UNTOLD JOURNEY

It does not make any sense
to go beyond, where the road ends.

He was searching the meaning
of life. Moving out of comfort zone
to Roman cave.

Émigré to chessboard,
he will stop pushing the game.
But what about the demons―
sitting on my chest, in cahoots with the nails?

Somebody walks into assassin's
trap. Somebody's bread does not
reach the home.

A child will ask, when my
father will return? There was no answer.
The tide has brought back
the ashes.

Satish Verma

STREAKING ALONE

Like sly coyotes
you move around
the fireballs. You switch off
the earthly lights. They are
now oranges. Presently
a broker will sell the wounds
of the moon.

Why did you feel sad of something
which was unsaid? A thousand
and one words will speak
when the poem would be brought
dead. You are not here
not in the nakedness of lies, when
something glitters which was not yellow.

The twilight now settles
in your eyes. Moon refuses to
plunge into darkness.

Satish Verma

Flares

There was no secret
among mountains.
Clouds were their adopted siblings.

*

Only the rain drops
were dancing.
The mounts stand still.

*

I beg your leave.
The spring has invited.
I have to meet the yellow blooms.

Satish Verma

UNRISEN HORIZON

Take off the glasses and
look at it closely, the infant
universe of the ―
receding age.

I said, weapons should not
be allowed to speak, cheating
the all terrain of
humankind.

The legality has to be
defined to earn the daily
bread for impregnable
hunger.

Whatsoever, there was no
precedence to take the occult
into the homes of non-
committal voices.

You become the temple
without god, who was
waiting at the gate.

Satish Verma

IN DISGUISE

Raising the walls
around you, you started
a ritual of placing a single
rose on the tomb daily.

Trapped in the blues,
there was a killer instinct
to destroy the self.

I become a flame,
passing through the flesh
eroding the body's mystique.

The ravage words
now sleep. A dying
moon will set the
night free.

It was an invasion by
deathless roots at night.
A slow music starts by puppeteers
to undo the potter's field.

Satish Verma

FRIGHTENING

The winds ruffle the
solitude. Sparrows were
watching me.

*

My name was floating
in dark. I want to burn the
book, to throw some light.

*

Violence will toss
you around, when you
are wearing the grass.

Satish Verma

SACRED COMMITTMENT

Under the holy basil,
lighting the earthen lamp,
whom do you invoke at dusk?

*

A needle pricks your finger.
You smear the blood
on your face.

*

It was the flame of forest
which ignites the path,
you wanted to tread on.

Satish Verma

ENDLESS SEARCH

Moon was not faraway.
It rejected the evidence against the rhyme
and proceeded to release
the poem.

The colored bracts of
bougainvillea, fall solemnly, to kiss
the grass. Spring was around
the corner.

Quizzing a stone, a dream
crashes in my hands;
becomes a tiger moth and
settles on your lips.

Future turns into a shell.
I pick it up from the beach of time.
Play with it for sometime and
give it away to my offspring.

It was the beginning. It was the end.

Satish Verma

BLUE VALLEY

A tiny doubt sends out
the solvos. Self on fire,
you want to bail out the hierarchy.
Physically imperfect, a star
ejects the charged rays.

There was no secret of coronal
mass. You were taking a dip
in golden plumes of nirvana.
No suffering, no remorse.
A slice of moon will heal.

In your path lies the gray earth.
Who will incite the ocean now?
A transient truce will not give
you the leaping death of
valley. The clouds will take there own revenge.

Satish Verma