Thawed blues travel sparingly barricaded by the transparency.
Drip, drip, falls on soft curves,
Cold, cold, the pearls drop.
Past or passing, the motors run rushing.
Tires screeching, one falls off the tin.
Scenes are lagging; juvenile jittering.
Resin hands give glass fabric a push,
Jurisdiction equilibrates things immoral;
Adjacent, scene pivots to the long lover’s quarrel.
Scenes forging, civil man batters a weak three-wheeler.
Machined men run over paltry pedestrian,
For the day is long, so is the maneuvering of the machiavellian.
Schoolmates walk on borrowed time, measured life
With lines on pages that camouflage cages.
Evening sighs, sky launders pearls to thread
Upon the pale blue and violet.
World circles round, for it has tomorrow to dread!
Four Seconds to Midnight
It is ninety seconds to midnight,
Trodden road disappears into the night
Feasted by the forest.
Hours of darkness mushroom over the hamlet.
Cicadas impede the silence, their white noise
Remembered, irksome reality reinstates.
Nocturnal shift begins.
Tangled chords of omen-sealed owls and cricket
Cut through the bleak after-dark.
Moonlight drips on midnight mass.
Banshees banished; wails altered!
Houses blend into the dark.
Fear coagulates, It comes out at night!
Distant cries unearth the insignificant others;
A nuptial nocturnal contention, one can not quite
Curb that chaos in chambers.
Everything’s glossed over and
It is four seconds to midnight.
Afnan Bintey Helal, originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh, has recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Linguistics from East West University.