Rizwan Akhtar

Lockdown

(2016, Islamabad)
The end of art is peace. Seamus Heaney

The protest seeps in walls and holes
of the city —


police shower bullets
bodies bend and scamper


bricked-soul, mortar-heart
a skeleton of guns hover


over intruders barbing tongues
to no end, behind cordoned pickets


they sway under Dionysian spell
the country is run by make-shift oracles —


out there in the middle of human heads
you are a Teiresias dithering in divination


though not meant to take sides and yet
your charming spin on words


of poems firing discontent
bellistic in intention and diction


an army of latent expressions
commanding drastic ends


in squirmed soliloquies
and borrowed conclusions


a parliament of language snores
squint-eyed, cocked-hands

your bored readers scatter
others drowse over interpretations.