Dearth of Memories

                     I
  

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