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.
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.
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
It is 1996 And my first breath makes me cry I reach out, empty fists reaching to clench The hem of this world But all there is, is a sudden, alien emptiness Guilt flows as I find Those warm walls The nest of my nescience Dissolved, collapsed to nature’s cruel balance Or were it my kicks that brought down My Rome on me
It is 2007 And I am eleven And alone Watching a new world from old eyes Somewhere back home my mother is crying Watching my clothes, neatly folded, at the bottom shelf of the almirah But those tears won’t teach me That love won’t reach me Here, in my bunk bed covered with mosquito net My voice has settled deep in my gullet Like a sharp flint So I keep quiet For seven years In dust, duty and delusion In camouflage, country and confusion
It is 2023 And I am watching through the half open door My sun, up close, She is waiting with my world in her lap, And I wonder if she is a dream And would dissolve too on my rebirth For my life, all tragic, I had lived out in sin But her touch was magic A symphony on my skin And I was afraid to hold her Afraid too to let her go She was all I had never known She was all I would ever know My last bastion My clarion call My swan song My Eden’s fall
I opened the bathroom door And in the dim and damning septic light Of the months old lightbulb My face, blurred and bludgeoned, By night’s nihilistic apparatus Smiled back through the broken mirror Hanging above the dripping, dead sink And I think, that is how it feels To wake up, in the middle of the night Hours after having a fight
I cupped the cold water Felt my fingers sting where the ring Has cut in my flesh Had I punched too hard at the bouquet? Were the petals bruised and bloodied? As if freshly plucked on a dewy morning By a miner’s hand Oh the anger in my throat Blue Eve around my Red Adam’s apple I knew if I let loose the bile of my belly And roar the bull’s breeding call My landlord will knock And the door would open A sliver, then a centimetre Till I am naked in the flooding light Of the gallery Absolutely awake And utterly ashamed To mutter an excuse And retire in solace
I cannot shave without tasting something of the foam It’s bitter This taste on my lips Like a thirst long not satiated Lips, last kissed Perhaps a decade ago In an alley behind an alley Where a beautiful nymph in rotten rags Had found my face handsome than those walls Closing in around us “You look much better than the bricks” She said I smiled, hiding the mortar in my molars As the rain pattered down like tar Peeling away rust from the pipes Drenching us Head to toes Like a wet painting
It has been three hours But my beard still showed Dancing around my face like a Rorschach’s blot I felt my fingers feel my skin Smooth it was Like warm pages of a new novel A novel about this modern day Don Quixote Who spent hours shaving the black spot left on the mirror My blade had blood on it And the sink sprouted red roots I watched as they dissolved And slipped down the drain It was only when the last drop was gone That I did felt the pain
I stood still till the sunlight streamed in From the half open window Like an intruder Creeping along the floor Till the corner of the door Illumined And left me cold Years old So I turned, back to my bed Where nightmares awaited Under the blanket In a dark sequin gown For dark was my friend For dark is the end And beyond that I feel nothing And nothing I comprehend
“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”
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
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
Dry twigs wrestle the wind Shadows burn on the ground Here I stand in the center And the world turns around With yellow leaves laughing White sand dyed brown In Nameless nothingness I named a pronoun All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Sand dunes shrunk to seashell Like past framed into memory
I watch dazed morning Walk drunk upon the shore Where my footsteps on the sand Leave footprints no more As if all of my life Was a mirage from the start A mirror holding together A man falling apart
All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea In the sky a sun wrinkled And stars breaking free Am I drowning Am I drowning Should I breathe this darkness and lay As a dead man in a dying womb being fed everyday The same old desires The same old silver songs The same old praise and promises That nothing would go wrong
And only if only I could no longer be here Be a past that never happened And a future always near But never coming together With the rhythm of our heart An end that is unending A beginning that never did start You and me, you and me The Sand and the sea Away forever Our little infinity
The edges of the world Like pages from a play A Recurring razzmatazz Occurring everyday The blue’s beats Jarring jazz And ballads on the way Razzmatazz, razzmatazz As Liquored lovers say “You be thought and I the mind To reminisce and remind That love is not litmus To be tested everyday Let it flower, let it grow Be careful what you sow For the soil takes it all Your flight and your fall And it’s the way of the crowd To take as truth what is loud While our love is all silence Strong sans the violence So take care of the petals They are flesh and not metal And do not look for reflection Till the water; it has settled”
Dry twigs wrestle the wind Shadows burn on the ground Here I stand at the edge And the world is not round Black leaves moan Under heels; trodden down In Nameless nothingness I named a pronoun All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Falling nowhere With two skies above me All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Fading in the distance Once man now memory
I do not desire To lie naked in a rattrap life And lubricate my verse with victorian words; Filled with awe inspiring acts Led by mundane lust Of Angels and Men alike Nor do deep desires murder me Nerve by nerve Peeling away my eggshell skin To illuminate the onion within; A coiled rainbow, boiled white Neither am I a shadow Fallen far from crowded feet Awaiting on indifferent paths For a heavenly retreat If at all I were to bare myself and be One thing that should suffice how I see Myself, in this crystal world Of self reflection and askewed insight I would be a thoughtful statue Sitting alone in a far off land With infinity in my head And nothing in my hand
