TIMELESS AFFAIR

Joining the names,
a nameless melancholia crosses a borderland,
between dreams & reality.
The stone face, a mask,
some nothingness transcends
the unhearing mind.
Tell me how much
you know about yourself?

Moon shaped pleasures
did not stir me, not ever.
The hours of a dark day moved
in pink fog, my heart
was bruised in a fall.
My infinite failures
saw the inversed truth.

Yellow was the rage, fire.
A perpetual leap from emptiness.
The flames were movements,
towards void.
The thoughts were circling over the flames.
Green windows open, shut, open.
My timeless affair with my self starts.

Satish Verma

EGOCENTRIC WIND

The matrix drinks the words,
in the anonymity of opaque meanings.
Heart slips a flutter,
to catch the unborn tomorrow.
The deep azure measures the depth, the fear,
drowning the architect,
generic of doom.

A dropp floats in an ocean of solitude,
a static milieu which has no quivering of its own.
The roots always give pain.
Your eyes are filled with tears.
Now final image
was a memoir of falling leaves.

The dark effect splinters,
into many seeds.
The space widens between us in a
hush of loneliness.
Egocentric wind scrapes our bones.

Satish Verma

MOTH-EATEN

There was a geometric progression
in movement of truth and dreams.
Candles snuffed out in moon light,
were dripping bloody tears.
My lips tasted the salt,
accepted the basket of wounds.
A sacred gift, you still cannot read the eyes.

Night lifts a crescent moon
on slaughtered clouds.
Diaspora of stars burn their love poems.
I collect the pebbles to build a path.
The arthritic branches will never know,
how love was evaporated from the trees?

Signatures were
ahead of times, giving up,
their names to childhood.
We turned into dots.
The sorrow started an enquiry into wilting of words.
Life was to be read as a book,
pages moth-eaten and yellow.

Satish Verma

YOU BECOME A STRANGER

Give me your lips
I have to drink the dark night.

It is the final assault
for tomorrow. The idea
becomes a journey.
I have to walk on water.

True dialogue starts
when stars are not with you.
I am standing on rooftop
scanning the sky.

Let me repeat the ascent,
the hill is younger than me.
It will settle the dispute,
man was taller than god.

You become a stranger
in your own drawn circle.
Life had the absurd walls
a wounded center.

Satish Verma

WANDERING FAKIR

Blood splatters on walls,
on earth. Erstwhile anointed idol
lies broken. Thatched roof was burning.
Navel crushed on the newspaper,
a rape was atoned by cash award.

A womb refuses to eject the ticking clock
wants to preserve the window of sin.
Mother do not cry for the ashen stranger
he will go to the roaring sea to wash the
bleeding corn, and the mouth.

Salt in the eyes is hurting. Paper thin
purple child becomes the player of death.
Appetite of flesh for nirvana has cuddled
the religion of grizzly bears. Be or not to
be makes a body formless and slapped.

River is waiting for the shoreline to show
respect for the wandering fakir. He comes
once in thousand years and crosses the dams.
World will kiss his tattered toga. He wanted
nothing, he gave nothing.

Satish Verma

WHITE ROSES

Mob hurts you
when you were standing alone in a crowd.
Bending like blade of grass
you accepted the rocks.
Your inner world broke down.
Softly you became a river,
flowing, meandering,
sucking the barriers.

The shivering relationship
puts off the mask,
a catastrophy or
liquidation of a frame took place?
With no regrets, life declares the fall of
our incorruptible icon.
The time and face
changed the color.
Farewell to truth was given!

For the poverty, the dirt;
the shriveled faces
god repented.
Dark lead the dark.
Blasts of anger did not help.
Few feet crossed the path of truth.
Stormy winds erased
the clusters of white roses.

Satish Verma

CARRIED MY FATHER UNSIDE

Mirror to mirror
a face floated in anguish
the mourning was deep
whenever inquest for truth was made.
Was it so terrible?
I cannot read the human face.
We were so used
to wear the masks.

Stoned and deaf,
fuzzy kiss of death levels the ferocious peak.
The nameless murder
of truth got a reward.
Garden of strange foliage
slurred on a song.
A metaphysical experience
sniffs the life.

Chained to the probity of the city
I bowed my head.
Reluctant to move in a procession of ugly months.
Lifetime’s nostalgia lifted a veil.
No sleep will descend.
I still carry
my father inside.

Satish Verma

EMPTINESS WAS SCREAMING

When your lies pretend to be truths,
Your house becomes full of cadavers.
The reticent progeny,
you abandoned at birth, strikes.
My hands bleed, lifting the bones.
Actuality overwhelms the landscape
like molten lava.

Shadows in the sun, grow larger when,
we are dissecting the truth.
A daunting work to dig out the relics.
We have not modified our speech.
Ill tempered time
makes me insane.

