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: trending
-
Ceramic Mornings
-
The Nectar Of Her Neck
I
The tip of the grass was yellow
The root of the grass was green
They waved at me like water in winter
And I waved back just glad at being seen
The words rolled back
Dyeing my tongue
Like a dry river
Rocks and pebbles
Fishbones and silt
Traced my thorax
Grinding my guilt
So I could swallow and wallow
The echo of oars
Belonging to those ancient mariners before me
Who sought loneliness
And found it
One step before horizon
II
In my dream
I pool out from the fissure of earth
After a midlife rebirth
Gleaming, polished, welted and wet
Watching the woman holding my fate
Nestled like a flower
Asleep in my rubicon arms
Dreaming of fragrance
At once tender and torn;
Oh to be born beautiful
And in all beauties, a unicorn,
In my mythical ache
I keep this universe at stake
For it’s brutal to awake
When I am so brittle to break.
It is night
But the dark shines
A soft black
Such perceptible blindness
Such untouchable familiarity
Should I succumb to the magic touch?
Drawn like a dying man to the nectar of her neck
Should I summarise eons of my afterthoughts in an afternoon with her?
And let her reciprocate the same
On a kohl claimed evening
So my ashtray mind
Can drift
And ignite
My field of dreams
A purple blue;
That colour of a newfound forgetfulness
Unnoticed to the irises of her eyes.
I dim and she shimmers
As we dance in the glass case
She; of velvet toes
And I; of rubber gloves
With her hand in my hand
Like time through sand
Passing, and staying
This melting portrait
Of our memories
And I am aware, suddenly,
At the soft sweetness of everything
That percolates into the inchoate perfection
Wavering and waiting to crystallise in our kiss;
I lean in
And the world holds still
Till another breath finds me
And it feels what I feel
-
A Buffet
Shell of a man
In Hell, as he can:
Only think of the deeds,
You did.
When he trusted you most,
You just played the host,
And when the guests were all gone,
You left.
It is four in the morning
And I am cold in my blanket,
With yesterday’s breakfast
Still fresh in its mourning.
The honey runs warm,
But the bread is tough
I stoke coals under my coat,
And now my flesh says enough
I melt, and I merge
Am I the candle on the cake?
Years have passed unmarked,
I worry about the last second before being awake.
This pain wasn’t in my plan, you know,
Nobody caters for such cataclysm,
The eventual demise,
That permanent procrastination
In watching star-filled skies
Reflecting in the unseeing eyes; the dead light
Like diluted dynamite.
Why the world shifts, flutters, ebbs and flood,
Why tears are closer to the heart than colour of the blood,
I have no answers, just assumptions;
Half drawn sketches
Plucked from memory
In this Gaussian garden
Of life’s self-centredness.
Old age
It knocked on my door
Like neighbour.
He had nowhere to go,
And I had nowhere to be,
So we sat down together;
An empty mouth and a bad knee.
He spoke of the past,
And I smiled at his tone,
Mimicking a million voices,
To make me forget: I was alone.
Shell of a man
In Hell, as he can:
Only think of the deeds,
You did.
When he trusted you most,
You just played the host,
And when the guests were all gone,
You left. -
The Dying Dandelions
I have never spoken of it.
The secret, although not shameful on its own, makes me feel ashamed.
It’s like being able to see among a group of blind people.
You want to describe the beauty of the world or dissect the violence of a man’s motion, to complete the cracks of a woman’s expression but you can’t: without feeling acutely guilty.
So, here I speak of it—
I preyed on promises
Like a thoughtful vulture
Of culture and cheap compromise
For facade of feeling was important
To alter the illusion
That gift-wrapped horrors
Are comedy of errors
A reality divided
By the cause and the causality:
For a broken man
Does not bleed in the mirror
(Perhaps heaven is a heart
That is heavier to hold)
I know my poem feels like practice
A frozen hand
Combing through rough edges of life
To even out the answers
So music may appear
Vibrating crystal clear
A tear tainted with tear
Like lyrics of King Lear
Alas, this exercise
Is not to exorcise any answer
But to await and witness
The silent decay
Of solitude
(For has any mind every mastered
The art of interrupting its own soliloquy?)
