Whistles from buses and cabs,
Drivers intimate with their fogs of smoke,
As the ashes of the cigarette
Meet the concrete defeated, devoid of hope.

Today is yesterday, tomorrow is last month,
A chain of promises and complaints,
Necks wearing the chain with devout compassion,
... the fire is smelling faint.

And in the loneliest hour, which is every hour to be exact,
We search for any wavering footprints,
Marching on an array of dead skulls,
To guide us to where the river is. 

We're catching breaths with heads hanging from windows,
But we can't breathe enough, can't grasp much,
So we hang them down ropes of the cheapest material,
Aiming for a free fall to where the silence stretches.

Everyday with red eyes staring holes at the ceiling,
The ringing in our ears comes to life as the devil,
Every night it has a poem of soothing words,
... they sooth every flame, till they turn to lifeless pebbles.

You are no one special

The days make a song out of it, it's just so catchy,
It's the tune played in every commercial,
It makes you believe we are nothing but the dirt we are,
Ideologies are illusions of an anger rebel.

It's every smile plastered on a heavily made up face on television,
The finger pointed in the "right" direction,
It's the words of illiterates that make it on trees' corpses,
It's the thought that gives your mind a detention.

The air is heavy on diseases and illnesses,
It's so saturated that it turned hearts yellow,
It made south north and north south,
It made billboards rules to follow.

I'm sick too, I'm sick of those same words
That I utter at the peak of my revolutionary asthma,
But when I'm good enough to breathe,
I bring acceptance out of my closet and iron it to finish this stanza.

What are we doing stifling flames,
Taming the wilderness with acceptance,
Our breathing is a stale pattern,
Our actions are just where the currents send us.

The river doomed to have only one shore,
And the boats sail to infinity,
But when the drought hits town,
All the sailors part for the sea.

Art became something we're used to,
A design where every curve has to fit,
Bold colors always mismatch,
Cause they just make the eyes upset.

So every candle smells of forgiveness,
Every night a canvas for a new excuse,
But it might be a month, a year, or ten,
When the paper can no longer be of use.

I'm always envious of the way the sun finds its way to the big screen,
The way the characters' eyes would sparkle and their smiles would shine.

Yet this same sun, that has eternally fed our small planet with its kindness
Always fails to find its way to my smile, as if I don't deserve its generosity.

I'm always envious of the way the wind knows the shooting locations,
How it arrives on time, when the heroine needs a little volume to her hair.

Yet this same wind has always taken my breath away, in the literal sense,
It doesn't know that it should do exactly that to the person in front of me.

I'm always envious of the way the waves meet the shore in perfect transcendence,
In time for the opening scene, from the very first take by the cameraman.

Yet those are the same waves that engulf me with their salty scent,
And drown every sandcastle that I've ever fancied visiting.

And I'm always envious of how selectivity sends the moon
To where a fictional plot is taking place, to grace a fictional character from her fictional window.

Yet my midnight has seen no moon, just a blanket of nothingness,
And it spreads to my room where my mind dreams of living eternally on set.

The breeze begged me,

Let me take you away from here.

Bargaining with the arms of my jacket,
And the laces of my shoes,

Let me take you away from here.

And in the eyes of the rising sun,
I watched promises weaving into the sea,
And sipping into each approaching wave.

And I found myself summoned by the breeze,
Forward my powerless feet moved,
My faced splattered by all the words
The water carried for my ears only.

Let me take you away from here.

The breeze teased my line of sight
With a boundless perimeter of dreams,
With each centimeter of my clothes getting soaked,
The bottom of possibilities seemed so near, so reachable.

**Let me take you away from here.

The actors shuffled around the stage,
In a hurry to deodorize themselves of what they were,
New words are getting recreated,
The vapor of the past moment taints the air.

It takes a neck at a right angle,
And a smile at a linear relationship curving upwards,
The machine spilling new pages,
Receiver ends watching standards getting ruptured.

Now you have to pay a ticket, a cost,
To live through a screen, framed by your acting skills,
Because what once started as a perfect match,
Now is only worth a motion picture's thrill.

The patterns that once ran parallel to one another,
Intersected along the way, now sitting perpendicular,
Running low on impulse amusement,
Backstage, the two actors were nobody in particular.

● ● ●

Tonight, as I flip through the world in the fog of the sky,
My brother's coughing beside me, rolling onto his right side,
We're pulling the bald landscape over our bodies of dust,
We won't be dreaming of fairytales, just of a home to trust.

We drank too many tides, the sea is spilling over our bodies,
One day when our hearts explode, our names'll rhyme with casualties,
Along the tribes we race, at a young age hard we learnt,
That the longer we wait, the more of our memories will be burnt.

It's in black and white, the digital world they're fussing about,
We're in one cell of this universe that seeps no sound,
The clatter from the battleground rivals our ringing ears,
My dead mama said, boys were born to laugh at fear.

Through mirrors of smoke, I think I see distant planets shine,
I write to God everyday, can you patch the holes of mine?
At a tie in this war of peace, they bow down to the lion in the cage,
It'll only ever be a means to end, even our corpses will be estranged.

They only ever see eye to eye and claws to fangs,
Under clouds of fire, me and my brother will dance.