I was not prepared for this calamity
losing my way in a jungle of untruths.
Mighty darkness
pierces the perennial thoughts
in the brain edifice,
knives were out all evening,
emptiness was screaming.

Satish Verma

BENEDICTION

How sad you had been
without wholeness for the,
price of having broken shoulders?
The people were shedding their skins
to wear new masks.
I was haunted in my sleep.
Sun was not rising.

House to house from face to face,
death makes a pause.
Time sits for a while, when
we mourn in silence.
A scream halts in our throats.
In the courtyard a pungent smell spreads.
Atrophied limbs tremble.

The elegance foresakes the human touch.
The river dries up,
sucked in by laments of earth.
The unfolding of wounds
festers on cheeks.
Lips sluicing the grief,
spill benediction!

Satish Verma

INSULT THE DEATH

Blows had blackened the mist,
fear of crossing the road, dented the veil.
‘Ism’ versus the boundary had a long rhetoric.
I was struggling with scars of learning.
Pain unwrapped the gift of rhythm with confession
bitten by skorpios, blue and cold.

Finding the cause does not solve the rigidity.
Entering my own genome, increases the panic attack,
where I am heading after all?
And today sun beats the unentered thighs
marrow, blood of a martyr, who pledged
to die to himself between enquiry and truth.

Fragmented self now seeks totality
and the mystery of staying alive,
when the hills are dead and green had turned around.
As usual I am meditating, to live or not to live.
The greatness of earth still impresses,
it does not insult the death.

Satish Verma

THE AIR WAS SCENTED

The tryst with path,
was full of voices of silence,
confronting its wrath & revenge.
Nothing was new, soft matter divided the winds,
arithmetic of energy,
faced up to its agony of spent life.

Decently artful,
you manipulated the clouds, its music,
the bluebells went into trance.
The shower laden
leaves started dancing.
Half solemn, half smiling
you preached the immortality
of a sick downloaded wisdom.

The golden days had
yellowed vision of time, but mutation was complete.
The masts were broken.
The air was scented with
punch & humility.
Adjectives had the
advantage over nouns.

Satish Verma

FACE OF TRUTH

It hurts, the abstract isolation of life
emptying of self.
The infection
of water in the sun.
A nameless pain annihilates
the ascending desires.
I want no more
traffic of dreams.
Only discovery of Being.

Where the city had gone from the mirror
of my poems?
Streets had the color
of a wrinkled maid.
And new dictionary had new words
of an obscene vernacular.
I wanted my stack, my lake.

Surface exploded into nothingness.
The lake boiled in the heat of eternity.
A part of the evening was cool,
participating in the festivities
of homing birds.
It took a whole night
to see the face of truth!

Satish Verma

HEART UNSNAPS

You gave me a name without asking.
History of my pain
did not need any label.
I recalled only
the blooms of bougainvillea,
not the heat which gave them color.
My burned lips
remembered only the dew
and rear view of life.

The total otherness of the moon and stars
did not heal the scars.
My perceptions had
given me hot tears.
How the distance between us
created the schizophrenia?
The familiar laughs
have frozen after all!

In the middle of night I lie awake
to count the door
and the closed windows.
I listen to the moaning of walls.
My eyes remained half-closed in freckled sleep.
Heart blinks, unsnaps
and weaves a moon.

Satish Verma

MY POEMS WEPT

I had to let them stay.
My anguish & anxiety.
Denuding me, filling me with hymns of pain.
The blank days drifted in slow motion.
I tried to sing,
imitating the cuckoo on the tree,
to shake off the clouds from the eyes.

Everyday the pain was new,
dreams were old
in the eternal churning.
Grizzled clouds hanged on trees
for witnessing the chaining of desires.
Empty words went into seizures,
clogging the arteries of crisp brain.

Deep within a seed
opened the eyes sitting
quietly near the blast of pain.
Green sprouts drank the light.
My poems wept
and truth started a dance.
The time and space intermingled
to celebrate a birth.

Satish Verma

THE TERRIBLE

This terracotta urn
contains the ashes
of an earth-baked dream.
You worship the setting sun,
rape of dawn will continue.

Intravenous entry of hope
had failed.
Outside the window
crowd of heirlooms, falling like stars.
Thoughts come and go, we hunted opportunities in vain.

Tonight I will dropp the wheels
on the tarmac, to roll the pride.
My flight had knocked out
the sleeping pain. Now amnesia
will help me to climb on the moon’s shoulders.

They dragged her in the field,
the most deprived one. Was outraged.
I send you my grief, my sadness,
O, god. The flag was flying half mast,
rapist was absconding.

