Dubai Days manuscript

Those looks of blighted passion

Are poetic

But rationed out
And crippled,

Stirred up and rippled,

With the fates

Converged,

Submerged

Under wrinkles and alcohol,

Faded blouses and stained teeth.


You think on your feet.

In the streets you scamper unwashed and tatty.

Long after you've shot yourself in the foot

And the horses have bolted,

Jolted by contempt

And frayed tempers.


That dim decade of blind love

Blind-sighted her

And leaves nothing to salve.

And in their wrongs,

She wrings
Out the nurse's gauze.

Blood-tinctured warm water

To dress the wounds

Of our sons and daughters.

New shoots wither.

Things crumble.

Empires tumble
And fade into the sands of time

Forevermore.



Inflated hearts are punctured and dolefully droop.

The cycle of a gentlemen's honour and a faithful
dog,
Blind love and bloated ego

Stumble on the rocks of reality.



Under a sycamore tree

Lovers sigh

And sign their names

Into the bark.


In the dark house of wishes

And prayers,

She cuddles shadows

And huddles

Around a candle.

Wax dripping,

She laps up the waning
Years.



Ears hear music and hope fade.

The last flame flickers and gives out

In the violence of the last raid.











The Long Road Home


4th Oct 18


If you don’t bring forth what is
within you,

What you don’t bring forth will
destroy you.



Bring me a heart worth
breaking.
Nothing I was given was worth
the taking.

Take me back to the years of my
insouciant youth,
When I could afford to be
uncouth.

The polished colonnades of
pernicious power are no life for a
principled man.

Nor do I want the rake’s
progress,
Nor the judge’s gable where the
accused stand,

Nor still the drudge’s strife at
constant hand.
These people are empty vessels.

I am neither master nor vassal.

The inequities lacerate and
grizzle

Leaving gaping gashes
That fester and bristle

With maggots and blood.


In the bitter, bleak English mid-
winter,

There was no way for me to
disinter
The imagined from the real.

In the Arab inferno it feels like
no respite
From machinations and political
spite.

The magnanimous

Are sucked into the vortex
Of the malevolent.

The stars
Howl

As they
Unravel

Like

A ball
Of wool.

The galaxies are silent witness

To the carnage.
The bloody soil.

The ransack and pillage.
The village idiot is crowned
king.


On the shores of Ithaca

Penelope and Telemachus stand

Waiting for the long-awaited
return of their man.

The Mighty Ants of Dubai



13th Jan 19


The real criminals are at large. No one was charged,
no trials held, no punitive measures levied. In the
toubohou of Dubai Mall, the privileged throngs jostle
with subservient Filipino maids in tow. Their casual
rampant voluptuaries are untouched by the financial
vagaries that others groan and heave under. Through
the palm fronds, a piebald of sunlight splashes the
footpath where an ant scurries about with a morceau
of food aloft its head. Detached from the hum of
Downtown Dubai traffic and kerfuffle of flocking
feet, it goes to its progeny to feed them with its
modest forage. Gently, the final seconds of the dying
day flicker and the sun dips behind the rim of the
earth...

The Mundane Lives of Gods


th
6 Apr 17


The Adriatic Sea laps at the hems of Venice and
beyond.
Beyond the crumbling Ionic columns and regal
facades
Of Ancient Greece
And beyond the Aegean Sea,
Beyond the Bosporus,
The lands snap and here the West severs from the
East.
And there when the Occident was a mere spore of
yeast
In the minds of the eternal Romans of antiquity
And their propinquity with the Ancient Greeks,
Finance speaks volumes
And influence
Echoes
In Oriental markets,
Infused
With cinnamon and turmeric, parsley and dill,
Where the gullible are gulled by the frills
And furbelows
Of cunning merchant fellows and wilier vendors
still.

Softly,

A poultice is applied
In the surgeon’s room to a gash
Encrusted viscid and vermillion.
Outside in the dusty streets, dusky children skylark
simian
Vexing the adults
Too old
To remember the mirth of their own mischief and
childhood gold.

Mail is delivered, bills are paid, and the chamber
pots emptied.
They tussle in the square; the men grizzled by
labour, blowzy and beer-addled.
Times of yore when men were chivalrous and
sartorial,
Thinking men with pens poised and clutching
parchments, were lauded.
Her sordid sedition did not incite an expulsion for
all time from exalted climes.

During my tortured exile, my years in the
wasteland, my years of famish, my subversion of
every rule of the game I had a latent disregard for,
I saw many men that were mere vassals by other
names.
I saw unseeable manacles chaff and drain their life-
blood, life-lust dry to the point of pain.
Problems as millstones that bent them double like
keeling poor-filled sacks of flour and yet by the
hour

They continued, like obliged and wambling mules
and tethered heifers.

But time sends both the Orient and Occident to the
same dusty doom and the depths
Of the fertile furrows from whence their empires
once bloomed.

