For the Indolent Reader

by Prakash Kona

Ruminate over impossible beauty,
The chest must know what is
impossible before it is a person,
Nights are nights because it is predetermined
that stars look with cold affection
At an importunate will dancing
in a sea of frailty;
All nights are same because stars
never cease to be ravishing
In that impossible way that makes you want
to beat your hands to the ground;
The nights of haves are not essentially
different from have-nots’,
Both are sleepless and insecure as
days that breed them.
Impossible beauty is a joke
if irony is not intended;
The frustrations of days are
for moments of nights
With promise of calm and fulfillment;
Elusive as nights are words spoken
in dimness of
Streetlamps unnaturally poignant;
Mornings are machines of distillation,
The nerves are ready to be forged
in workshops
Of eyes that dissect permutations
And combinations of the thing
that makes chest heavier by night;
A halo of sleep surrounds labors of living;
We walk through day’s sidewalks guided by
a vague intent that the hereafter
Will not deviate from blueprints of our dreams;
Absorbed in life you are
the unsparing love of children
Giving purpose to purposeless,
The intricacies of passion
love real as bodies
Waking out of exhaustion
mind on tenterhooks
Goading feet seek frontiers
in that reflection of sleep
Called existence;
I’m not an atheist if the god of nights
is an idol that manipulates
Every motion of the limb toward
Freedom punctuated with madness;
The urge to complete is corporeal,
Our dreams indolent as golden fawns
thawing into light.