Joyful is a human heart
aware that sorrow and joy
are two strokes of life’s art.
For the heart neither groans
nor shows any frown.
It struggles but wrestles on,
the grief of friends who are forever gone.
Heart is a traveller which dwells
in the crowd but wanders alone.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-
dome decree: Where Alph, the
sacred river, ran Through caverns
measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
As, I count my hours
with the endless jars’s
of poor man’s coffee,
I hallucinated about
Coleridge’s Xanadu.
May be it’s just
one meal a day or
is the opium that
Keats snorted.
As I lay bare
in grim winter
afternoon,
I see around me
a wasteland,
but I am dreaming of
Khan’s Xanadu.
The regal parade continues to march on.
Many who exist in silent, will reach the end.
Few Spirited ones will depart near the next turn.
Corpses will be shoved by the strapping boots.
Blood stains will rust up on the parched land.
The glorious spectacle is a site to behold.
The regal parade continues to march on.
Disguised in the
hollow curves of
your eloquent words,
do I hear a vicious
hissing ; whispers of
a conniving heart?
Why do I visualize
a serpentine on the rock?
I’m not beguiled by
your deceptive talks.
By the tinkering of your
silver coins.
For I’ve on my hump back
burden of enough winters
to mark a
Devil in a sea of Men.
PB Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A sorcerer once looked
at my palm and held my
arm to enthrone destiny
in the deep criss-cross lines.
For I was young with crimson
blood , momentary bubble
bursted at my insolence.
The sneaky destiny flew out
of my palm and sat on a
very high wall.
“ Now what?” I asked
The sorcerer took my
destiny in his shack.
Resolute I never showed
a palm or counted stars
for Mars or Venus,
nothing is ever sealed
in gold.
Standing in the land of the great Apaches
Midst blooming wild poppies
and the mammoth elephant grasses,
thinking of the dream that once Martin Luther had.
May be the days of chivalric Camelot are over,
as I heaved reclining on the grand arm chair;
vicious winds from the North gushed
echoing footsteps of a massive feet
opening a narrow pass for the
grim shadow of Lincoln to flicker by,
leaving behind trails of the Fallen Soldiers
on the path once trodden by the
fierce Indian Tribes.
