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.
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…
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
There is something about memories That never lets me trust them Maybe because they appear When I have nothing more to think Or perhaps because I can think of nothing more The paradox is a juxtaposition Memories, like dust on a photograph, fading, Reminiscent of a forgotten spider’s web In the cold corner of a locked room At the end of an abandoned hallway Of a castle in ruin And if I were to drop a stone In the crevasses of my mind The sound would be of memories Coming back to life O Forgetful me Remember the sea That which goes silent When the sun goes down
But Dreams! Those nocturnal delights Full of sins and sensibilities Like a ballerina en pointe on a needle A sylph threaded And wedded to life’s leftover canvas To stitch and make whole Pieces of prosaic poetry Oh, the dreams are my delicacies With daydreaming being my favourite The flavour; incurably sweet yet alarmingly bitter As I teeter Between death and sleep Between Morpheus and Orpheus Between soliloquies and singing For a drifting island of my own Where waves are stories grown And I sail all alone Towards horizons Etched in stone
But reality is like rust Over time it chips away Parts of you; to take you apart, And away from your Cinderella story, Reality, that monster which appears When fairy tales of everyone coalesce And things that made sense Becomes white-noise in your ears The blinding buzz At once a siren and a lullaby So that you sleepwalk Out into the ocean of possibilities To first drown and then float Before a man and now a boat, To get boarded on and sailed Just another oyster that failed In understanding the pearls of wisdom; That not all ports get hailed
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 stood open Like a coat with its collars out Watching the eddies engulf Small horizons Spread across the drowning fields of dark passion Ivory bodies; Burning like lightbulbs Float without feeling their flesh Turn into tentacles Those roots with mind And headless intent Searching depths Forbidden to the common kind
There is a sense of self Without understanding Which echoes from mouth to mouth Of every mortal marching in tandem With the balance between their breaths Or how else would dreams in death defy Their short lived immortality And return to the shared seed That individual’s agony; Of being the answer to another’s need
Parched thoughts Eyelids whispering The story of skin upon skin In histories unwritten Monuments crumbling Under the weight of that original sin Of having known Right from the wrong In veins; dyed blue Pulse of a heart that do not belong To the common questions Left to muse In the silence of philosophy
I can feel my own eyes Watching themselves In reflection Unable to adjust To the depths Reaching out of the abyss for the sky I swallow the tempest So my clothes can stay dry Beneath bare feet and stilettos The ghettos are the same If my mind is Medusa The world is Poseidon to blame But the wheel it shall Be ever on the roll For every man down There is another to make it whole
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
