Abortion

I wonder what it is to kill a life

Sneaking surreptitiously into the clinic,

With fear, sometimes shame,

At other times desperation.

Fending off uncomfortable questions,

“Married?”, “ Unmarried?”, “Love?”, “Drunk?”.

And then scalpel and metal,

And a life which could have been

Ceases to breathe.

I kill dreams every night,

One abortion past midnight

That’s what my appointment diary says.

In bed when I see the distant blinking of the stars,

I throttle and sigh for the astronaut I couldn’t be.

The aeroplane that flies away

That somber thunder from its engines,

Assaults the evening by the Thames,

That I willed myself into believing

Would be mine one day.

With every squabble

I cease to be the man I wished to be,

Fading like half remembered dreams

Which walk backwards into oblivion.

Every day I kill myself, bit by bit,

Amidst screaming hawkers

Grumbling housewives

And stumbling principles.

In the half shut eyes

Of a sterile revolution,

Little by little,

I give myself up.

And like cars rushing at GET SET GREEN,

Days whizz by

And my dreams crawl towards their premature graves,

And a life which could have been

Ceases to breathe.

The Nightmares Have Begun II

This morning it had me again,

The cancerous vision of dates,

Ranks, marks, counseling.

Spreading like rumours into my soul.

These visions, they devour me,

Like guilt, like carnal desire.

I am afraid now to go to sleep,

Lest, watching like a hired assassin,

These dreams jump out from the alleys

Those which I have kept shut,

Like a neighbourhood abandoned during a plague,

Or a ship quarantined at the harbor.

But they will appear, these dreams,

Who lie waiting,

Like old age,

Like death,

Certain to greet me

With an embrace.

The Nightmares Have Begun

Finally the nightmares have begun

Generally it grapples me,

Like the sudden drop in mercury

On a late winter afternoon.

It is like sitting for the mathematics exam

With an inscrutable question paper,

As inscrutable as the Gods.

Or being tied on the deck of a ship,

The sea licking its tongue,

Mocking the vessel.

The waves as big as ego,

And as destructive as pride,

Raging towards me.

The night sky as dark as desire.

And then the dream is over.

Like the conclusion of a good short story,

My mornings are punctuated

By the three dots of an incomplete dream.

Silence II

If I were to paint your silence,

And how loud it could get, or how poignant,

I would fall into the trap of repeating clichés.

I would say that your silence is louder

Than the minutes spent looking at the phone,

Waiting for it to ring.

Or the silence that descends upon a neighbourhood

With a sudden power failure,

Lights going out of the eyes,

Lights going out of the ears.

I would be in danger of saying,

Your silence is reminiscent of

The one preceding a storm.

But your silence is worse,

Like a bad dream it seems unending.

Like what lies between two mountains,

Or what follows when one suddenly hangs up the phone.

Or even what one sees in the blackness,

Pouring over a well.

Your silence is a serial killer,

Claiming its victim with bullets of words unsaid.

Or every stroke of choosing to ignore.

It is like what lies between two planets,

The void that keeps them apart,

Keeps them locked in a distant embrace.

Irritating

As irritating as,

A doctor’s handwriting,

The sound of a drilling machine,

Incessant dripping of a leaking tap,

The promises in the year of election,

A garrulous woman with her repetitive tales,

The right word eluding you,

Running out of change,

New clothes not fitting,

Bad grammar,

The muggy sunshine after a downpour,

Someone completing a joke before the punchline,

You are all this and more.