Tag: divine

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












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



The Ghost Of Your Breasts


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

To Blush Or To Bruise

Blue lines on my face
Teardrops on my dress
She said, she said
There is no one at my place 
But he wasn’t standing far
The man in violent garb
Pining compliments 
Like flowers on the barb

His brutal hands were red
From all life, playing dead
And like a rose to the cactus 
She wed, she wed
Merry was the man
Like cherry blossomed lies
The kiss was murder weapon
Aided by garter and bow ties 

And so years were spent
Part in bruises, part as prize
With smoke in the lungs
With mirror in the eyes 
While the violent man he waltzed
Alone on the floor
With a corpse in his arms
To a music playing no more


Origami

It is the morning after
And I awake as an origami undone
Only yesterday I had her arm on my chest
With mine anchored round her waist
Balancing our seesaw soul
Making whole
Those pieces we planted 
Like bookmarks to find
The stories we memorised 
Keeping in mind
Going almost insane 
Being blinded by pain
Once kayaking in chaos
To feel alive again

Now I watch my face shiver 
In the ether of her eyes
Now I am fire cold with fever
Falling on the rise
She is here
She is mine
She has no say to say
Far near  
Dear divine 
So I kneel but not to pray 
Now I watch her face shiver
In the ether of my eyes
Now I am fire with her fever
She is falling when I rise

But I dare not confess that I dreamt of her
In the early hours of last night 
For that would be blasphemy 
My being alone
With only her memory 
Drenched monochromes 
Some charcoal art
Of me painting her toenails pink
And she murmuring shape of my heart
Waiting for the words to sink

For her voice is my hymn in exile
And here I wander, mile by mile
A broken kite
Dead dynamite 
Waiting for her mirage to draw me closer
Towards sun kissed horizons
Across daydreaming dunes
And purple fields
Of my pulsing past
Through this desert vast, desolate and slow
I search for her
As the seconds grow
 
I can see her white hands over black countertop 
Passing pepper into the pot 
Waiting for me to finish my worship of her
Waiting for me to open the refrigerator 
And take half a dozen eggs to scramble 
To toss and turn
The yolk and white 
In the shade of the dim light 
Wafting from her seashell skin
With wafer thin petrichor 
Of our last night’s rain
(Did I drown in her hair?
Did my gasps made her growl?
Did we swim in stolen silence?
Did our motions knew our goal?
To be, to be
Half mad in ecstasy 
The sea falling apart
At the lips of an estuary)

The dress does to her
What dust does to a diamond 
But she knows it not
Even when I beg; a child in disguise 
To breathe over her facets
Between her navel and her thighs 
But she laughs and she turns
Like flower between ferns
She waxes into full moon 
And I am a candle that ever burns
To ignite at her sight
To surrender without a fight 
To be answer to her questions 
Which were never answered right

Razzmatazz

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

Rowing Till The Riverbed

Let me fall now, no
Let me fade away instead
I am tired of being ever alone
Of being always afraid

I was a fool to grapple with the dark, you know,
A fool to light my heart on fire
A fool to eat the wounded ashes
To taste the honey of that sweet desire

I was blind with my eyes open
Blind to the water rising around my waist
Blind to see that I with my words
Was no different than the rest

So here I am now, here,
A face amongst other faces:
All fools condemned henceforth
To die; by hanging on her tresses

I should have known it, I should have
For it was no secret after all
That there was magic in her voice
And that it was a siren’s call

It was this damned dream, you see,
To be together in the end
So surreal that I forgot
It was all make-believe, a pretend

I am going now, I am gone
There are other lovers in the line
They ask me if she is a goddess
And I answer: Yes, if the Devil’s Divine…

The Lost Sense of Bewilderment

Jayson Hinrichsen @ unsplash

I wonder if life would have been the same
If I had but a different name
As common as the monsoon rain
Somewhere between John and Jane

I wonder who would have called me close
Gifted whiskey or a blood red rose
Shared laughter with a list of woes
And left me where the west wind blows

I wonder if I would have been happy more
Being a seashell on a shallow shore
Drunk with madness like never before
Following the echo of my silent roar

I wonder if I would have lived long
Sang a chorus in some choir song
Before in life it all went wrong
For now I am but not where I belong…