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.
Tag: answer
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Ceramic Mornings
-
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. -
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. -
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 -
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 -
Make A Wish
The sky begins
At the edge of your smile
And I am the star
You chose to find it
Willing to fall
To leave it all
Just to be the reason
Behind it -
Transparent
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 -
The Mist of My Mornings
Why cry about things you can laugh at
Said the quote on my bathroom mirror
It wasn’t funny
I thought
And smiled to myself
The nights have been short
Or perhaps it was I who has been stretched thin
Between two impossibilities
Of being here and being there
An almost everywhere
Every thought of mine now
Feels like a bullet through the brain
The very last; and in a way everlasting
But new ones creep out
Out of this philosophical yeast
Growing in the dark keeps of my mind
Nurtured with cold sweat
And self taught paralysis
The toothpaste tastes funny
Like old age
These are those days of winter
When sadness feels warm
Like a hug or a cup of coffee
Something to snuggle into and fall asleep
Sadness; the elixir of a dying man
Sadness, yes
And melancholy (Pretty word)
Made of me and the unholy:
Thoughts, dreams, desires
Snails creeping on a wet wire
I remember a time
When I dreamt of being a dog
And lie on the carpet
Of fallen leaves
Dogs can dream, can’t they? (Yes)
And so I dreamt of being a dog
To come full circle
A perfection
My being complete
A zero
The wind from the window
Touches my face
And I blush;
Love is in the air
Or is it despair?
How can one compare?
When being utterly unaware…
(I rhymed on purpose
For they say poetry must taste like a painting)
I gargle and gag
There is blood in my spit
A rose line
Branching out like a symphony
Clarinet and timpani
Violins and bassoons
Bach and Beethoven
Mozart who died too soon
The tap turns
A thunder
The tap turns
All silence
Good morning
-
The Cold Sun of Midnight
I sleep upon the windowpane
And the glass cracks under my face
Like lightning from my breath
The night below is strange;
Captured stars howling
On streets and in houses
As people dance
To hide the shadow of their shame
I can smell their perfume here
Thirty stories high
Scent filled with lost sleep and sadness
It numbs me
My throat, my voice
And I choke without a choice
(Should I shift? Should I turn?
I do…and the thunder swims to my belly
The glass gasps
But the shattering never comes)
Sound of a million footsteps
Collapse into a single chord
Time’s thread
This linear, pinpoint eternity
Do I merge or do I dare
Far foolish when being aware
That there are no ripples in the ocean
Just reflections of the air
Lives, candles
Last days in wreath
Desire turned dream
Dream turned to death
I now see the eyelashes
Left by a lost time
For cinders on the shore
For hearts saying no more
For children born sans choice
Once people now toys
And so the dying swans dance
Vying for a chance
To nibble the breadcrumbs
Of broken down plans
And I, this vain, stitched flesh in pain
Lie supine, and divine, my tears through rain
And sing against the chorus
Those verses that say
Ask and you shall get
And to get you must pray
As if prayers are questions
As if questions would find a way
As if ways would take me home
As if home is for what I pray
So I await
Under the cold sun of midnight
Watching myself
Falling out of sight
First a man
Then a memory
Now a stranger
Forever a stray
A silhouette
Some shadow
All silence
Is what I say -
The I in Why?
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