Cosmic

Tonight, the sky seems poisoned with a silence

That breeds a rather suffocating sort of death.

The stars are pinpricks. Small,

Points on some cosmic clockwork, some

Flower that fell off in a summer downpour.

Some blue eye, glassy, vacant- it’s time to lie down.

The moon is a promise of solitude to come

After all has been whisked away behind daylight

When each word is a revolution that tips Kings

Over into the paradise of fools. April skies

Barren with heat. An angering flinch from prisoners

Withdrawn into hollow expectation, a single

Palm that lets my hand go in the street, perhaps

To lose scattered stories- all worth going to battle for.

All hinging upon collective insanity. Dark and

Bespectacled, you’re a visionary. A book propped

Open against a fount, by your old hat. My tired eyes,

And your light. My tired eyes are hurting with your light.

My hands, too broken to write, are wordless against

Abounding howls stretching across from one vacuum

To the next of our generation. Only a poet will salvage

A shipwreck, in a storm where man was attacked by his own

Fables, pooled together in the dark, skittering off in all directions

Balanced on spider-legs, leering on the verge of truth

Soft truth, autumnal sunshine and the smell of your hair,

Truth delicate as ice breaking away under your feet

Dispelling our illusions, ghostly butterflies remain.

Beating against the hard wall, the brutish scaffold

And the juggernaut of time, all merely swim about

Your pretty little head like starlight and fireflies and

Your smile is all I need to understand that the door must

Close upon it.


by Komal Ashfaq