Too many words have I read
silently to myself
out of pages aged with the heavy
dreams of the neglected many
who desire to place You on their shelf.

What voice is loud enough to be heard
over the din of robbers
in a den of thieves?
Honest hands steal the words of antiquity
out of the broken mouths of those
who flatter themselves to quote it,
preening no one but the weak,
cuckolding only those enraptured
with the heaviness of sleep.

Years have taught them nothing
out of the jaws of mighty men
who display the contents of their stomachs
on concrete steps of golden gates
ascending to handmade shrines
in timeless temples of silver screens.
Yet time cracks the blessing,
the undressing,
the impressing,
and the fools
by painting pottery with myths of misinterpretations
of their long infatuations
with themselves.

My quiet eyes,
how I long to disguise
my voice to the world’s
but emboldened hands will not let me.
It seems that royalty deems to hear
these old stories beneath fresh veneer
newly painted for newer painters
than those observant of the past.

At long last,
after tuning my ears to silence,
dismissing passion as a crime of violence,
displaying logic as the key to freedom,
yet preaching democracy as the coup de kingdom,
my intuition has come to ruin
the very lies I’ve long to cover
like things I will never tell my mother
and the time I spoke in ancient voices
wholly unlike my own.

History has been proven
by my mistrusts
and misdeeds
and all the shivering seeds
I’ve planted in other gardens.
In strangers greenhouses I’ve made my home
traveling from lawn to lawn
from dusk until mid-day
drawn by the colors of Bombay
and forsaking the nation of my birth.

Yet I have come to unearth
a hidden treasure in an auctioned field
dug, buried, and concealed,
filled with the handsomest of IOU notes;
its not something I want to reveal
to the kisses of the court
promptly to be short
changed by vehemently cooing
of all my wrong-doings
to the king who sits on the throne.

But when He stands to His feet
they are unable to meet
the forgiveness of His gaze.
All of my debts of endless black days
have been torn and scattered
thrown into the leaves that shatter
broken glass onto the plans of the deceiver
and singing songs that leave nothing sweeter
than His shouts of deliverance.

Labels: antiquity, arrogance, deliverance, lying, poetry