I thread my threshold;
Some common words are never welcome,
Words that suture out from chafed lips
Carried over as gangrene
For whom mind’s a myth
And memory a mind
Words that evolve as themselves
Over and over
A curated cancer called as a cure
The next iteration
The final step
On life’s drowning ladder
(Do they know that the ocean
Is deeper at the top?)
Beyond the compass needle
I discover a horizon
Painted in haste
Made of waste paper
And a pulverised sun
It stretches-this myriad moment
This suspended time
This grotesque mask of shattering beauty
Like a dragon’s yawn
And near her maw
I dance: daring death to dandelions
Till the fire came
Like algebra on music-sheet
Unreadable
Exquisite
And I was reborn
A particle
Singular
Similar
A sinner
(I summarise in theory
That a poem knows more of the poetry
Than a poet does) -
Lazarus
The hall was open
Well lit by the intruding sky
Peeping from the roof
Like dry tongue behind a lie
I remember being here
Since forever was yesterday
My heartbeats echoed when my footsteps went quiet
And the walls watched
When I shifted the silence
Like a decade old calendar
(Tick Tock but it’s not a clock)
For I heard that death in the desert
Comes from weight of the ship
Ah, these dark thoughts
Burnt cognac on charred cinnamon
Keeps me awake
For these festive ashes
Are kohl for my eyelashes
The piano plays
Her faded ebony and darkened ivory
But the tune is not twofold
It is syrup in syringe
It is grease on my hinge
Making me murmur and mould my moves
To her jazz and her blues
Till I saw light in the dark
Her flesh flint and my soul spark
Oh, and did I burn from her breath
Do I roam now as wraith
In this hall that stands stilled
By my heart that was sealed
When she held me and said:
I am naked and you are afraid
But dare not clothe me
For my love, I am sea
I have whispered those words
Which for even memory weren’t free
I remember being here
Since forever was yesterday -
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 -
A Confetti of Concussions
I licked the ink-pot
For leftover words—
Words whose foeticide haunts me
Like laughter
At the end of my eulogy
I succumb to the watered down version of myself
They watch me—
As I haunt fireflies under streetlights:
Like a modern mosque,
Some cannibalised church
A trapped temple
Random discourse
A faint idea
Keeling over the volume of vomit
Ready to be regurgitated
Like a scripture
Of my life
The moon pools like piss
Around my ankles
As I weep
Watching my nightmares
Walk the night
Whilst I fade—
From sky’s painted blue to horizon’s scratched red
When I follow
The pole star of no path
Like a wish
Yearning to be granted
A Yggdrasil, dying to be planted
And then
Left alone
To be inert
At birth
Standing somewhere
I apologised to the air-
It isn’t fair, I said
Half grateful, part afraid
Of being proven wrong in my regret—
The closest thing to a closeted fate
And it’s easier to evaporate
In the space between
My neck and my pillow
And became the indivisible
That incalculable afterthought
Which succumbs
Ever so wilfully
To dream’s dying desires-
Like a wound
Unwilling to heal
And able to feel
The hurt, all the pain,
Driving the flesh slowly insane
Inch by inch
Till all that remains of one
Is a red hand
Reaching for the heart
I let my mind unravel
Like a knotted string
That never went through
The eye of the needle
My theory for this is that sometimes
The affliction comes from affection-
Affection for the effects of the affliction
As if the race between the tortoise and the hare
Was won by the tortoise
While never being there
At the finish line
And there is much I need to ask
From myself before that,
But the catapult of questions
Can only aim so far
So I vie for the fruits
Hanging on the lower branches
Sweet residues, softer shadows
Of a grand world
Made of crystals and confetti
Confessions and curiosities
A woollen world
Of shapeless horizons
And mirror-tinted sea
Made of mythical people
For whom the world comes from ‘Me’
I wish to cover the world under the blanket
And tell the ghost story
Of how it all ended
At the very beginning
-
The First Light
We are sitting in a sun-blown café
in the far corner, alone,
at 6 in the morning.
