Ask me no questions friend
There is so much I can’t say
My hands are folded for handcuffs
They aren’t here for me to pray
The mindless things they claimed me
Long ago when I was young
I swallowed whole words of law
And now I have no tongue
They asked me to keep away
That my footsteps usher in plagues
Been buried I have been so deep
I no longer have my legs
And yet I have been told to repent
In the hope that I may sin
My life is left to the coin toss
It’s only in the air that I win
I found the whiskey sages
Dancing in the dim
Their eyes on the music
And carved teeth on crystal rim
They wore leather gloves and spandex
They carried bullets in their heads
They spoke of liberty and lunacy
And took daydreams to their beds
I found the wounded women
Walking down the aisle
Their face a plastic painting
Melting for a smile
They held too many secrets
Their eyes were far too bright
For a world that loved the dark
Who wished let there be no light
I found the neon soldiers
Trapped beneath a grenade pin
Soon to be a sea of roses
For it is the war that always win
They guarded children in the basement
They were taught to stand and fight
They were told the recoil’s same
Even if the barrel’s wrong or right
I found my fallen pieces
Flowing down the ice cold river
My skin the colour of water
Burning with an old fever:
I had seen the cards beforehand
And called out the eternal bluff
With so many lives to play
One life is not enough
I draw myself
With a red charcoal
Still breathing and burning
In afterlife
The shape of my head is a shade
Made of thousands of fingerprints
Left by all the people I met
Some I remember
But mostly I forget
Those with their teeth
Sunk in my throat
As if ripping me apart
For the words that I wrote
Wind takes my torso and I am turning into a tide
Flowing with flayed limbs;
Deeper into the drawing
Past pulp of the paper
Into the girth of the ground
Like roots and fruits
I am sold by the pound
Sold to wishes and worship
Sold to order and obedience
Sold to answers and acceptance
Sold to nothing and negligence
Transparent flesh
I design my thoughts so they can please
Eyes of the beholder
And as I grow older
I intend to paint myself as a mosaic man
And many see in me
What I may see in many:
Eyes coming closer
Merging on the bridge of my nose
A single center
For my dissolving circumference
And it is odd to fall inwards
For the implosion leaves no leftover
Other than the suspended emptiness
In the middle of the throat
That neither screams nor stays silent
But echoes; this pencil stroke pain
Rising, apprising my churning nerves
Like nails dragged upon my spine
The shadow beneath my feet
Portends a prerequisite that light must be nearby
So I shade, the lines of my face
The folds in my dress
Gifting myself my gratitude
In a bow made of shoelace
For I am poor man
Who breaks one pencil in two halves
And loses both in no time
For I am poor man
Who when his world is being coloured
Pretends it is a crime
Most nights I sleep
Sitting and looking at a blank canvas
As if it is the canvas which is painting me
In colours kept secret by mirrors and mirages
It is sad though that feelings cannot be reflected
Only inflicted and affected
Feelings by their virtue of being
A past participle and present continuous
Is man’s eternal tense
A void with wisdom
Aware that the sum of all it’s infinities
Is simply a zero
There are times when I rhyme
My gestating philosophy
With archaic words
So that when I speak
There is rebirth
And I am assured
That my thoughts
Those infinitesimal, dust motes
Will live on
In the veins of mortals
Addicted to immortality
So perhaps I draw myself
In a way I shouldn’t be drawn
For who has seen one using charcoal
To colour the perfect swan
But I am not a swan, you see,
I am crow beaten black and blue
In an attempt to create something new
Out of desolate frequencies
And distilled time
A still life portrait
Dead by design
I heard
There are things
Out in the woollen nights
Mosaics of happenstances
And matchstick quick delights
A life of unbuttoned jeans and restless jazz
And lipstick stained tissue papers
Left on countertops
Under empty whiskey glasses and beer mugs filled with vapour
Proof of a life at once loud and empty
Like a vacant microphone
Filled with dreams of hunger
Like a dog with a buried bone
O how the mind meanders
In the test tube alleyways
A ghetto full of false fire
Spreading shadow for many days
I heard
There are people
Who count the twelve strokes of midnight
Yawn at the break of dawn
And search for moon in the twilight
And gather molten menagerie
In the effervescence of aftershave
Wherein the limbs are nests of Nirvana
And love a motion to enslave
Till the flame of faces; it withers,
And only wax is left to blame
