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.