New Moon
New Moon There will be a new moon over my shoulder And that old moon…..
Cathexis
Mohammad Zaman
Cherub’s Fallowed Morning
His face aching, emotionless and unflinching, he declared,
‘my parents are getting a divorce’. Mother cringed; she spied
at the vacant screen of her cellphone; barren moonscape;
her lips trembling; an ephemeral rictus…
‘How was the school’? I pivoted; and we are back to the mundane
mendacity of daily vagaries; are you taking your medicines or
avoiding the dust mites as we discussed during the last visit; as
if nothing else is of import;
I never have seen Cherub’s father; maybe he is unemployed and
he smokes the cheap cigarettes he buys from the Reservation;
maybe he does not come home every evening, and maybe he
does not read bed-time-stories to his cherub son; a childhood
without the purple Teletubby, or the Berenstein Bears; Cherub
must have born with the burden of mountains.
It was fifteen-minute-visit and Cherub did fine with a fantastically
normal spirometry; newer biologics are doing exactly what they
are supposed to;
but my God this wistful morning surely is not anthropomorphic!
I rather be a cold-face stone of Paleocene; or at best, a speechless
Neanderthal; and let the thieves run the polity.
I glide backward to the dawn of hominids when the genome is still
waiting to be tinkered with that ultimate thinking gene of inane
vacuity.
Autumn Leaves
When Sappho was burning in fine flame and her tongue
snapped, when Catullus was etching a thousand lips on the
lips of his beloved Lesbia; it’s Majnun who was dying a
thousand deaths and then rise to the ecstasy of a love
undone.
Vagaries aside, love’s braggadocio is but a dolorous thorn;
castles burnt and fire consuming; it’s the autumn leaves
that makes my heart weep.
Cathexis
Poetry or not, vagaries of life will still feel
prickly; love or no love, things-that-matter
will still be overwhelming; God or no God,
life’s journey will still be a perilous journey.
This is not about the aboutness of myself
or of my poetry or of anything else under
the folds of heathen Gods. Neither celestial
nor interstellar; it’s the obelisk of hope.
Neither Calliope nor Erato is my forte; not
even Sappho, the tenth. I do not write for
posterity or for some transcendent euphemism.
When the mind is fenestrated through and
through, when ennui engulfs the total being
like a shroud of death, poetry seeps in;
Butea (Flame of Forest) blooms and sets this
sinking heart ablaze.
