These Days...

I

These days
I find everything staged:
the words of comfort you plant,
the concern that I fake,
the platitudes that we toss,
twirl, throw into each other’s face.
How brittle is our truth
that we wrap it with pretexts
believing love holds good
only in certain contexts.

II

The other day
at Carter Road,
when the Sun was
a speck of orange in your eye
and the world
a soot covered portrait,
I felt I had a poem for you
but then, these days, I don’t write poems.
I look for words instead,
words that would miff the silence
you puncture our conversations with.

III

In the quietness of the night
when you twirl next to me
I hear shrill screams
of our unsaid thoughts.

I then strain, strain
to hear your silence...

© Dan Husain
March 25, 2006

The Line...

Between the here and there,
between courage and fear,
between love and longing,
between knowing & belonging,
between fisticuffs and handshakes,
between letting go and heartbreaks,
between knowledge and wisdom,
between thoughts and action,
between inertia and initiative,
between certain and tentative,
between criticism and mudslinging,
between ignorance and awakening,
between you and me,
between they and we
there is only a thin line
dwindling somewhere in your mind;

step across it!

© Dan Husain
March 2, 2005