet you.

Outdoors alone in my homeless home
tonight I will talk to you in sleep
from the smoking hurts.

Trespassing the forbidden line
to the drowned boat,
I am opening the dark sails.

Hope and the sea
apprenticed to pluck the shells
from the eyes, I am wandering on beach.

Satish Verma

TALL FAITH

Between the tears falls the non-vision.
I am scared
let go off my silence
and restore the infidel wall,
speaking to faithful bullet to aim nothing.
We are still not protected
in the domed confidence of million years.

Ahead of time the tryst
with goodness becomes
a window opening into
a garden of startling truths.
An immaculate response of speechless
creation gives back
a new twist to faith,
and Gods have gone into hiding.

In granite temple
the doors are missing.
Leaves fall from tall faith,
unstruck in the air, become fossils.

Satish Verma

WAKES THE BLOOD

Walking alone in
the dishevelled inner space
I find peace in my failure,
an innocent patch of a silent hurt.
The futility of hollow beliefs
crawls like a spent thunder.
Truth remains unborn.

I cross a bridge where eterniry begins.
The freaks chase the shadow for a while,
the idea so excruciating
they melt in conspiracy of silence.

In oneness and suchness
the harmony drips
from infinite pores.
The seed has a history.
Lost in resonance of outer space,
now wakes the blood,
distorting the ripples.

Satish Verma

TRAMPLING

It was happening.
It was a perverse state,
one by one we were tearing apart,
our wholeness, our human heritage.

A distorted image of beautiful order.
We went assembling the torn limbs.
Each desire was sutured
like a wound, to become a scar.
It was a collective grief of history.

Abrasion of ‘me’, grotesquely
disfigures the face
of soft weightless peace.
Love has never been the same.
The little things have become
enormous ghosts trampling our senses.
Ugly scrawls are scaring.

Satish Verma

MOB WAS COMING

The enormous evil pours
its darkness on streets.
Violence throws its tentacles.
Overpowering fear stalks
and we shrink inside.
Ancient wounds fester again.
Our pain knives the clitches and
suddenly we search for the roots.

When the centuries fail,
who will link the dates?
The spaces in mind
are thronged by promising tomorrows
of soft pornography.
The virus spreads far
and wide and calender bares the ignobles.

The mob was coming.
Windows have new paint.
We will collectively burn
the scriptures in the city.
The deep tunnels hide the debris
of our broken limbs and shredded belief.

Satish Verma

LINKAGE

Too many mongrels on road
chasing inbred hymens,
while walking I try to find
who was not unipolar.

I am trying to fill in
magic and enigma
in intersex of autobiography
of a right man.

I must find out
who were you in feminine attire
drinking sap from merciless life
igniting god?

To uncover the antimatter
I place a wreath for the matter.
Body flashes the other side of death
to uncouple the link.

Satish Verma

SPARKS IN WOODS

Some depth,
my thoughts never touched,
the moonlight fades on my window.
The vague gratification,
falls silently on my mind.
Pausing on relativity,
I open the door to eternity.

Vast loneliness of qualms,
like the cult of dancing doubts
where was the choice?
I felt guilty at the fall of truth.
Black grass was not my doing.
My blood dripped
on every count, on every tear.

I don’t need questions anymore.
Give me landmarks.
Darkness was for me.
I will walk relentlessly
in search of light.
Alone, you will remember the fire,
the spent spark in woods.
It makes a difference
when you are picking flowers.

Satish Verma

STRANGE ENEMIES

If the lineation wins,
I will not pardon myself
the dots on flesh will glare.
A dummy hurricane,
will envelop the ruinous body.
The death will stalk and the predators,
will have the field day.

My own truth cries for an,
idea of making a complete suicide
on table. Inside the guts
flows a column of skimmed fakes.
Directions break the geometry of sleeping faith.
It was not worth trying.

In mind between the dark and grey,
lies the pale of truth.
This perspective is a constant pain.
Where will the thoughts end
and the ripples begin?
Arguments have become
strange enemies in war of words.

Satish Verma

SONG ABOVE THE SORROW

I missed the heartbeats for a vessel of stars,
while death was always near,
circling the house.

