Against the Waves
The crowded lift and emptiness of the flat
doesn’t help me resurrect what’s gone
late at night I may pile hopes on a pale paper
trying to invent a new life to live with
end up seized by pain trolling in the shady light
double bed, blank mirror and still greyer dawn
the pillow hurts, the image derides, the prayers fail
the roaring inside, the ghostly silence
and unfading darkness. I’m no Odysseus
but keep straying against the waves
*****
.
Prayers
I don’t know where it goes to or piles up
but grief is a large storage corrupting moments
of soft arousal: the body fails the mind
the screaming in the head and the grunt around
continue the night’s drunken flow
into the morning’s miserable brush
with the wheel’s slant truth and slangs
I poach in poetry to bare the sermons
lost in nostalgia or
insomnia of prayers
*****
--R K Singh
