I saw myself in the sundried leaves,
In the lost rustle of a tired morning,
And the ache reminded me
Of my words in a wastebasket,
Shrivelled and softened by the ceramic blows
Of a morning tea
And I dared not unravel
The smothered ink
With my teaspoon
For who knows what wound,
Its mutilated mind would bestow,
As a belly on my boon.
I chose rhyme over meaning
And choose doors over ceiling,
Walking away
From under trapped moon,
Those uneclipsed chandelier
Into another room:
A quiet place,
A simpler explanation,
Survival through survival,
Where my shadow is not my rival.
The dawn taught me to look for the sun,
But dusk divided my attention,
Its scattered light through broken ice
Like a melting rainbow
Of myriad thoughts,
And the colours drowning time
Till all that remains of the pain
Is silent suffocation
Dark made breath
And men made death
So I befriended the feeling of loneliness
The echoes had things to say,
But the conversation fell silent,
When the game found that there is only one to play.
Often, half my heart is in something else,
For the idea of wholehearted surrender,
The sin of transparency, of nakedness
Of allowing others to converse:
With the frightened child; nascent and wild,
With the broken man; unwilling to understand,
With the future me; who can no more foresee,
Is a debt of denial.
There is a shimmer in my soul,
But they are just ashes in the hole,
There are wrinkles on my heartbeat
And every second takes a toll.
My worst memories are dreams,
Nightmares; imagined and shaped,
Catalogued with colours,
Perfected without an escape.
So I can train for the agony,
The world was supposed to bring,
That’s why I focused on the chorus,
When I was supposed to sing.
Hear, the murmur that passes from the window into the ink,
Hear, the poetry teeming with applauses from the bottom of the sink,
Hear, the tragedies being turned with the poker by the hearth,
Hear, the comedies being created at the moment of our birth.
Category: prose
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Ceramic Mornings
-
Mythmaker
I was sentenced to make myths for men.
There I stood, assembled,
In the centre of a blank room:
Unadorned and without any orifice,
Time for me was a corpse in an ocean,
Swollen, floating, rotten, unrecognisable
But the salt still stung,
As if death had forgotten about the pain of passing.
The silence of the world rested like mist upon my mind,
A common sobriquet, I know, but still one of its kind,
Oh and the dark took it, and made me one of its own,
But I know not textures of such thoughts,
This enslavement comes from whispers;
Those slow daggers,
Aimed at my slower spine.
But I do dream beyond this shackled dream;
This walled precipice,
I carry out my sentence,
In a sense that makes me, my own judge and jury,
And weave myths,
For those who dip their finger in the wind,
To fold the fabric of the world,
One corner at a time.
Am I God?
The omnipotent earthling of heaven and hell?
The omnipresent search of science and eastern religion?
The omniscient questioner of Egypt and Israel?
No.
Perhaps, yes.
Perhaps, we all are a perhaps,
A song on the shore made from echoes of lost oars,
Each of us existing for the existence of other,
We each another’s child,
We each another’s mother.
Seems I have turned the men themselves into myth,
So, another life sentence for me;
I never learn,
And it is a gift. -
Dithyramb
03:00 AM
…Fragments fill me
And I ramble unheard
Part-time prophecies
Those cancer of choices
Growing—like an echo fades
Quieter and quieter
Thus, that closer to death
Fragments—crawling
To heal age old wounds
Once festered, now turned to fountains
But will those ever ebb
Once the path has been found
To let go, never to return
In the tombs underground
The question alas, is one of consequence
More than the conscience
11:00 AM
Most of my mornings
Are straight lines drawn one after another
An exercise in forgetting myself
In the labyrinth of memories
Same thoughts, same turns
Falling like Tetris
Deriving and dissolving
My life in daily dogma
The dithyramb
At once beautiful and grotesque
In simplicity and anonymity
Of existence
06:00 PM
Often I dream of my nakedness
Knowing, I am never truly bare
For I may close my eyes
But my skin stays aware
Of other eyes on me
Knives that can see
Hear and speak
Bury and seek
Desires and disasters
Broken laughter thus cast out in plaster
On being a servant with no master
But only the sense of subjugation
Builds as arthritis in my knees
I claim no consensus with my shadow
And this ocean has no keys
So my fears, they appear
Upon waves not truly mine
Thus I plead the fifth amendment
For forging my own sign
02:59 AM
On numb days and sensitive nights
The fear of fight and feeling of flight
Is what I must wholly wear
When I am made to appear
For a jagged stone set soft in satin
Is as rare as writing latin
To make the pieces fall into place
And make the mosaic world force a face
Something I could draw
In my dreams
