THE SILENT VOICES

Preface

I didn't write this poem to be a poet.

I wrote it because I kept watching people fall, into darkness, into numbness, into the kind of life that moves but doesn't feel. And I couldn't stop seeing it. The ones who run the streets at midnight. The ones who reach for something holy and come back with bloody hands. The ones who know exactly what freedom would feel like but stand trembling at the door of it.

This poem is for them. It is also, honestly, for me.

It is loud because the silence was louder. It is messy because the truth usually is. It reaches for Nietzsche and Gollum and E=mc² not to sound clever but because that is genuinely how a mind in pain moves, everywhere at once, grabbing at anything that might explain the weight.

I don't know if it is a good poem. I know it is an honest one.

If you are someone who has ever felt too awake for this world, too aware, too feeling, too much, then maybe some line in here will find you. That is all I was ever hoping for.

But life goes on.

THE SILENT VOICES

Staring at the street in midnight's dark,

the new moon withholds its light,

cold as the frost on a midwinter morning,

crackling with some borrowed triumph

in the eyes of the pitiless and poor

who run these streets

like madmen circling back to the beginning,

shadows thrown by artificial light,

dimmed and doomed with half-formed ideas.

You. Me. The machinery we've built in our veins

with the fluid of wanting,

the mind games, the charm, the carnival of lust

bubbling furious in the desert cart.

·  ·  ·

Thunder rolls between the gods we've chosen,

yours and mine colliding.

Faithful warriors run for salvation

with holy hands soaked red,

offering magic potions they call hope.

Life stretches too long,

live it like a ghost.

·  ·  ·

The dream of freedom arrives at the door

but fear crowds the threshold,

trembling in the chest,

frightened of the true self waiting there.

We reach for the easy way out

and ruin ourselves quietly, in and out,

while the hallelujah dream drifts off to sleep.

·  ·  ·

The jazz and blues of morning's dew,

the hunger to taste the thing called love,

it could grow into a tree of life,

but we hesitate, muzzled by the norms

of the morons who raised us,

the men and women we come from.

Love ends without bliss.

Kisses lose their meaning

in the dense forest of ideology.

Books are just words scrambled for survival.

Even Nietzsche went mad trying to stay sane.

The disparity is holy.

Life is satanic.

The duality rises from the tomb of dead saints,

from the womb of a virgin world,

and all of us are wild to be ourselves.

·  ·  ·

Life flickers like a firefly

running toward light to see itself inside,

blinded to the dream it chases.

Every alley holds a madhouse.

Every holy place clutches its cluster of values,

turning the honest mind toward madness,

never true to its own kind,

the whole world a carnival of appetite.

·  ·  ·

The crisis in mid-earth begins

as Gollum cradles the ring,

weeping at the bay of freedom

he can't reach.

Meanwhile, bombs hollow the sky

and the monster hovers, indifferent,

offering beds of meaningless urgency.

The crawling and the crippled go unnoticed.

·  ·  ·

The cosmos dances, laughing

at our performance on this stage,

so vague, so unnatural, so immature,

a pig farm dressed as paradise.

And yet,

verse of mercy, eyes of kindness

reach into the darkness beneath the sun

to end what suffering hides there.

But life goes on.

·  ·  ·

They plot and plan toward power,

madly picking the heads of ants

walking the street to buy their things,

thinking and living, living and thinking,

while the closed chapter never opens.

The city burns with the fire of its cries.

Clan clashes with clan, god with god,

boiling the blood of the innocent

until humanity hides its face,

all to crown one head as judge of nature.

·  ·  ·

Hungry faces turn for sympathy

but vanity has taken the mind hostage.

Faith stays silent,

torturing the quiet,

while tears run to oceans and return as rain,

accepted, believed, and ignored.

Words of empathy, condemned and narrated

through the voice of a lost soul,

eyes of aloofness scanning from the corner,

blaming you for the murder of belief,

but the mind remains free.

The gut hides the dirt.

The mouth hides the truth.

But holes show the way,

and so do eyes.

·  ·  ·

The heart keeps yearning,

for your life, for some awful trace of madness,

so confusing, so nasty, so clarifying

that night arrives as mercy after days of trouble.

Smoke fuzzes up from the lungs of the young

seeking relief from the depression

that lies dead in the bed of their dreams.

Feet prepared for the crowd,

trembling alone,

laughter from outside panics the heart,

the end feels near,

fear of sane or insane at the middle of age,

while the flame of the majority's cry

burns whoever dares to turn toward themselves.

But life goes on.

·  ·  ·

Heaven arrives after marijuana,

so clear, so jazzing, so true,

in the state of no-mind,

no walls, no barriers,

the soul catching its pace

to rush toward whatever destiny it carries,

searching for absolute freedom.

But life keeps thinking,

to live, to feel, to sense

the true self we truly possess.

·  ·  ·

The mind chanting E=mc²

in the face of a physics teacher

believes it has found true intelligence,

it states, and states, as it has been stated,

racing through the nerves like blood in veins,

furious and fizzling

as time collapses toward its end.

At midnight, the nightmare returns:

returning to before,

hoping for an after.

Killing the living life in the search for meaning.

To be or not to be,

the question lives in every mind.

The silent war within creates its chaos

at the amplitude of noise,

patternless, yet we endure.

Symphonyless, yet we listen.

Faithless, yet we believe.

And something in each step keeps us alive.

·  ·  ·

Sitting in the middle of chaos,

gathering the useless values and norms,

anchored to a madman in power,

the lust will never be fully cleared.

But dear, life goes on and on.

·  ·  ·

The hip-hop, the raps, the beats,

words of frustration dancing

in the midst of the black-buck's shadow,

revolving around lust and dust.

Oh, life just takes him on the journey to vanity.

The tormenting dream

keeps him awake in full daylight,

conscious but thirstless,

striving to gather the voices hidden deep inside.

What is life itself,

the question tenses every muscle,

the existential crisis

hollowing out from within.

The way is gone, dear. Far gone.

·  ·  ·

The luminous streetlight,

son of the sun,

casts shadow on the walls of giant cement trees

standing at the edge of the world,

so big, so mockingly gigantic,

narrating the life on earth,

the breath we breathe in,

racketing the peace inside the soul.

Desperately, the cult of living appears.

·  ·  ·

The sexy underwear

hiding what they call natural bliss

becomes, in the sick mind,

a reason.

The woman's life torn and dragged

toward a hell that never existed.

These blasts of pain tear the self apart.

But life always goes on and on.

·  ·  ·

The howl and growl of the young mind,

leaning, lingering,

splitting, doubting,

terrorized and horrified,

tendering and crying,

sorrow reaching toward a new life

it wishes to begin at every dawn.

·  ·  ·

This is my age,

where words are trapped below the tongue.

This is my age,

where art begs for a comfort pillow.

This is my age,

where knowing has poisoned the human.

This is my age,

where all are terrified by the passing of time,

tick tock, tick tock…

on the wall of the great compartment,

giving the illusion of a flow that doesn't flow.

This is my age,

where life suffocates in the vision of virtual reality.

This is my age,

where I am mad

and everyone else is sane.

But life goes on.