Photosynthesis

Just smile wanly at the summer sun,
Feign warmth within and shut your mirrors still…
Exhale the truth until thy shards are spun
Into the gelid heathen who’d stolen all your will.

Do ask the blind what visions has he seen
And picture them one feeling at a time,
Then carved them out like an infected spleen
Hold back the shards and chew a bit of lime.

Now beg the cripple to lend its scrawny hand
And grasp the shelf you’ve worn out from within,
There’s things on it that you forgot to mend
And other still more worthy of the bin.

Solipsism

We’re roaming through the snickets of our own pantomime
With closed-up shelves and frost upon the mirror,
Confused and cold, unable to define
What makes us true and why we’re getting nearer

To solipsism and its pervasive sleaze,
What rigmarole of unfit fallacies…
It’s sickening how we abide with ease
By quick comfort and foul fantasies.

We’ve smuggled pain and traded phony shards
Only to crave the honesty of truth,
And now this truth stifles our house of cards
And there’s no buyers lining in front our booth.

The straggler

#generated by AI from last quatrain

Look at his saunter – this blackened mirror straggler
He has no past but time just owes him one,
He could’ve been the hero not the haggler
But now he plunders shelves to carry on.

This ennui won’t help his peaty mirror
Lackluster shelves lay hidden in plain sight,
Shedding their shards yet never getting clearer
Until their truth is nothing but a plight.

He’s just a thrall to an impending sunset
Watching the birds circling summer sky,
Faltering now and then with no sense of regret
Until the mirror’s black and shelf is almost dry.

The long winter

Oh how those mirrors withered your resolve
Unfocused still and reflecting the past,
Lacking of shards but hoping to absolve
Whatever sins have made your winter last.

Oh how that silence’s deafening the shelf
Ablating parts the cripple used to feel,
So here it haunts – ghost of forgotten self
A feeble thing left for the time to peel.

Oh how this shade is nothing but a fast
A self-imposed withdrawal from the truth,
How can the cripple with a broken cast
Run fast enough to leave behind its ruth?

Braneworld

#created with midjourney from 1st line

An ocean of misgivings now batters at your brane,
A restless tide of slumber rummaging at its seams
Poking the wretched shelf until it goes insane,
And silting it with sunsets and terrifying dreams

Of a world beyond the brane where heathens grieve
Where mirrors have no tint of ageless wars,
A world where shelves are not afraid to give
And cripples don’t sleep naked on the floors.

Here is a séance conducted by the blind
In hope of reaching mirrors that can see,
To maybe shed some light on what’s behind
And glimpse the truth they never dared to be.

Shadow Play

Beyond the reach of the mundane time squanders,
Frail souvenirs left from another life –
A churning sea of craven thoughts that wander
Through quarries carved by the relentless strife.

Disgruntled shelves weep silence in the shadows
Like involutes of darkness weaved within,
Twirling the lie that no one ever shows
Until the truth has nowhere to begin.

So when the squalls finally reach that alcove
And when the lining withers with dismay,
There’s nothing there to rekindle the stove –
A dried-up shelf consumed by its own fray.

Nonsense V – Neshez Le Galavli

He woke up in a different bed than the one he usually slept in. She was mad at him – he sensed, that’s why they slept in different beds, but he just couldn’t remember what the reason was.
He had some things to do outside and so he went towards the exit door. While passing by his usual bedroom he saw her lying sideways on the bed, with a leg bent at the knee like a ballerina doing a fancy pirouette. She wore a brown hoodie, a black beanie and boxers. He could still see the rest of that long charcoal black hair of hers spilling like an angry sea over her back and the shape of her ass. He stood there for a few seconds mesmerized, just looking at her, feeling how the hurt of their separation intensified. Just when he thought he couldn’t bear it anymore she rose her head, opened her eyes and looked at him expressionless, without saying a word, without anger or hurt in those black eyes – just the sleepy, dreamy demeanor that one has when they wake up.

And then he manned up and walked out the door silently, while she went back to sleep.

Outside, he picked up his phone and saw he had a missed call from grandma. That was weird – grandma doesn’t have a phone and even if she had, she doesn’t know how to use one.
After whatever he had to do was done, he went back inside and decided to go back to sleep beside her, in his own bed. But this time he was the one wearing a black beanie and just when he was about to put his head on the pillow he heard her stretch and yawn and make all of those mumbling noises people make when they wake up.

He must’ve dozed off for a few minutes because the next thing he saw was her at the head of the bed, wearing a black dress with 3 quarter sleeves and naked shoulders. She looked different, her face looked different like she wasn’t her anymore, the hardened jaw line, the pale white face made her seem like she was terribly upset but trying to endure it in a stoic manner. He was convinced the woman he looked at did not look like her but somehow he felt it was still her. And she was singing something like “Neshez Le Galavli”. It was a beautiful song, a bit sad like the songs that those medieval minstrels always sing in movies but he couldn’t help feeling deeply afraid for some reason, it felt ominous. He couldn’t recognize the language she sang in at first but just when the sleep fog disappeared he felt he recognized it – it was Turkish. In that same second he also saw his cousin singing the same song at the head of the bed, both of them women seemed enthralled with the song and their eyes seemed focused somewhere in mid air like a singer that’s completely into his performance, oblivious to the public.
He was stupefied and asked them: Do you guys speak Turkish?!? But they didn’t answer and continued singing.
And then he woke up for real.

Ruse

What ruse you’d conjured through these sighs
An intrepid detachment from thyself,
It spread within like mold under the guise
Of darken shards forgotten on the shelf.

The paucity of truths had never lied,
Its sequitur spoke plainly on your face
You took the cradled silence as a guide,
To roam alone that light-forsaken place

Where rose-hips never grow yet wither still
And dreams bequeathed sorrow to the blind,
Where thoughts are thrown in darkness for the thrill
And hope is brought to slaughter the confined.

Restart

↺

A cruel debt has put us on the run
And now it hides in corners of the mirror,
Intransigent and scorching like the sun
To singe our way yet never getting nearer.

Exhaustion fidgets on fingertips of time
Enthralled again by summer apathy,
We can’t ignore this script-less pantomime
And will our eyes to cuss a silent calumny.

A baleful look is not enough to thwart
The whims and hopes of a corrupted mind,
So here it is – thy shelf’s only retort
Just like directions – but taken from the blind.

There’s beauty in the sadness of our times
Enjoying it takes just a seasoned heart,
There’s good somewhere between our petty crimes
But finding it requires a restart.

Bearer

And when it rains it pours like it’s the end of time,
The blinds are pulled and shiver through the terror
There’s lightning out but darkness in your mind,
There’s also something in reminding of the bearer…

As if you could forget the chaos that seeps in
Through gilded mirrors framed by the raven sea,
Thy shelf had no idea that it would have to swim
Nor you have any clue on how to set it free.

But now the heathen can’t help you anymore
This strain is stronger than any you have seen,
Mysterious and silent, it infiltrates the core
Reminding you again that you have nearly been

Diluted yet confined into ethereal bliss
Absent-mindedly colluded with the thief,
To drown thy shelf and lose to the abyss
All that the cripple looted – the memories and grief.