Coloured black
Like silent screams
Mimicking the wall clock as it kills
Every hour as eternity heals
So the balance—it never breaks
And the circle evens the stakes
And the empty is once again made whole
New patches for an old, embroidered soul
Just like the hour hand, I now see
Beginning again at three…
03:00 AM -
The Silver Shambles
I dropped a coin in the wishing well
But did not wish at all
And so it began
The exodus of my existence:
At night I painted
The black skies
On white bed sheets
Spilling ink
Spilling tar
Spilling ashes sent back from war
I painted
Night after night
From dusk till dawn
But the stars never showed
Neither the moon manifested
Nor the auroras appeared
The only light I saw
Was from the white of my eyes
Rubies line my lips
I bury diamond in the dark
Deep in my throat
Foams a rabid, rabid bark
But I do not dare
For the censure is too strong
Lashes even if you are right
Why wonder when you are wrong
So I paint
And I paint
A monk
And some saint
Both parts of same hypocrisy
Part blotch and part a taint
This endless evolution
Is just revision of the rot
Mirages made images
And themes turned to thought
For we begin our blasphemies
By begging to be left
Away from the trials
While accepting the act of theft
For then the onus lies
On those ailing institutions
Who accepts blood and bile
To darken words of the constitutions
Oh how I wither in this weather
Where all claim the right to rest
Whilst walking naked through the fire
Hoping for the best
So, my bed sheet it is dark
My bed sheet; it is wet,
And my menstruating mind
Loves to water hate
And grow flowers that are golden
And encased in a thousand thorn
A beauty to be envied
Not to be woven and worn
Thus I sleep
In the shadows
Aware at my loss
Dreaming of the silver disc
Falling at the toss
I dropped a coin in the wishing well
But did not wish at all
Oh why did I not wish at all -
The Song of Silent Cicadas
“I dream of dying daffodils
On a wave of my broken, favourite hills
Where I as child had once laid claim
When I knew myself by my name”
“But these ages have not been kind to me
I was fettered but asked to spell as free
Promised monuments; I was given a moment
To count salt that slept in the bed of sea”
“Oh, how I wept and leapt like Sisyphus’s stone
Known to all just by being unknown
I was placed all high but without a head
I survived it all by playing dead”
“And thus now we come to an end
This poem breaks where all stories bend
As no more of life will come my way
I give away that, for which I pray” -
Abrasion
My life is a loose translation
Barely read, rarely understood
And sits, with an air of years spent
Suspended between two strokes
Of a broken down pendulum
Ages have passed undivided
A single line, perpetually drawn
Getting thin and thinner
Till the Parallax Error
Caters for my silence
At the center of my heart
And I am able to remember
The taste of my first breath
The warmth of my first touch
The colour of my first view
All amounting to nothing much
I submit to the auguries made about me
By people who claim to know
When the leaves of a tree in the autumn would fall
And when the sun would melt the snow
Fire in the birdcage
Would the wings be able to save?
Can feathers and the flame
Be the same
Can the ashes for once be brave?
I humour the dinner table
My hands carefully caressing
The cold, silver cutlery
And my words
Churning in my mouth with the morsels
Breaking down
With every bite, with every conversation
Leaves a taste
Something lingering upon the tongue
They watch me as I listen
They listen as I watch
The thin sound, going around
A tiptoeing whisper
Toeing a line;
I am known to these strangers
I am shared and savoured
Wound licked with salt
I am a pariah and thus favoured
Long into the night
I stare at my soul
Standing by the window
Stitching itself whole
And the night breeze is painting
And the dark woods; they dream
Only the blind sky is witness
As I thread down my scream -
Dressed in the Dust
There is only dust in the distance
And my breaths are getting slow
And soon I shall be a sand dune
And no man will ever know
In this quiet land of barren life
To survive is a sacred sin
Here men come not to die free
But to live long as a fabled djinn
In the golden ferns and flowers white
I watch the wind call out my name
To her who counts the skeletons growing
Our faces are all the same
And the sun here is an older thing
Who preaches no practice or path
His philosophy is walk and wither
His love is same as his wrath
My steps are becoming mirages
And I have one last oasis to reach
Where I shall hold my silence close
When the world has nothing left to teach -
The Plagiarist
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 -
Summary of Sleep
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 existWe 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 roamI 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 -
Intricacies
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