Those shivering shadows differ
Like every lover with a new name
I heard
There are places
Where mortal wounds entwine
And life is bet on races
Which has no finish line
Here the dyslexic dystopia
Begins beneath one’s roof
And the mythical myopia
Does not end without a proof
Dying under disco lights
I lay colour blind to the pain
Needles upon my tongue
And yet I am singing in the rain
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
I wish I could be the colour blue
Not sapphire or cerulean
But something old
And something new
As if waves of the ocean
Are carrying pieces of the sky
Moonlight and stardust
Dipped in indigo dye
A deeper azure
A cobalt that will fade
Part turquoise, part teal
Your shade, your shade…
It’s a terrible tragedy you see
To be away from you
The farther you are
The fainter I get
The harder you hold
The longer I wait
Tonight the edges of my soul are clear
And I can see my heartbeats through my chest
They come and disappear
They pulse and fade
Alive and dead
Red over red
I can hear the wall clock
Can hear the teeter tatter of the seconds
Turn into the silent hour
An hour without you
Then one and half, then two
I am mesmerised in the act of missing you
Part proud, part desperate
Juggling memories and dreams
Promises and themes
Like Picasso and his paint
Rhyming his story and history
Balancing the devil and the saint
I close my eyes now and then
And hold you to my chest
Close enough to collapse
Onto myself
First in tears, followed by laughter
Then silence much after
Dents in my denial
Rust on my reins
I falter like a colt
And stand still until it pains
Deep enough for my marrow
To call out your name
Madly enough for my mind
To believe that you indeed came
The night is falling fast
And I am writing against the flow
To reach the side of your shore
Where you await in your pink bow;
That tiara of innocence
Which broke me
Slowly apart
Till I lost all of my aces
To the hand of the queen of heart
So, I just want to wait and watch;
You are driving me slowly mad
Like the purple in your hair clips
My soul is right kind of sad
Ink on my puffed up lips
I kissed your poetry tonight
Blood on my fingertips
From the verses I had to fight
Now people they come and claim
That they know you as well as me
They may have tasted one drop sometime
But don’t know the depths of this sea
And I have fallen and I am falling
Hand me the hem of your chiffon dress
And I have called and I am calling
To surrender my pieces of chess
For it’s you who hold me now
Gravity is not part of the game
Let go and you shall see just how
I get lost in the search of your name
So, I just want to wait and watch;
You are driving me slowly mad
Like the purple in your hair clips
My soul is right kind of sad
I wrote on paper
And was called a poet
I wrote on walls
And was asked to wait
On a chair nailed to the floor
In a cold, cold white room
Where the only sound was of my breath;
No different from a writer’s womb
So I sat in the pleated emptiness
With a glass of water left to precipitate
Watching the walls seduce me to sadness
When the pendulum peeled an eight
And in came this ladybug green
Glasses carved on the tip of her nose
She had grey pad and a bald blue pen
And a red ring in the shape of rose
‘Ahem, ahem’ She said ‘Ahem, ahem’
And I coughed and cleared my throat
She looked at me for a second
Then this is what she wrote:
‘The subject is kind of rude
He has no manners so to speak
He sits like a beggar on his throne
A man of power sold in sale to the weak’
It made no sense, nonsense, I tell you
For she was no poet for god’s own sake
She was too tidy to have chaos inside
And that is how I knew she was fake
‘The subject now seems annoyed
He is watching me with furrowed brows
As if I have stolen something of his
And now pretending that everyone knows’
Ah the audacity of this usurper
Who claims my kingdom as her own
I have pieces of paper in my pocket
And a dozen verses to loan
‘The subject is trying to smile
And I am feeling all sick and ill
There is wrong with his mind
He says naught but I can feel’
She knows nothing of my madness
Of how it hurts to sit and smile
For only writing on the wall
I pretend to die once in a while
‘The subject has tears in his eyes
Maybe my saying something will change
But what should I say at this point
That will not make him seek revenge’
The fool, the fool is writing
And what a caricature does she draw
Looking from behind a pair of glasses
She writes what she thinks she saw
‘The subject does not comply
To any form of my treatment
So must be treated in harsher terms
Or in an asylum must be sent’
Oh I did snatch her pen and pad
And wrote down my own choice
Before you judge what others have said
First make sure if they even have a voice…