The network of sorrow,
beams to world.
Can symmetry of pain
provide a plank for the sinking mind?
I cannot hold the curling smoke of a tainted fact.
The fear, the anxiety,
empowers the animal look.

An uncovered seed sprouting into
tiny root on my hand
starts a conspiracy.
People talk about the meditation,
and senile body shrinks.
There is a song above the sorrow and
freedom from the assassination of ideologies.
Hold my arm!

Satish Verma

SILENCE OF DOORS

How can you salvage the theme of god
from the forbidden knowledge?
Must affinities have a reason?
The precarious life hangs
between birth & death.
Crying all the way for immortality,
I ask myself for the end. Was it beautiful?

The ending becomes a climate of personalities
from return to return.
The anonymous call of history
overthrows the silence of doors.
A hard rock strikes the clumsy head.
You cannot take a turn,
another step takes a plunge.

You don’t dare to face yourself,
It was frightening.
A text was bruised and the book was bleeding.
Mapless you tread on broken paths.
Nothing was on record.
Was your god climbing up the stairs?

Satish Verma

SPIDER

I was very restless today
somebody had overplayed the hand
to grab the absolute.
Light was searching the earth
and earth was moving inside me.

I wanted to pack up and go
to meet the truth.
The lips had left their print
on the empty cups.
The ragpicker was waiting.

My toes had met the brutal stones
of godhood. I was puzzled by new
methodology to make man free.
As the grass grows through the carcass
a cataract is trumpeting blind.

I was afraid of the huge web.
The spider was nowhere in sight.

Satish Verma

SPIRAL DESCENT

Where the laughter ends,
sorrow makes an entry.
The black cloud drifts towards you,
a gift of unknown to nameless.
The sacred bond of blissful ignorance.
I remember that I am still alive today,
my friends are gone.
I see a light on the hill.

So beautiful in its death,
a song lies on my lips
I face the world
with a wound in my eyes.
Space of many years
between me & my defeat.
Time has not come for farewell.
Cannot afford the luxury
of breaking down & then disintegrate.

Alone I watch you in fascination,
the slow spiral descent.
My watch stops again & again.
Suddenly I start speaking the truth
about the deception & the lacerating wounds.
There is a longing for a frozen moon
and a melody melting in the air.

Satish Verma

LOYAL TO DEATH

An answer becomes a question
without an effort.
The world hisses
in filaments of joy.
My hands become
green branches of a huge tree.
Terrified sun moves away
with all its glory.
I empty myself in a circle of voidness.

It was a sad chapter
the beginning of violence-
the heat dries up the sweat on brows.
Standing in the sun I watch,
how we are dismantling each other.
The innocence of civility,
eclipsed by ferocious flesh, loses symphony.

The fatal, brutal, savage times.
We are running
to reach nowhere.
The tension creeps under the skin.
The impurity of thought
hurts like broken glass.
A barren land forgets
the man & remains loyal to death.

Satish Verma

DEATH OF CALENDERS

It is me, inside & outside,
movement of sensuous self.
Time sails through the mind,
a silken thread unbroken in names.
If only the death would erase the fear.
If only the other self meets my roots
and stir up the inner sap.

Reaching the end,
you tell me to remember
your name to latch on to memories,
to collect all the pieces
of conceptual loss & gains.
How we were fooling ourselves?
Nothing is left between us
to celebrate the dreams.

All the stray thoughts
could not give us insight
we were dusted off from start
to finish in our loneliness.
Once it was a glory
to watch carnations in our eyes,
now I am mourning the death of calenders.

Satish Verma

DEAF CITY

We cannot think alike,
and we cannot listen together.
The words change the colours
and the colours let go their charm.
A billowing smoke
fills the space between us.
We are searching
our destinies amidst the ruins
and life hangs like an empty frame.

The jaundiced view,
mars the beauty of cognition.
I stick to my long path,
though journey is tough.
The immaculate space fills my lungs.
I feel the thick, stellar thoughts
and climb over the contradictions.
Balance breaks, becomes the faint window.

The disorder lies within.
Green moments evaporate
I wither up in veins.
Heart misses the beat.
Standing in dark I hear
the sounds of a deaf city.
My eyes search,
the letterprint of a tranquil childhood.

