Blind spot

Impermanence is not painful

When it takes away pain

The isolation that goes with it

Still one is guarded for what may come

Next for travail comes in camouflage

Like viruses that elude immunity

We did not plan for our obsolescence,

For grappling with the present 

Took all our time and everything around

Told us our future would be bleak anyway

Brace, brace was all we heard everyday

And we hoped we would survive every storm

Even if the storms were the norm and sunshine

The aberration that we would learn to cope with ----

Freedom seems far away or is it so close

We cannot see it like in a blind spot.

Disappearing

Let's not court silence

It's not outside us

When the desires subside

It appears quietly like the moon

We have disappeared from places

We have not been to again

The body vanishes little by little

Starting from hair to the ovaries

Death is a kind of disappearing

An absence where we have been

We will be found by those 

Who have lost us as we will those 

We have lost ourselves,

Before all of us disappear forever.

Shadow

We hoped no shadow
Would darken the day
When the feet had found the way
Back to where our hearts lay
Yet in the shrine
Only the shadow remained
The head bowing all the same
Saw behind the closed eyes, ripples of emptiness
Soon swelling into an orange oblivion
Someone said there could be no darkness
Only various shades of night
From moonliness to moonlessness
And all one had to do was wait
Before it would be first light
When the search could begin again
For the new god who rejected all gods.

Truth

Say only the words
I want to hear,
It is the truth
I truly fear,
For now, lies will do
For even dreams are only lies
Before they come true
Before they rise
Before unbelieving eyes
Who only believe
What they see
Then say it cannot be ---
Or be like the deity
Who only listens
Who can only be silent
But all the same
Makes my eyes glisten.

Body

Give us back
What belongs to us,
Keep your eyes
In your sockets
Not chase after us,
Let your poison-tipped barbs
Stay in your quiver,
Allow us to forget
The cross we carry
The bleeding wounds
That mark us for life,
Do not keep telling us
What fig-leaf we should wear
What we should not,
Stop blaming us even
When you violate us,
Do not call us goddesses
Those you pay lip service to
Before you hound us
As if we were sorceresses.

In denial

In the unreal night
Of the death-dazed house
I clutch at the faintest sounds;
I steal from room to room
Hoping she has somehow come home;
Is she now merely hiding
Like a child
Behind the door
Or under the bed
Just waiting to be found?
Maybe I have forgotten
She was again staying over
With her ailing father,
Tomorrow she might walk in
Through the door
Like the other time,
With sleepless eyes
Yet eager to take
The house off our hands ---
How I wish I can go to sleep
Wake up and find her
Next to me, still asleep.

Grief

I've wept the tears
Of a lifetime
On a single night
The strangers
With their condolence faces
And cliches of comfort
Have all disappeared
Leaving behind a house
That has turned
A stranger without her
I switch off
Even the zero light
To hide my eyes
A hush as when the clouds gather
Seems to hang in the air
Beside me a howling vastness
Darkness giving way to darkness ---
I dread the break of day