Not Found

Today,
I knocked on the strangest of doors;
A door that opened onto the strangest side
of human emotion:
Your heart, or so it was said.
When I knocked,
Someone inside asked me,
"Who is it that you want?"
And,
I said your name.
The most unexpected answer
that you were not there.
Should I hide my surprise?
Should I be angry
and hurl fists at the sky?
I waited and knocked again.
And again and again.
No reply.
Wasn't it you,
who had invited me?
Is it you who has forgotten?
I wondered as I left
and wiped my eyes.
These tears just won't do anymore.
What was there or never was
is not what I am sad about
but about that, which was promised
But never found...
never found

The Great Stampede

The Great Stampede
A Continuous Dirge of A Lament


We are sorry to inform you

of the death of your son's feelings

in a rush of other people's emotions,

Crushed,

these feelings were

sent to the ER

we tried to revive them but no

they had died on the way



In no morning paper

will this story appear

of a boy's death of feelings

the blatant murder being

Blamed

upon the deluge of

other people's emotions

No one will read and sigh

or cry

No one will attribute it to al Qaeda

or the Basque separatists

or the IRA or the Red Army

or the Chechens

or the Militants

or one Ariel Sharon

neither to Bush

nor Saddam Hussein

nor Mother Russia



Who will take the blame

for the murder of youth's

most innocent feelings

our parents, our elders

the society, this world?

or shall we say

All the feelings in desperation

and faced by inward frailty

committed suicide




Who will fight

our most private terrors?



Whom shall we call terrorists

for the murder

of our son's feelings?


Friday, September 17 2004

The Thin People

They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen. They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest table.
It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere
In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.
Wrapped in flea-ridden donkey skins,

Empty of complaint, forever
Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn
Scapegoat. But so thin,

So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head
Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon when it

Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife pared

The moon to a rind of little light.
Now the thin people do no obliterate

Themselves as the dawn
Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

Of the world comes clear and fills with color.
They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales
Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.
How they prop each other up!

We own no wildernesses rich and deep enough
For stronghold against their stiff

Battalions. See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

And grayer; not even moving their bones.

Sylvia Plath

You can't bind feelings for long. Fingers might be knitted together, lips might be pursed, eyes might be downcast but who knows, which crevice would let a feeling out? No guard would stop that fatal whiff; no mask, no filter...