Satish Verma

A TOUCH OF CLASS

The tree, the sky, the moon, of
summer prick the eyes.
We suffer majestically.
The aberrations will
now rule the city.
Incorruptible winds
languished in crooked lanes.
A pale hand will paint the unlatched doors.

When stars meditate in unison,
moon upcurves.
The blue becomes dark,
my eyes climb the hill.
The day has ended without a conclusion.
Clouds are frightened.
Virtue when cuts open the heart,
it does not bleed.

Pseudo reality reigns,
and we amputate the limbs without analgesics.
The philosophy of being
is quietly murdered.
Green leaves start dying.
A terrible dream flicks the hope,
a touch of class with littleness.

Satish Verma

WET LANDSCAPE

A saddened rain dropp
strikes me at the face.
When town is burning,
its dignity confronts me with force.
A human clone rises
like a smoke from the ruins
of our nerves.
Why the love has evaporated
from our hearts?

In new spread of palaces,
upside down roots grow with regrets.
The dark woods depart,
small grasses peel off.
the wounds of earth.
Tomorrow the half glory
of our greed will be exhibited
and leaves will burn.

Now a clearing has been made.
Sun smiles, bakes the bones.
The water of life
has been denied to us.
Beaming technology buries the classical path,
the book and the eros.
The wet landscape cries.

Satish Verma

HUMMING NIGHT

The enlightment drops words, things
I am at peace with the light,
the sand, the river.
The thought of non-being is subtle,
touches a cord.
Hours slip, silicon hardens.
Grains of truth move towards essence.

The thought of emptiness
was very powerful
I sit by myself, swallow a stunned voice.
My hands become white.
Inside of me was a book
holding a past. I hid nothing: my faultline.
It was a strange poverty.

I could not plug it,
a hole in memory.
The voices drip.
A moon-knife slices my room.
Far off a poem drifts, in blue nothingness.
The day was very ill
and night again humming
a tune of rising sun.

Satish Verma

WRITING ITS DIKTAT

Beyond the thoughts,
nothing I mourned,
nameless death was writing its diktat.
The dirty epithets were accepted for collage.
Simply a prayer was needed
for a childless truth.
Rudimentary terms owned
a beautiful diction.

The ultimate pain makes you dumb.
Words lose the vision, you walk in a hollow city.
Now is the time to remember the movement of truth
in a jungle of drums.
Eyes must find out the old path.

Huge crowds collect at the door.
Human connections are at strain.
The questions are never answered flawlessly.
Life should not burn like coal,
but be a tree,
in praise of sky,
wind and earth.

Satish Verma

HOLDS ME GREEN

The cult
catches you
like a black hole.

You cannot scale the walls -
slide back
in a crucible.

Like fried insects
crisp and dry.
Witch-hunt starts.

Sky was blue
in eyes,
winds will divide the space.

Do you need a mediator
to read between the lines?
To cross the fence?

Who sucked me dry?
Who leeched me white?
Death holds me green!

Satish Verma

TRACKS WERE OBLITERATED

The spirit of hollow ideal
was not the thing,
I remained inconsolable.
Truth demanded endless pursuit.
The helplessness of the beaten days
was unfit for the night of terror.
The false paradigm could not ignite the flame.

The shadows collapsed
and thoughts walked in dark
into the trap.
Perfect splash of impulsive drive,
and movement of matter
created hallucinations.
and the conduct of freezing moments
had no parallel.
Cutting edge was evident.

How truth saved its pain,
of telling a heart
the death of a silent dream.
The vision went blind.
Faithful figures did not write the wrong texts.
Escape from territory was complete
and tracks were obliterated.

Satish Verma

HISTORICAL GRIEF

A perpetual war between
frame and content feeds
the fire!
I step outside the house of thoughts.
The death begins the counting and
jasmines start crying.
I hear the over-worn desert
blowing the sand.
A raw stone throws up a sculpture.

Midnight knocks on the door were loud.
Rain was banging, moonlight drifts in.
The huge cloud outlines
the ceremony of deluge.
Abstract ideas have to be clothed again.
The naked truth stops the clock.

A proxy death shatters me.
I also die in a dome.
Night melts in hissing sounds,
time becomes a paper weight.
The splender of quartz cracks.
Demolition is complete
historical grief now takes over.

Satish Verma

UNTITLED MONUMENT

Beyond the self,
is the freedom, unchained dawn,
I am in a crowd of voices.
Lifted by songs,
a bruised truth becomes a rose.
Choice was limited,
I desired silence, middle path in night,
under the lunar ecstasy.

Nowhere to go
I searched for tranquility, peace and light.
Failing hopelessly.
Love migrates back to old memories.
White days are pruned,
I would say the mirror was wrong.
I did not choose my life.

Dream of final
release was extraordinary
grandeur of pink moon
hanging on the trees,
the divine shower.
Life did not alter the genes,
it shifted the flow.
Untitled monument was submerged.

