Sonnet

I took his hand, while drifting on the shore,
He mistook the shallows for the ocean.
His youth found the beauty in all the lore,
Caressing the anchor, devoid of motion.
My captain stood against a want and need,
To protect him from what must lay ahead:
Shattered lessons of betrayal and greed,
Of weighed down dreams, upon an ocean bed.

What he does not know now need not be known…
But when landlocked safety is rejected,
I‘d have to take what I myself have grown,
And sail to the deep and the dejected.

When waters roar and his eyes froth with fear,
I wish enough remains to pull him near.

Bent

Love begins with such tenderness –

Even the tears are made of joy!

What wonder it holds in that time,

Oh, what magic it does employ!

The many things that irks love now

Were what held away all its fears.

Who could truly know that sadness

Would supercede past joy in tears?

Each twist in the body was seen,

As some Grecian statue of old;

Now twists are seen with angst and pain

And addressed with manners so cold.

Love glimmered like burnished gold,

When it was young and fresh and new;

But gold doesn’t oxidise with time

And take on shades of green and blue.

Carpe diem, the poets implored,

They chased love and it chased them, too,

This chase has gods fall weary,

Then what the poet, or me or you!

Hubris is a part of all love,

Love declares it rules no ego;

But most of love fades over time,

Under pride and lust’s undertow.

Love, they say, shows its truer form

As it grows with time, some say years,

Some say it lengthens slow or fast

And rebounds truest when death appears.

Love distorts due to other loves,

Experiences are benchmarks here;

Doubt’s a seed people love to sow,

Watered by your own unseasoned fear.

Needless to say, love confuses

All its promises, in the end,

It isn’t love, if fate and time ask

And the imposter agrees to bend.

Trojan

It’s all a matter of time:
Love evolves into honesty
And the tube light glare
Rips through at some point.
The thing that was once hidden,
Under the guise of empathy,
Lies naked for all to see,

Like a broken body after rape,
Open to the lenses of posterity
And a boggling public
That cranes to see which part
Was most abused.
The need to hide exists no more.
Justice demands sight and hearing.
A lynching is required.

Love is stronger than romance
And it can withstand a slap,
Or two.

Compromise is a grey area.

Love was not the same,
Either for Helen or Mumtaz –
Tom had jumped on a sofa
And after begetting children
Of blood, they say,
It all ended amicably.
I mean, the jumping ended.

I think myself grand enough
To think mine will last.
I shall let the Trojans in though;
Because I love horses.
(That is a different kind of love.)