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: writings
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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. -
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
-
All My Reflections
If music could be made,
Then all rhythms would need a roof.
I am just a quiet kid walking on a silent sidewalk,
Measuring the distance between two tiles,
Counting yellow leaves amongst green,
Ticketing my thoughts beside the traffic light,
And being a lamppost to remain unseen.
My eraser is razor sharp
And my pencilled Picassos
Burn without vapours,
Leaving white carbon,
Like an unprinted newspaper.
This is the heading of the day:
“Do you not do not believe what you say.”
(Was that a question.
And…was that a question too?
Yes, two.
Perhaps.
Who am I to question…)
They brought me from zero
And they taught me infinity,
So I could extrapolate
The contraption called concession,
That middle ground
Where, no one is around,
To plant a seed,
Or to paint a shade.
So, my mind, like every mind has come
To a common conclusion:
That each drawing needs
The name of an artist,
For then, the art can be torn apart.
You cannot hang an anonymous, can you?
It’s the way of the world, boy,
It’s the task of time.
If you divide your days
Between work and play,
You can have coffee at eight,
And your wine at nine.
I am writing like a maniac,
Mesmerised by my own vanity.
Didn’t once, amongst scientists posing as philosophers,
In a shivering old shanty
By the backdoor of my dream,
I said that needle is the greatest weapon ever invented;
For it sews together torn men
And sends them back to be torn apart again,
Stitch by violent stitch,
Till it cannot know which is which:
Cain or Abel,
Bible or Aesop’s Fable,
Eliot or Gertrude Stein,
The Monster or Frankenstein.
Often, when my mind stills,
I can smell my nostrils
And taste my tongue,
Draw mirrors with my eyes,
And make my face go young.
It is a miracle that in silence
One can hear more of all:
The cocoon breathing for caterpillar,
And incense stick in the prayer hall.
I have toothache since yesterday,
So pardon if I seem to mumble,
Bottling sulphur in my philosophy
And murder whilst being humble.
I am a student of disguise;
To believe me is to mimic surprise. -
The Rites of Remembering
Measure me in marigolds
For in a throw-away thesaurus, outside a church,
I grappled with the dappled god of meaning,
And lost.
What is light and dark?
Where is heaven and hell?
If not in the act of becoming one,
At the last peal of the bell.
(Pardon my parody, but the juxtaposition is justified)
Am I pregnant with pain?
Crawling on the polyester carpet of my burnt-down building,
Wondering if the watchman can watch my agony,
Or the torch is just an ornament,
Like for a cripple is the cane.
Should I wither or give birth?
Is there not enough on this earth:
Pain, I mean; the people they can pray,
Dancing upon the anthill,
A divine massacre so to say,
Thus I ask for an answer and the Answer, it asks:
Is that your true face,
Or the mask of your masks?
Should I memorise now,
The punctuations on my face?
Or claw down to a carcass,
The primordial preface?
Whence time could be tasted,
As old flint struck new bone,
When men bowed and prayed,
To the shape of the stone.
So, Summon me, Suleiman;
Who darkened the Siberian plain,
Red snow on his arrow-tip
From the blood of a thousand slain.
Summon me too, Great Elixir,
He of immortal name,
Who tore down towers of sandstone,
As part of a checkered game.
Summon me, Lady Myleth,
She who crowned her husband as Queen,
And watched as the kingdom danced
On the watered edge of a dagger unseen.
Summon me too, the People Pleaser,
For whom did the senate end,
But died as an enemy
In the circle of enslaved friends.
Thus, my answer to the Answer,
Is a question in disguise
For isn’t truth an orphan
Born out of lies?
I ask: Do I dwell on the delusion,
That maybe everything is as it should be,
That change is a charlatan
Only a reflection of what could be,
As the nature of all things,
Is to echo and not sing,
Why tie the knot and be anchored,
When you can hold onto the string? -
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 -
Kafka On My Cuffs
I often notice that night
Is right time for one to fight with oneself
You are naked with brittle bones
And the heart floats, like stone
Upon the impalpable air,
Buried in your body
With a weight, as you wait,
For the world to surrender
To bow down as you beg
For the light to be shined in your eyes
For water to be passed through your lips:
A concrete kiss
Of traffic light love
And 9 to 5 passion
So that you may be seen
Laughing, smiling, walking, talking
Along the chorus of the human hummus
The room is a soap bubble
Ready to erupt
They watch me as I speak
A monologue
I oar on speechless sunshine
A mute morning
Born out of
Borrowed solace and forced silence
Like a wall with paintings
Having no need to be owned
To be entombed or embalmed
With stories other than my own
Yet unable to
Deny the desire
Of loving the smell of lit matchsticks
While afraid of its fire
Men must not talk of their mental health
I cut my photograph with scissors
The outline cherry red
From the bleeding background
For it hurts to be left alone
Even in the past
It dismembers the delusion
My silhouette without shape
A broken geometry
Held together by tape
Of a world within with a world without
Snow sealed
Half peeled
Body bagged
Soul killed
Most of us mimic
The same mistake
And get better with time
At convincing oneself
That mistakes were truly mistake
And they happen
Around Gravity’s girth
Like a natural law for unnatural things
I too mimic
Practice and perfect
The moment of my death
The last words
That final thought
Fear, Anxiety, Regret and Fate
Should I go closing my eyes
Or will the irony of the effort suffice?
-
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