I see strangers with my face Wave at me from afar They line the luminous city With knowledge in their hand While I am fishing for sequin sardines Left upon the land In my mind the caltrops stops Every thought that grew from ground For Promethean parentheses My open mind is unsound I shift and sway, I shift and sway Holding on to sweet yesterday For the World’s decree Is that dreams are free But to breathe life in them I have to pay
Pauper with papers I write of thousand priceless things I have feathers made of vapours But that does not make them wings So I turn around and retreat When it’s time for me fly For who would lend a lap When it’s time for me to die I have my fingers in the sand And I am searching for lost time Would I be shown mercy in the end If I solved my own crime?
She lay on the bed like an open book And in the dim yellow light In the diaphanous albumin desire To surrender and to conquer I dreamt that I could read her Line after line Passage after passage Page after page Till nothing more remained Other than the bookmarked memories Those handwritten notes In the folded corners To revisit and renew our love That obsolete imitation Of imperfect life's pursuit for perfection
Mercury in my mind I hold solace in my sleep If shallow is my heart Why would my feelings run deep?
She was written anonymous In a language I couldn't read I was a gardener in need of shade But knew not the type of seed So I waited with bated breaths With my hand close to her spine Should I turn the first page of her tresses Or lay her open and in my hands supine In my listless mind I would picture her As a shape I could never comprehend So I went for the last pages To see if I could know her in the end But the ending was the same as beginning She was holding herself too close As if the hand that wrote her never bothered To find if she was a lily or a rose
Do not open your heart For you would have to borrow it’s beats And the lending would stop If another heart she meets
Night after night I searched for her sorrow Against the scale of her past I weighed her tomorrow Numbering her pages I stained my fingers deep blue But her corners remained same Nebulous and new I went through the hyphens The colons and commas I passed through every comedy All tragedies, each drama Till lo and behold I could feel on my lips The words of her next chapters As if by my fingertips But O was I wrong And I was so wrong For it was her voice Singing my song And her pages they were Black from my hand Having unwritten her story In a rage to understand Mine was the fault For I should have known I was just a plagiarist Writing her as my own
I can feel my skin Drip on the floor Like the ink in my bottle I hold words no more
Evenings; splashed like red wine on canvas Now turn dark Eyelash by falling eyelash As I meditate upon the traffic sounds Upon the streetlights And the indistinguishable net of voices Falling over me Like a little rain, this brittle pain Should I see now Should I share The weight of those fingers Which rested upon my iliac crest Like a promise of an afterlife? Maybe my heart is not a heart afterall Maybe it’s a spade; A leaf leftover from the fall Black and decaying Prone to praying Lost and afraid Saying what’s been said Over and over Slower and slower Till its heartbeat’s no more Than a pulse on my wrist Which l bartered for love And ceased to exist
We should have been born in oyster shells Our lives a lunar cycle Circling the moon within our womb For this warm darkness I guzzle This phantom of my lies Lies like a lotus on my lips A rootless need sans a seed That divides and conquers All my desires which anchors The ships of my souls On your face with four moles And I know that the distance Has kept us apart And the time has been ending Right from the start And now and then again Our words have gone sparse Drowned by those voices Who called ours a farce But the ocean is changing There are waves which find home In shaping sandcastles Where they no longer roam
I wish I could dance And drown in my sorrow I wish I could regret My mistakes of tomorrow I wish I could be Someone you see Knowing what I am And what you want me to be So I try to separate My dream from the reason And hold back my love In my arms; this prison Inherited over years From those before me Who searched for freedom And found it’s not free
Every poet wants to be painter And every painter a poet It is the faint mist Between words and things visible Where great minds Are led astray, You can say From the paper bouquet of your everyday life From the half chewed pencil of your clerical nights; That I with my bedroom lights Turned off Am turned on By the slow shape And soft luminescence of the moon But that would be, probably A crescent quote; Lying halfway between truth and lie And even though it may soothe The immediate argument Like bolt of the door Thoughts would come knocking One midnight at a time Till madness makes me forget my heartbeat And remember only the soft taps The gentle creaks Of those faint footsteps Approaching Dim lit corridors of my conscience Asking to be heard To be understood But in my fragmented prophecies; At the altar of my falsehood I am an orphan Asked to adopt my parents And I am in a mood to err To give over to the permanent suffocation Of savoury sadness That comes from cold hugs In a stuffed room Filled with trophies and dolls Framed history on the walls And the pitter patter of acid rain On the window at dinner time For the cusp of my boyhood Was never crossed by me It appears I shed My skin on the bed And awoke An old man With childish desires Of milk and marmalade At the corner of my lips And though it is said That I have grown and growing Into a man the world can count upon I hardly know the numbers To make it count The stillness of my dreams Is a motion sickness; And I am diving against the gravity Unable to comprehend Home from horizon While the pivot of my existence Is a spinning top Balanced upon a raindrop Being painted by a poet Who writes for his pain to stop
It is the morning after And I awake as an origami undone Only yesterday I had her arm on my chest With mine anchored round her waist Balancing our seesaw soul Making whole Those pieces we planted Like bookmarks to find The stories we memorised Keeping in mind Going almost insane Being blinded by pain Once kayaking in chaos To feel alive again