To the laity we owe lucidity.
To the velleity of the poets, patience.
As flavescent leaves float to the forest floor where
twitching auburn squirrels scurry,
Universal laws restore to nature, limpid order that
Man has raided and upbraided.
Reactions and decrees of the heavens to this is laid
out in
Writing
Hallowed and sacrosanct which brings votaries to
kneel.
Piecemeal,
Nature retrieves
Its deeds
And foils every
Deceit,
For the sake of survival and our final deliverance.





















The Peace that Only Simpler Creatures Know



7th Oct 18


The golden sun strikes the ocean quicksilver.

After the carnage,

The silence of inner peace

That’s so often fleeting.

The wind whispers consoling words

And waves with a rolling dash, hush the traumas
and tremors of the heart.

The birds wade through low tide

Asking for nothing,

Least of all love.

The tiny crabs that scurry between the rocks

Do not
Seek validation.

A jelly fish gently

Floats past

Surprising the swimmers.

It wants nothing but some wherewithal,

A simple victual

To help it survive another day.

The River Eats Mountains



Aug 18


Another

Dead end road

And the dead don’t envy the living.

And the givers keep giving

To the point of death.

It’s only you
That slowly dies,

The ones that hope and believe

Are the ones relieved and delivered

From the cycle of their grief.

I know the stars will live on

Long after I’ve gone

But they too will die one day,
Spectacular supernova in the sky

And I

Have nothing to declare or justify.

You act like you have impunity against the waves
of the seven seas and timeless ways of the world
And karma is a paper tiger.

I say tread lightly

Because the river

Is mightier than the mountains it eats

Away

After multiple millennia.

The feathers on tides
Succumb to the sway of the sea

But nature sees

They too decide their course

And in the end

The rivers bend

To the will of the land

But reduce the rocks
To sand.

The Silence of the Mountains



13th Jan 18


The car bombinates as the rubber tyres lap up the
asphalt miles. The figures stare ahead
in silence flanked by the undulating contours of the
North Emirati mountainscapes. The children home
from their educational incarceration gambol between
shanty garages and carpenter ateliers rejoicing in the
simple joys of a punctured football. Boorish Arab
officials browbeat servile labourers from long
suffering countries with meagre means.



The unobviable inequities are writ large. The car
drives past nonplussed by these daily spectacles and
human tragedies that everyone sees and no one talks
about. The young men in the backseat chomp on
snacks and indulge each other’s adolescent
tomfoolery. The women play with their hair
imagining themselves to be more beautiful than they
actually are.



There were tales of old Arabia and of Arab blood
spilt in sand by foreign marauders from the lands of
the Latin and Hellenic people. They’re untouchable



now. The oppressive culture of prohibition-era
Chicago still persists in some parts of the world.
Within progress, there’s stolid draconian systems.
The silence of the mountains speaks volumes. It
speaks of how everything and everyone has come
and gone from the humblest fly to the mightiest
empire.



The passengers fiddle and fuss with electronic
devices waiting to be let out onto the beach to bask
in the glory of the sun and their own blinkered self-
satisfaction.

The Snake



Mar 18


As love lies bleeding,

You slither away reading

Your prayers and rosary beads.



You were able

To win my trust only to betray it.
Our friendship was a fable.

Judas, Brutus, Cain and Able.



Blood running down my face,

Sweat running down yours.

Two redolent figures

As the white noise of deceit
Brings me tumbling to my feet.

The 30 pieces of silver jingle

In your pockets as the last remnants of my trust
tingle

Through a deflated heart.











The Sphinx Knows the Secrets of the Pyramids



May 18


The angels gather

At the pyramids

Of lime and gold

As old as time itself.



Cherubs frolic
Amidst the pile of stones

That have reduced a litany of empires

To powdered bones.



And the crumbling rocks

Quarried from the hard belly of the earth,

Belie mathematical wonders
And hold the secrets of the cosmos.

Cleopatra lies with asps tearing nipples off milky
breasts
And the Messiah and Socrates,

Attila and Shakespeare,

Nostradamus and Galileo,

Byron and Hitler

Have come and gone.

The Sun



Apr 18


The erasure

Of those autumn days

Will not alter your ways.

Every time

I touch you,

You cut me,
Hissing

Like a feral cat.

To keep me at

Bay.



Everyday

Your days minish
As you drift to the finish line.

The crosses

Conferred upon us

Can be crutches to bolster flagging faith.



The autumn leaves
Freeze as heimal days harden.

Then April showers

And spring rays through dew on mustard butter
cups and violet fox gloves.

Then the buds of May

And in the lapis-blue sky
The sun beams a smile.

A Banquet of Abuse



Jun 18


Mother pig lies crisp

And succulent on the serving dish.

The sour grapes of our reality

Are turned into wine and guzzled

By the barrel.

Our empires are built
On appalling abuse

And subjugation

Of those weak enough to be chained.