By Jose Varghese
Colours of an Island
Islanders learn to shut their eyes
to the colours others vie to capture
behind self-indulgent faces.
Born to it, seen enough of the kind
that invites the scorn of even
the dreamless, they learn to live
in grey shades on white space.
.
All that drifts ashore are
the ugly remnants of what once
lured life. Longings stuffed
in fantasy aren’t enough to reclaim
the colours lost in aquamarine heaves.
.
The mainland dumps its visions
on them, the blissfully ostracized.
It envies the burly waves
that mock senseless captures.
.
The sea paints the shore in colours
that reek of dead light rays,
bodies in decay still trapped
to a mind that moves, the way
a dead hermit-crab floats, encased
in mad hopes that refuse to break.
.
Scary Silence
A sound implodes
the silence you keep
enclosed in high walls.
.
You raise an eyebrow.
Ears fail to catch even
the noise of your
eyelashes cutting air
in thin brush strokes.
.
I freeze. Your unmoving
lips stretch to a grin.
Your silence creeps on me
as you embrace death.
.
Jose Varghese is a bilingual writer/editor/translator. His first poetry collection was Silver Painted Gandhi and Other Poems (2008). He was a finalist in Beverley Prize 2018 and his works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best Asian Short Story Anthology, Dreich, Meridian: The Drunken Boat APWT Anthology of New Writing, Unveiled, Unthology 5, Chandrabhaga, Postcolonial Text, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine and so on. He was a runner up in the Salt Flash Fiction Prize 2013 and two Faber QuickFic contests, two Eyewear Fortnight Poetry Prize competitions, and was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize 2014.
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