Now I watch my face shiver In the ether of her eyes Now I am fire cold with fever Falling on the rise She is here She is mine She has no say to say Far near Dear divine So I kneel but not to pray Now I watch her face shiver In the ether of my eyes Now I am fire with her fever She is falling when I rise
But I dare not confess that I dreamt of her In the early hours of last night For that would be blasphemy My being alone With only her memory Drenched monochromes Some charcoal art Of me painting her toenails pink And she murmuring shape of my heart Waiting for the words to sink
For her voice is my hymn in exile And here I wander, mile by mile A broken kite Dead dynamite Waiting for her mirage to draw me closer Towards sun kissed horizons Across daydreaming dunes And purple fields Of my pulsing past Through this desert vast, desolate and slow I search for her As the seconds grow
I can see her white hands over black countertop Passing pepper into the pot Waiting for me to finish my worship of her Waiting for me to open the refrigerator And take half a dozen eggs to scramble To toss and turn The yolk and white In the shade of the dim light Wafting from her seashell skin With wafer thin petrichor Of our last night’s rain (Did I drown in her hair? Did my gasps made her growl? Did we swim in stolen silence? Did our motions knew our goal? To be, to be Half mad in ecstasy The sea falling apart At the lips of an estuary)
The dress does to her What dust does to a diamond But she knows it not Even when I beg; a child in disguise To breathe over her facets Between her navel and her thighs But she laughs and she turns Like flower between ferns She waxes into full moon And I am a candle that ever burns To ignite at her sight To surrender without a fight To be answer to her questions Which were never answered right
Has an ant ever crossed an ocean Or a swan reached the sun Has any flower ever saved a thorn Or lost love ever won
II
I scratched; Upon the whitewashed wall of my sanctum My nails bled With the semicolons and commas But the pain that rested Like autumn in my chest Stayed The heartbeats shifting dark roots and yellow leaves A raw pulse Decaying With each bartered breath (Perhaps I have written these lines before Or perhaps I have felt the same Long time back When out of the blue The blackness took over Like a bubble of bile)
Sometimes I want to be another man Someone whose shallow thoughts Never leaves his hollow lips And if I were to dissect myself In a cold blue room And remove these tumours that I can feel Lying along my spine like roadblocks I may perhaps get better But I do not want to be better Not alone and not by myself For I know my hand would betray Even if the scalpel stays loyal
So I sew my torn sweater One stitch at a time And I can feel at the back of my neck The mist beyond the window Hiding a drowsy world A quiet world From the memories of Edgar Allen Poe I don’t know… For I am sewing my sweater One stitch at a time
It is easier to break than build My grandmother told me Long ago, when my shoe size was half of what it is now We were sitting in the veranda Watching sparrows without nests Search for shade Her wrinkled hands were beautiful They knew only to give To me, to the sparrows Her today for our tomorrows I did not understand what she meant Only that she meant what she said
III
The face of my love Is an enigma A diamond made of star dust And dew drops I have seen her as none have During hours longer than light In dreams deeper than the night And yet if I were to hold A paintbrush Her shape would disappear In the shadows of my mind Like fragrance does from a flower
I know her to be beautiful Like rainbow after rain Or an ocean undressing at midnight Whispering the tales Of sailors and their sails And I often try In an absentminded earnestness That of a child never chided To try and catch her featherlight hair To hold that waterfall The obsidian madness as she sways Like a soft swan Without silhouette
The nights are hard Rebels and roses And I write of my love in poems and proses As I reach for the soft molasses Surrounding my heart Breaking and bleeding From Cupid’s blue dart
She taught me to write, you know… When all I could do was recite And bruise the pages Perhaps I with all my innocence Was nothing but a man wanted for my own murder But with her I am me; Irrepressibly free A child dressed in clothes too big for him. Perhaps I never grew up after 2007 Forever eleven An Abandoned ectoplasm Morphed in shape by satire Drowning in the desire To be wanted and stay haunted By the spectre of love
IV
I am rhyming the verses For I know nothing more My poems are to the paper What waves are to the shore
I painted a white line Upon a blank canvas And the people they praised me no more They could not see; That the painting was an echo Of my silence that wasn’t seen before
The broken flowers they fell at my feet Gold and silver, ebony and peat And I knew not where this road may lead Will I find in the end what I need And I need... A silence in the shape of the sun A bit of violence with the face of a nun And someone who won't turn and run When I face down the barrel of a gun But hear now... I don't have a penny to pay as your price I spend my nights cold and filled up on rice And I know my heart is my own greatest vice Always afraid that my love won't suffice You can see... Out there those houses of princes and kings Whilst I can only shelter you neath my own wings And I have no diamonds to tie our rings Just the hollow of my chest to rest your sufferings So beware... Of my sweet words that may seduce and sway They only ache so to take you away And keep you happy come what it may We will be children till our hair turn grey But I know... This poem seems just a practice in rhymes And does not cover the cost of past crimes But I shall spend every penny and all of my dimes For our today and the end of our times So... Never forgive if you want but don't forget The magic of those moments we met And I wonder if it's my heart you now so hate But wasn't our love written by the hands of the fate? Thus I say… The broken flowers they fell at my feet Gold and silver, ebony and peat And I knew not where this road may lead Will I find in the end what I need And I need… You
