Post chaos

Today, you will leave the universe
how its spans: world rotating on its
canvas of day & night, birds flocking
in formative obedience of the wind's
mouth; the active or passive voice you'd
take with members of the office. For words
occur when the need for words arises.
You speak not of weather, how cars
choreograph their dance of swerves &
short rage; or politics governed by the
hues of faces in the office. Tongues
will bless or curse the world as how
the leaves fall with wind's command.
You map yours by the pen in your hand.

Shoulders

Newly incubated from loneliness, her hair
falls in fresh waves on my shoulder. We
share a long ride toward imprisonment
or joy of days: some station she'll stop,
sling her bag in defiance of the world,
click off on concrete, steel of heels.
They will fade as the train doors close
while I will lean my head on manicured
glass, feel the draught of shoulders &
ponder the comfort of sharing them
like common places on a morning train.

Lost Buttons

You rattle off your list of sundries
then groceries, while I fall into the motion
of silence - letting my gaze do the talk
of surveying the mall after purveying you.
Perhaps you are blessed with a silver
tongue or the charm to conjure every
passerby's attention to you with the spell

of soft gaze. I do not know. Your long gown
brushes the ground and I suppress a tender
tendency to remind you of dropped things:
apples; a dollar that's escaped the folds
of pockets; a lost key whose soft clink
drowned out the volume of voices; my gaze

dropped at the floor as if pursuing
lost buttons

Throngs

Mornings open not the shutters of your eyelids.
Rushed rides, not happy, says a psychologist,
who probably took the mean of countries’ statistics
to make this statement. So, explain the lethargy
of eyelids, how they gaze at train throngs
like a movie one harbors no wish of watching.

You sneak sleep on the Reserved seat, pray
the old man lumbering on board is staunch enough
to refuse the seat you will not offer. Eyes
glued to phones require no permission to steal
glances at yours. How that woman wafts her
scent of cherries. This man’s crotch planted at
eye-level negates your smile at her smell of cherries.

That fiver-year old needs a lesson on balancing.
Once more this book of poems fail to intrigue
your hands. The young girl beside dips her
head toward your shoulder. A glad support – except
that you are not her boyfriend, so withdraw the
unwitting cushion of your shoulder. Besides this

seat, what else serves as the day’s logwood
over a sea of commitments? Train doors aren’t
ghost doors till they open at your station: get
down, get out, take the people-thronged path to
an office that holds no sympathies with your wish
for five-minute coffee before flipping on the laptop.

Poem to Mor(u)ning

To conquer the lands of tension, I have tried

different remedies: dreamless sleep, subjugating

the bed-monsters that cannot be once controlled

by human means; letting go the need of choping

a seat on the morning train; discarding my KPIs;

addressing the boss as “bro” & saluting him

in his Room of War for free black coffee; leashing

my heart to my chest & offering it those

who would not hold a finger to my throat – yet these

visitations of the mind run like a film reel,

like the mad train bounding on its endless tracks;

my breath force-slowed in longer exhales

as I pull the handbrake on a headlong life.

Were We Told in Class to Grasp Mindful Listening

Watching her solo concerto was

scarier than mannequins through glass.

Her pupils dilated; she conveyed riddles

in gestures, hair falling from a middle

parting mussed up by a hand whose

slender wand I could not pose

any spell of defense against. She gazed

at a point above my nose, fazed

over the impacts of positive perspective

(quite unaware of fools seeking God's directive

to blind the fall of lips, eyes, hair

and sound of her voice that made the air

shimmer with heat and music). The lecturer,

suddenly rising, intervened like a treasurer

of time to break the class up for notes.

I scrawled a name below Carl Rogers' quote

on _______ and change. The mind fractures
on reasons. The heart authors its lectures.

Laws of Attraction

Picking bits of fried fish off
the porridge, your heart races
to find an answer to why
two ants repel each other.
Two leaves' friction in mid-fall,
both pasting the pavement to point
in different directions like two South poles.
The magnet that kept you glued to
your food has long since repelled it -
rejected, the porridge sits cold. Two
flowers fall from a tree; the evening crowd
divides and merges like fish. Each a
stranger bearing no law
of attraction to each other.