Isle of Dreams

​Is there anyone here

who could let me in?

I stand as an outsider,

in the rain,

despite years of toil

to get accepted into

the various dreams I weaved,

saving some as songs,

many more as visions of grandeur,

and nightmares to bore my soul.

They let me breathe in my sleep​.​

​The deep sighs

whistle through the stale air

over my bed,

like the breeze at a beach

carrying the salt ​of my existence

to an isle afar​ where

​proud n loud neon billboards​ scream​.

Free entry for all, they say,

but caution: Kids at play!

-- Leslie Xavier

Light Banter With The Bulb

​In between a siesta

and a night slated for grammar,

I find a canyon

to banish the scripted emails, 

as punishment.

Many remain in obscurity there,

others return after sunset,

and remind the dwellers

of Nazareth,

words are immortal.

The subject lines who made it,

and ​the woefully inadequate boy,

dance on a wooden stage,

the rickety scaffolding,

creaking under the 

weight of expectation.

It is night now,

the light bulb says mockingly,

singing ​a ​glowing tribute to normalcy,

but ​a ​long shadow lurks

just beyond his narrow mind,

bolted like my front door.

It keeps the couriers out,

food slips in; 

thoughts and vision hardly do,

the essential commodities, desolately so.

-- Leslie Xavier

​A ​Fever​. The​ Fervour!

The still air,

hot, dry and dejected,

reminds​ ​of the fever last night.

Where​... when,​​​

in a mindless act of restlessness,

the citizen, a protagonist,

took an umbrella,

stood on the terrace,

and sang the rain song,

cried for childhood!

It was windless even then,

but the trees swayed,

a ​dance, ​​a trance,

to the tune of

amendments made in haste,

in hatred,​ ​in ​​apathy​... 

Oh, the fervour​.

Fever it is​,

in ​the many shades​ of skin,​

​in the diverse ​layers of nationhood.

-- Leslie Xavier 

The Fallen Champa Tree

I turned slyly away from 

a fallen friend,

the mellow red comrade 

whose philosophy I watered once.

She pleaded... Not guilty;

it was the storm.

I walked away, and now,

in the night it haunts me,

an eerie song.

I toss and turn.

Sprawled on her side,

helpless, bleeding perhaps,

while I rushed 

toward the unkempt side,

the place where I depart

from empathy,

and opt for a juggle,

a skip across time and space,

balancing the lefts and rights

of breathing a lie, living a truth.

A fairy tale rings the bell,

where a proud man

fell to his knees

and then the author helped

him become a fable

for little kids

to learn from.

Lesson One: Never walk away

when aspiration bites the dust.

But, oh but, I am in a perpetual fall.

The Epilogue

She stands tall again,

an arm missing

but the soul green, 

evergreen...

Have you seen the soul,

I prod my shadow

as he turns away again,

hiding his face,

fading into the anonymity

offered by a setting sun.

-- Leslie Xavier

Stormy Lullaby

I could smell it all,

the dust, ashes and

the ghosts of Mehrauli...

This raging storm 

— the summer kind —

awakened 'em all tonight,

a li'l past midnight.

But all I sensed was the stench

from the rotten, sinful

human spirit yonder.

 

Oh, stop shuddering

my timid window, my heart,

this is but temporary...

Permanence is in the other

tempest, the face of reality;

the one that makes the wind

seem a better man than men.

It exudes love,

allows my wind chime to sing,

and my daughter to sleep.

-- Leslie Xavier