Anonymous

I wrote this poem at 4 AM on November 8, 2016, aftermath of American election. It was subsequently published in the University of California newspaper- http://synapse.ucsf.edu/articles/2016/11/09/anonymous

It is 4 AM in San Francisco.

Deep night overwhelms the emptiness.

I would like to stay in this dark forever.

I feel safe here-

no one knows my skin,

no one knows my religion,

no one knows my sexuality.

I see hues chasing the ropes of the Golden Gate.

When light goes out on the bridge for a moment,

the city becomes the loudest in anonymity-

no shame of being America!

A Night In San Francisco

Murmuring breeze and November showers
threw the Westward sun into the Ocean Beach.
Neon lights coalesced into a rainbow in Castro.
Echoes of rhythmic clubs and million ambitions
crawled the tall ceilings of the downtown.
They screamed in the ears of a thousand graffiti.
Dreams were shattered on the sidewalks of Tenderloin.
Mist of the Bay conspired against
weary eyes, hungry lips, and desperate youth.
Money could not vanquish the banality of filth
and the bright light mocked incessant babel.
Undiagnosed pain lived and died,
but the city moved on as if every day. 

35 Years Later

Everything moved unusually fast,
like an afternoon sandstorm
coalescing into evening shadows.
35 years later,
I sat by snowy purgatory and reminisced.

High tides of twilight rushed
inside a buried prisoner.
I was a man of fading luster.
Tears of past blurred my eyes.
I heard crackled sounds of bones
underneath the flourish of immoral spring.
Vain sculptures of red water and stone
rose tall in the fury of disdain.
Time plundered all the illusion.
My despair became a deafening conversation
between struggle and surrender.
My being was an absurd continuum.
So was the lure of love in the Eden,
where vultures and snakes bite each other
in an eternal dance.
What a descent of man!