You are wearing your blue jeans
and my t-shirt—
washed out, white, far too large—
fitting you perfectly.
The waitress is dusting the tables,
pulling up the chairs,
shaking the table salt containers,
piling up tissue paper.
I watch as the dust motes play in the breeze
by the window—behind your hair.
They glow auburn—your hair, not the dust motes.
I was wrong to ask for open hair.
It looks lovelier now, tied in a loose bun,
with wayward strands
falling and cupping the contours of your face.
I watch in silence as the cups of coffee are laid,
watch as the steam rises
and veils your face—
You wink.
I smile.
You sip.
I smile again.
You ask something.
I nod, far too captivated by the rings on your hand—
the black from me,
and the blue from your mother.
They rest on your skin,
absorbing your essence,
your touch,
the warmth I long for—
something more than black coffee.
The conversation begins,
and I try to keep up
as words cling to your pink lips
and memories roll down
from the tip of your tongue.
Your eyes dance,
the brown in them melting
under the sunlight.
I wonder what you see—
how deep, how far?
Can you see my soul, that I wear
so close to my skin,
almost like a second shadow
when you are around?
Can you feel my heart beating,
painfully, avidly,
as it grasps
the reason for its existence—
sitting two feet across,
legs crossed, feet dangling,
covered in white socks
and tan boots…
Maybe yes, maybe no—
but I long to know.
The breakfast comes:
omelette, jam, butter, and bread.
You look at me and ask…
“Was it something I said?” -
Toes of Time
I whisper the words you were not meant to read If one were to wipe me from your memory,
you would still be you,
and I would still be me
walking the same paths,
crossing the same crossroads,
eyes on the sun,
hearts aflutter,
searching for a glimpse:
one for the brown hand,
and one for the white,
one for the long days,
and one for the night.
I wish I could close the world,
draw each corner of it unto me
like a blanket,
like falling asleep at the center of petals
and let the silence mould me
into something beautiful,
something lost,
something forgotten,
so that when I am found
in the middle of nowhere,
a child
unable to understand
the depths of the finger he holds to walk
I am appreciated,
welcomed home,
and not left
like a wrapper
on the road.
I feel the feathers in my bones,
and eddies in my soul,
as my mind flows
passing through life,
through gentle retributions,
via murmured aspirations
like wave after wave,
conquering and crashing,
a second of victory,
only to dissolve,
and dance on the auburn sand
between time’s pink toes,
walking on eternity’s shore,
barefoot.
I miss the time
when my shadow was small. -
The Ghost Of Your Breasts
My past now grows impatient
Under its tortoise shell
Eons passed and I have moved
Only a fingernail
Closer to you
Much of my music is lost
Listening to the wall clock
Counting, sixty seconds and a minute
Sixty minutes and an hour
Twelve hours, twice over,
Again and again
Through wind, winter and rain
This dilemma, delusion and pain
Of having met you
And loved you for a millennia
But having no permanent memory
No cup of your captured laughter
No mirror of your misty eyes
No sunlight captured by your tresses
No sweet scent of your sighs
All I am left with, are yellow pieces of fractured time
And a heart that mostly murmurs
For all truths out aloud are lies
The blanket we wear
Smells like Sunday morning
A waking warmth
Of hay and honeysuckle
And a quiet happiness
Equally sad and empty
So we hold each other
From falling apart
From drifting into different dreamlands
Where one of us ends and the other starts
I watch as you breathe in
Life, my life
For I am haunted
By the ghost of your breasts
Buried and hidden
A catacomb of our heartbeats
Growing restless
Like a river ever running
But never reaching
The estuary of my arms
You see
I am obsessed
With the idea of your existence
Insanely infatuated
So unequivocally infantile
To see your warm womb
As the walls of my tomb
And the pulse of your veins
Like all the seasons I have ever seen
I know, I know
I am mad to my bones
But my death is being alone
Without your hand in my own
So, I place myself in your hand like a petal
You drop me
I am cold
I am hard
I am metal
With nothing more to see
And nothing more to be
With nothing to call mine
And nothing is for free