Writers & Artists, Isn't Cricket & 22

Writers & Artists

- Agora artist in vast open spaces of expression
Spinning like a marionette; playing in shadow,
Splashing colour in the red room red studio;
A fledgling creation taking light and shape,
Form and motion.

- Wrapped writer tucked up in cobweb corners,
Is hiccoughing, claustrophobically scribbling;
In his cocoon of papery words he flounds,
Buried under clothes, debris and wall-tiles
Of an old room.

- Muddied musician traipsing in the muck and
Guts of valid human emotion making song; de-
Noting noumenal areas and aspect with tone and
Temperance, wading-boots on for a drudge
Through the melodies.

Tongue of a Rothko portal to the silence
Of the gap of a Rumi treasury in mind
Of a shocking stopping short in a Chopin
Keynote motif. Of hovels and landfills crawl
Out writers and artists.


Isn’t Cricket

As a batsman in a game of cricket,
I, and he, are your sets of wickets.
Running to and fro, the fielders are
All vigilant to throw, a fast bowl-
Over, ‘howzat’ and out. You’re winning ,
But the innings are running out.


22

Cuticle scars grow out over months,
After blended thunder struck the portico
On another lost Sunday to our love.
But love grows neither inward nor outward
But strays circularly, strangling
With pull-strings our aortas, or mine alone.

Every time you looked back, the nodding
Bedside lamp congratulated dead Staropramen
Bottles, hollowing their greenness sanctimoniously,
Like library lampshades studious in the dark,
And this is the dark alley; my brain at night;
A faltering man of science can’t…

Caught 22 and that’s enough, sewn in,
A being one can’t be with, the one one
Can’t be without. There’s a sum without a
Maths. Behind the door the portières drape
And drop and roll and enclose and endeavour
To conceal, a body, 22-years dead.