Satish Verma

LIKE A MOONBEAM

A brief encounter with the depth charge,
paralyzed waist down,
looking within
looking without
counting the vibrations in sea shells,
I could hobble along with a younger poem
my love trapped in words.

We were reaching nowhere
near destination.
Our shadows entwined
with our steps.
Bluebells not withstanding catkins of mulberry
stood waist high
for the catwalk.

We kept wishpering
unworldly nothings,
like autumn leaves rustling in air.
Petals of purple bruises squirting the smell of desire.
I will touch you
like moon beam
from dark sky.

Satish Verma

LUNAR TOUCH

The space covers me now.
Words stayed too long
beyond the thoughts of I
and my landscape.
A burst of silence soaks me.
What was history,
a voyage to rough awakening?
Absence of a voice makes me suffer again.

My religion burns.
Life is a dark smoke
I will write a message on your palm.
Give me a breather,
the distances make me sad.
Black dust drifts through
the slits of our predictions.
At least I know what I am.

On a sunny day
I break a mirror.
My fingers slide like scissors,
open the envelope.
I know it has a sermon,
I don’t want to read.
The depression has a lunar touch.
I break a flower into hundred petals.

Satish Verma

INVERTED BODY

Ending of day was beginning,
of a terrible awakening
when you started filling,
in the gap between the lies.
Truth aborts every time
we conceive a bright idea.
Somebody takes a shot
at you to kill the name.
Small birds twitter away,
the hopeless light.

Every day you destroy,
a part of yourself, concealing the light.
Lava flows in your eyes, scarring
the profile of mind, which was not stationary.
Confession was out of question.
Private feeling hooked you,
to a perfect kiss of fate.
Hugging the wisdom, you started a laugh.

From great heights you,
fall slowly, crumbling
I am on the bank of a stream,
identifying the inverted body.
From action to action,
there was no peace.
I tried to sort out the wearing down of life.
After all, the narration
cannot deliver the meaning of death.

Satish Verma

PASSAGE TO UNKNOWN

At cultural opening of thin
layers of faith & consciousness,
a new breed of angels was
romping on our souls.
I suffered again for tiny spaces
between the thoughts.
Death cannot be intrusive.
It waits at the door of light.
The show will start when truth dies.

I go again for the reality of anticlimax,
the anxiety of endless flights into fantasies,
the hallucinations of falling trees.
Give me some space to pedal
the silken smoke of dark truths.

There was fire in my heart
and eternal burning
of a lake. I cared for tears,
the eerie memories.
The age-old pain of seeking
the liberation from twisted symbols,
simple measures of
finding a passage to unknown.

Satish Verma

SAVAGE FIRE

Does not penetrate,
it brushes superficially.
Repeating me, from dot to dot, it leaps.
The ego performs swift impulses
blasting the constellations of simple arithmetic.
Blue sky gives a second thought,
strange colors appear.

Love has changed the skyline
and labels are fading.
Virginal truth has lost its burning print.
It flaunts and swears like a theater.
Bedecked, larger than reality,
second hand puppets rule the master.
Empty vessel pours out faith.

The city walks at dawn,
night lives in metaphors.
Gritty myths disturb the neighbourhood,
salvaging comforts from rumours.
In dreams we hear the clapping of hands.
Hopelessness burns me like a savage fire.

Satish Verma

LEGITIMACY

No plaques?
No head stones?
He did not start the inferno.
It was a misspelt agony
in purple ruins.
Pain had no other name!

While thinking of him
I evacuated the matter,
completed the circle beyond solitude.
More I did not break the silence
worse was the grief!

Meaningless threats
had no relevance.
I recaptured the color of stars,
glory of flames,
beauty of crucial controversy.

I was repeating the legitimacy
of alphabets.
Greatness was the idea of mediocres.
Every thought had the dignity
of its own!

Satish Verma

NAMELESS INTRUDERS

Fear swooped on extended mind,
when brain was never silent.
I was never alone,
voices broke all around.
The lead became kinky.
For sometime, I escaped into antiquity for,
a surrogate relief.
The clock prowled for
the graffiti of truth in night.

A programmed psychology
look extra-terrestrial.
The life mutated into a watch
which did not move.
The mob controlled the streets.
How thin was the tribe of fireflies in dark?
The sparks were cold
and stars were warm.

