How I felt when I first saw you

Comically stumbling, mumbling my words, a vise grip tightly knotting my being entire, deliciously aflame, incomprehensibly desirous, succulently inflamed, catatonically bedazzled,

feeling that feeling deep inside my hearts core,

an indescribable feeling,

that this is true:

Is how I felt, when I first saw you

our eyes

Our eyes mask many a sorrow within,

splintered hopes, tattered dreams,

lost in the folds of ceaseless time,

whispered murmurs, ebbing in the tides of fractured rhyme.

Still our disjointed verse has woven a path for better or worse,

holding each other close, through the travails of the years,

our wrinkled faces smiling, even as the end nears.

Identity – a rant

i d e n t i t y ?

rootless,

scattered beings.

unlike trees,

tentacled roots,

firmly entrenched,

in this earth,

we walk alongside trees,

embroiled in turmoil,

we hate, waging wars,

we discriminate:

tradition,

race,

culture,

patriarchy,

religion,

ideology.

rootless, we flounder,

racing through lives, unencumbered,

seeking a home,

eternal exiles, uprooted,

complacent,

skidding, smiling,

killing, proselytising,

inured by dogma,

anaesthetised with masters’ degrees in prejudice,

basking in the illusion, that we, us,

that I am surefooted,

yet remaining exiles,

all, together,

bound by gravity, unable to soar into boundless skies,

tearing each other apart,

unafraid,

my country right or wrong,

my religion the only one,

my culture the best,

my tradition superior to all the rest,

my book the word of god,

smugly uprooted,

unlike trees,

deeply rooted,

fanning out like banyans, free,

not us,

paying dues, settling scores, doling out fees,

rootless,

floundering,

meandering through bylanes of isolation,

smug, arrogant,

I am assuredly surefooted,

in the only truth of my culture,

my tradition,

my race,

my people,

my religion,

my god …

have we forgotten the trees,

chopped down,

without sorrow,

desecrated,

once firmly rooted,

now flotsam, jetsam,

like I, you, him, her, us and them,

uprooted, snuffed out,

dragging along dead wood,

pompously preaching the rootedness,

of culture,

of tradition,

of race and of religion,

while we remain,

exiles all, blasé and smugly surefooted,

sowing division,

waving flags,

sermonising,

my country right or wrong,

ignoring the lesson of the trees,

of what it really means to be firmly rooted,

posturing instead, ideological fantasies, religious fancies:

I am right,

and thus,

you are all wrong …