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.
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)
Half the time, I just exist—like husks of wheat. I move along with the wind, without a thought, a care, or ambition. I do what I have been told. I pray, I preach, I learn, and I teach. I exist for the benefit of others, like a common condiment.
The thing is—I could be much more. Much, much more. Like saffron or vanilla.
But there is a sadness inside me that pulls me close, a sadness that makes melancholia look adorable—romantic in ways that rejoices my being. I wonder if there are pieces of plastic latched to my soul, making me incomplete.
Outside my window, the rain speaks. I hear the conversation between the trees, the pathway, the creaking seesaw, the blades of grass, and the drowning ants.
Should I, too, put in a word about my world?About how I have surrendered to my surroundings? How my ego has mounted a paper boat and is now heading towards the eternal eddies of societal suicide?
There is a knock.
The floor feels soft without my slippers. Numb feet makes quite a carpet. The latch has brown patches on it—rust, spread out like a map of Europe.
I remember first hearing about Turkish Delight in Narnia—how the girl opens the door of a cupboard and is transported to a land of enchantment. Well, mine takes me face-to-face with a plethora of files: red, blue, and green.
I wish I were colourblind.
But that thought is for another time. Presently, I am enamoured with my own incompetence. The door closes and the stench of garbage wafts in, with a peculiar rhythm to it—an echoing arrhythmia. It takes me four rapid blinks to come to terms with the fact that it is indeed my heart, fluttering like a stapled butterfly.
God is muted silence. For silence can be heard. But God? He cannot be. He has left the pastures to the wolves, and the forests to the sheep.
Rejoice, children! (I dared to laugh)
Is this not what every heart desires in the end? To change? To be something other than what one is born with?
Yes—the first act of violence that any man commits is against himself.
First, he desires to shed. Next, he desires to show. And finally, he desires to be sold.
We are slaves, one and all—slaves to life and love, to vision and division, to season and decision, to thought, to carelessness, to songs, to books, to faces, to sex, to laughter, to text, to limelight, to corners, to whiskey, to cigarettes, to auguries, to cabarets, to sugar, to fantasies, to all things other than reality—
My past now grows impatient Under its tortoise shell Eons passed and I have moved Only a fingernail Closer to you
Much of my music is lost Listening to the wall clock Counting, sixty seconds and a minute Sixty minutes and an hour Twelve hours, twice over, Again and again Through wind, winter and rain This dilemma, delusion and pain Of having met you And loved you for a millennia But having no permanent memory No cup of your captured laughter No mirror of your misty eyes No sunlight captured by your tresses No sweet scent of your sighs All I am left with, are yellow pieces of fractured time And a heart that mostly murmurs For all truths out aloud are lies
The blanket we wear Smells like Sunday morning A waking warmth Of hay and honeysuckle And a quiet happiness Equally sad and empty So we hold each other From falling apart From drifting into different dreamlands Where one of us ends and the other starts
I watch as you breathe in Life, my life For I am haunted By the ghost of your breasts Buried and hidden A catacomb of our heartbeats Growing restless Like a river ever running But never reaching The estuary of my arms
You see I am obsessed With the idea of your existence Insanely infatuated So unequivocally infantile To see your warm womb As the walls of my tomb And the pulse of your veins Like all the seasons I have ever seen
I know, I know I am mad to my bones But my death is being alone Without your hand in my own So, I place myself in your hand like a petal You drop me I am cold I am hard I am metal With nothing more to see And nothing more to be With nothing to call mine And nothing is for free
I was a soldier in search of seashells On my way to a foreign land I was promised a piece of paradise But left with burying bayonet in the sand
There are omens and tokens and totems I carry in the colour of my skin Of leading strangers from ashes to Asphodel But leaving behind my own kin
And by this ocean of giving and forgetting I toss my morsel to the receding tide And build a mausoleum out on the seashore And pieces of my heart therein I hide
For the mountains I crossed on my way Told me that silence comes to those who seek Meaning at the end of an answer And not winning; because that’s for the weak
Now as I sit by lap of the waves And watch my bullet holes go larger around I align my irises to the horizon Till my heartbeats makes no more sound
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
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
I once had branches That burned in my backyard A pyre sans desire A fire drowned by its fire And at night In the dark When ghost grew like fruits From the shadow of its seeds From the ashes of its roots One could hear In the cast out whispers that they kept Broken words bandaged Pain yet un-wept And they said, they said In the black waves of bright flames We are faces without faces Nameless within our names And if night be a star in the ocean And infinity an eternal motion If silence be the words without sound And self a state never to be found Then the world with it’s weight held in a grain And poets with their pens dipped in pain The weathered visages with their vermillion words And the horizon a home for forgotten birds Is there to be seen, is there to be shown And not to be alone or utterly unknown
O the desire to be Loved by all And the ache of letting go When it is harder to fall Because of the world with it’s quiet words left to rot On transparent eyelashes Of eyes that dream, of eyes that dare Of eyes that hold, of eyes that care Should I wish upon myself an early demise Would the darkness in it’s view find it wise Why then sometimes I want to be The silence that shapes the sea Why then sometimes I want to be Someone whom none can see
Despair, beware I am a sky without cause My pain, insane Do not ache for applause Stare in the mirror O horror of my mind What you see is what you are Be gentle if not kind And whisper unto the wind These fables of your own For you are no Pietá But a statue turned to stone
The walls aren’t painted And there are orange pips on the table Arranged like a ten o’clock shadow Of an ornament left in a glass case And I dare not disturb Her architecture The tainted texture That peers out, as symbols, as summations Meaningless veracities, punctuated by punctuations.
I cough And the dust coughs with me For the echo is swallowed By the floorboards Beneath our feet So I dance, I tiptoe I jump and I let go To remain suspended An unlighted chandelier Burning butanol or some such nonsense In my pockets
My garden has gone grey The flowers; asthmatic Now wheeze in the wind Wrinkled and waiting For the next iteration of spring A seasonal afterlife That feels no soul smile and say; I will let you live If you follow my way
Curious is the world’s design They who smile never know why And they who claim that they do Knows in their heart that it’s a lie Is happiness something That can never be found Like corners of a map Of a world that goes round
If only I had Eyes that could see all Every thread of a thought From even streams and the stone I think I know What I would have known That this all, this enigma This play supposed to go on Is not worded by us We who think we have won For each life afterall in the end is the same Closed eyes, broken breaths And lost dreams with no name.