I stayed by the fire of meditation for a
turbulent river.
The movement of shadows made me sad.
An obscene climate inflicted wounds on trees.
Despair & rage, raised a panic in the herd.
Nameless intruders climbed our houses.

Satish Verma

SUNRISE

The decline was steep.
Somewhere the clouds burst in tears.
Sitting on the flat prejudice
we weaved a gift of poison for everyone.
It did not stain our shirts.
The big fat people moved about
with great confidence to change the world.
I suffered inwardly.

Perhaps the greed drank
from our passions.
A spectre of hounding.
Which never stopped.
My parents knew better,
always talked of comportment.
Llike our love for neighbours.
The turmoil drifted now in our hearts.

A self-potrait became
the vehicle of death
I visited myself,
to wind up the matters of concern.
The graffiti on the abandoned
walls of memories erased
time, altered the wounds,
and trembling shadows.
Sunrise will provide me a lesson.

Satish Verma

STARED BLANKLY

We don’t want to
see each other naked.
with our barbs.
Seeking the truth outside
our body was painful
we don’t want to change
the clouded mirror of water.
The desires were unlimited
and restoring the metaphor needed time.

For contributing for the unbroken becoming.
I held the water in my palm.
It dropped like ciphers
on the hot earth subtracting the charm.
We knew each other,
still falling ego was always revengeful.
My empty hands would seek another title.

A solitary ingredient made the old song.
Few will remember the wings and sky.
The anger’s haste had mauled the body.
Day after day false claims
were made to regain the soul.
The search for the sacred
will remain futile
I stared blankly.

Satish Verma

SEASONAL PRIORITIES

Effortlessly a desire erects
a monument. One flaw
demolishes the image. Stones,
ugly grass & a solitary tree
make the landscape.
Hundreds of seeds go back
to the earth’s womb, never
to sprout. Heartbroken
I stand in the middle
of life, crumbling alone.

How can we change?
A splash of green
ingests a scissor,
that is not enough. A parallel tragedy
strikes. Sun and flowers
are gone, seeking a truth,
not yet conceived. A timeless
fire burns in the temple,
uncovering the heat,
edging towards us.

Freedom from long falls comes,
bit by bit in degrees.
Suffering remains the same.
We immortalize our smears.
The absolute truth
suddenly becomes a lie.
A myth which balooned
our minds. But brutal
sunlight has seasonal priorities.

Satish Verma

TO LAUGH OR TO WEEP

When the night was swamping him
with epileptic frame
he was walking without limbs.

The awakening was painful.
Drinking his own blood
breaking his own bones.

This largesse was tempting.
No guaranteed death,
you will live with grenades.

Grief was priceless.
Only nightingale will exercise
for the fallen miracles.

He declared at incendiary pyre
to become a phoenix
which never was.

It was an ethical question
to laugh or to weep.
Man was made unmade.

Satish Verma

WAILING WINDOWS

chasing you in the dreams and
voilence made you sick of the
evil designs.
We must unpack our grief.
Hurts were huddled under the smiles;
times were stypefying.

I grieve for the dead
prophet, spread – eagled on road.
It had been a memorial death
fighting the ugly machinations
the days had planted.
A calculated murder of mighty truth
had taken place.

Again a flaming head
seeks revenge
violence does not cease.
The greed was the essence.
The town was full of howling.
There was civil war amongst
the wailing windows.
My heart aches,
I did’t belong to this
profile of naked wolves.

Satish Verma

LIPS WILL MEASURE

A perfect solution
was never found. The question
remained unanswered beyond
the skin. Stripped to the bone.
afraid of future,
you cannot invite the ending
and present will not continue
indefinetly. Unabated,
over and over again,
you hit the trail to drink the sun.


Pain and sorrow, hurts and grief,
is prescribed fear of unknown.
In the dark tunnel,
your numb limbs
search for an explanation.
The dialogues with stones
do not bring comparison.
You should remember your name.
The lips will measure the time.


Movement of fear begging
for unbuckling the dark
was like a calculated risk to alalyze
the wolf’s intentions.
They are hovering like inhuman
crimes. A potent hunger
walks out of the kitchen,
gouges out the peacock’s eyes.
Now rains will not come.

Satish Verma