Satish Verma

SEPARATED OUR LIVES

Shadows were talking,
we arrived nowhere.
Text was smaller than life.
Millennium hung on our eyes,
rattling the long distance calls.
Our house was ruined,
multiple windows
turned into walls and poems died.

Your face has become an empty vase.
Dismembered cast off
in the corner of the house.
A dreadful ruffled
body of the past glory.
I was nearly buried in quick sand.
Now I talk to trees, the carpeted clouds,
and move again.

My hands suffered
lifting the polarities.
Random tears disturbing the heart beats.
Knowledge was painful
and diminutive people spoiled my collections.
The stones, flowers
and wings separated our lives.

Satish Verma

BURNT TASTE

A cyan globe
rolling in the black sky.
I was visualizing
an earthset
on the horizon.

Lianas
threw a noose
around my neck.
Did I
start the fires?

My dissent
was of any relevance?
Who was standing
on the moon?

Self-centered was your vision
I was trying
to turn the tide.

So much bragging
could not go well with me.
The tongue had the burnt taste.

Satish Verma

IT IS TOO DARK

Forgetting the ultimate name
of clean truth
the essence of time latched on to the dangerous arguments.
Something went wrong.
I watched the foot crumbling,
everything was moving towards dark.

I wiped the magnifying glass
to witness the hunger
of everyday life,
blue veins of the shriveled legs.
Sinking deep in smeared eyes,
a panic leaps.
Nothingness to nothingness,
I could not use any syntax.

Repeating same sentences,
you are lost in labyrinth stabbing the walls.
Sunset will send
the blurred sparrows to home.
Antiquity will become a burden.
I am restless, a candle must be lighted,
It is too dark.

Satish Verma

ON BURNING COALS

Loneliness of non-being and,
reality, fill up the vessel.
I search for the eloquence while,
emptiness will be my forte.
Countless words are crossing
like a promise in milk-white days
I gather sunlight through grass leaves.

Life had been full of shadows,
lengthening, penetrating
the tapestry of love.
The descent was steep.
Coming home I found
no humming words.
Sitting in dark
I wait for shooting stars.

Measuring the blood, drawn from our hurts
was a royal reward
for your fingers.
You are allowed to compare blood
with brown coffee.
Sand in our eyes,
we walked bare-foot
on burning coals.

Satish Verma

ERECTED IN MY PAIN

Life gives you a sudden shock,
with ugly scars of mutilated truth.
Arriving becomes a failure,
a tilted faith.
Your eyes were blank but
you were seeing through
your hundred wounds,
spinning in the import.

Continuity of lies starts again.
From post to post
a sting was preoccupied,
fed on odium.
I had an indestructible desire
to set the throat free
from the obtrusive rust.
Love was not enough
a little bit burning on tongue was needed.

Polity has ruined
the green valleys
quietness cries in vain.
Fear in the mirror strikes.
I begin to run towards the sun
erected in my pain.
Times alter the image.
The cosmic bend is trapped.

Satish Verma

RETURN TO MYSELF

Dumbly you come
to the brink of a precipice,
at the point of no return.
Moving, pivoting with
a huge perception.
Knowing that life was exacting,
you are alive,
alone with a conflict.
Your choosing was a miracle.

Seeking was not ending.
Death was an inadvertent mistake.
You lie down in terror.
Deep in the bones you know, you have to move.
There was no cloud above the eyes,
history was an aberration-
rags to riches.

You become yourself
when death defines a name
and I remember a sunset.
My shaking fingers
weave a drape of sorrow.
There was no patch of green
I return to myself.

Satish Verma

GIFT OF LOVE

Between the blue eyes,
wind smeared a hot kiss
on forehead of moon.
There were no half-brothers to watch.

Swarms of thoughts descended
in zero hour of night.
Sadness was beyond threshold
a crucial insult to the arrival of time.

Now I was not going anywhere
I was afraid of myself.
The centre was disappearing,
in the statements of truth.

Pleas are falling apart in
global freezing, of collective brain.
I start sifting through the leaves
a gift of love, my fruit.

Satish Verma

GOLDEN SUNSET

Gently the invisible
strength overrides
penetrating every bone.
The desire was not seeking,
it was emitting a gloss.
Fierce truth was reverberating.
Only the mind was alert,
flesh was hissing.

An intense light
knived my sadness, death wish
it was a legend, I went into a process.
A quietness catching
all the voices of disharmony.
Word by word vocabulary
filtered in my heart.
Priests were prophesying doom.

Instant attention gave a passage,
uncontaminated, closer to the truth.
Gloom was glorified.
Scissors had done their job, few will remember the designs.
I should now think
of a golden sunset.

Satish Verma