Free Market Economy
Not for ambition or bread—Dylan Thomas
just when the evening is about to collapse
like a market haggles rattles and shut
his tea settles in a cup bringing a reprieve
behind window a dusty urban Narcissus
flouts lavish curls (on a glossy cell phone)
so that when the day is done and the memory
tucked inside body is worn by sweating labor
nine to five battle with bread culminates
he is on a soft pillow munching dreams
indeed his muse is an aristocrat unaware
of her assets whipping world’s stock exchange
compare to this mean vendor of survival whose
poetic is so undernourished even trees he choose
gasps for more oxygen and grass craves water
the sun is so capitalistic intent on lurching him
a wildness lives at heart’s surroundings.
Hermeneutics
We do not live in proximity
with a sea and neither are
there gods so our pantheon
never originated except an
encounter on a bench since
then only personifications
be any other implicit way
to wind up all our chapters
we shouldered even trees
close by called for glossary
ever since there is a simile
stuck on some page treated
your arms for all sorts of
purposes from a nuanced
analogy to a wild biting
to say I love you was the
death of punctuation till
an alcove of silence and
the book alone shelved.
Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press, Lahore .He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines of the UK, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
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