I licked the ink-pot For leftover words— Words whose foeticide haunts me Like laughter At the end of my eulogy
I succumb to the watered down version of myself They watch me— As I haunt fireflies under streetlights: Like a modern mosque, Some cannibalised church A trapped temple Random discourse A faint idea Keeling over the volume of vomit Ready to be regurgitated Like a scripture Of my life
The moon pools like piss Around my ankles As I weep Watching my nightmares Walk the night Whilst I fade— From sky’s painted blue to horizon’s scratched red When I follow The pole star of no path Like a wish Yearning to be granted A Yggdrasil, dying to be planted And then Left alone To be inert At birth
Standing somewhere I apologised to the air- It isn’t fair, I said Half grateful, part afraid Of being proven wrong in my regret— The closest thing to a closeted fate And it’s easier to evaporate In the space between My neck and my pillow And became the indivisible That incalculable afterthought Which succumbs Ever so wilfully To dream’s dying desires- Like a wound Unwilling to heal And able to feel The hurt, all the pain, Driving the flesh slowly insane Inch by inch Till all that remains of one Is a red hand Reaching for the heart
I let my mind unravel Like a knotted string That never went through The eye of the needle My theory for this is that sometimes The affliction comes from affection- Affection for the effects of the affliction As if the race between the tortoise and the hare Was won by the tortoise While never being there At the finish line
And there is much I need to ask From myself before that, But the catapult of questions Can only aim so far So I vie for the fruits Hanging on the lower branches Sweet residues, softer shadows Of a grand world Made of crystals and confetti Confessions and curiosities A woollen world Of shapeless horizons And mirror-tinted sea Made of mythical people For whom the world comes from ‘Me’
I wish to cover the world under the blanket And tell the ghost story Of how it all ended At the very beginning
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.
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—
I dropped a coin in the wishing well But did not wish at all
And so it began The exodus of my existence: At night I painted The black skies On white bed sheets Spilling ink Spilling tar Spilling ashes sent back from war I painted Night after night From dusk till dawn But the stars never showed Neither the moon manifested Nor the auroras appeared The only light I saw Was from the white of my eyes
Rubies line my lips I bury diamond in the dark Deep in my throat Foams a rabid, rabid bark But I do not dare For the censure is too strong Lashes even if you are right Why wonder when you are wrong So I paint And I paint A monk And some saint Both parts of same hypocrisy Part blotch and part a taint
This endless evolution Is just revision of the rot Mirages made images And themes turned to thought For we begin our blasphemies By begging to be left Away from the trials While accepting the act of theft For then the onus lies On those ailing institutions Who accepts blood and bile To darken words of the constitutions Oh how I wither in this weather Where all claim the right to rest Whilst walking naked through the fire Hoping for the best
So, my bed sheet it is dark My bed sheet; it is wet, And my menstruating mind Loves to water hate And grow flowers that are golden And encased in a thousand thorn A beauty to be envied Not to be woven and worn Thus I sleep In the shadows Aware at my loss Dreaming of the silver disc Falling at the toss
I dropped a coin in the wishing well But did not wish at all
The poet in me, wants to write of pain, And the child inside is euphoric At the nigh nakedness At the bare it all bluntness For once, it won’t be alone Like a lotus left In the middle of the forest For once, it would be a dandelion Seeding away the agony In search of answers
Pain, I write, Willing for it to appear To bloom out Like wave, like lava Inescapable, obliterating And free me And my own Christ on the cross; Those wounds on my memory, So that I may get paralysed From the things heretofore unrealised, But all I found Were the dust motes Blowing from my breath
Pain, I thought As I smiled in the dark At the death of my spark In the hollow of my heart Was it empty from the start? It takes all my willpower To ignore the whispers from the wall And breathe in the ground So while floating I do not fall
Nobody knows a poet, you see For he is a never was And thus never will be; A saint, a servant, a shadow of the soul, All but the devil’s advocate And someone who stole Each morsel of truth From those immortal minds Who lived their lives Beyond the hives
Ashes in my ink I am the fire from the far A hope never igniting But guiding like a star An untouched absolution A dye that does not dissolve A rhythm sans rhyme An equation that does not solve But remains like a constant A fulcrum on the edge All the weight of the world Against the end of my page
I want to see you in the midnight’s dress Alabaster elbows and satin shoulders Open for my interpretation; To gaze and wonder at the sea green veins Charting their course From your heart to mine.
I slept early last night Holding onto this thought; The effervescence of time, Of how our memories drag on Centuries before we met Like a trail Running through the forever forests Of passing people and people passing Like shadows on a summer road.
You belong to my mind At the beginning of my dreams And the end of it An epiphany born of my eyelashes An immortal thirst A fleeting fulfilment That loves to tear me apart Only to make me whole My design is your destiny And your smile, my soul.
You look like an ocean in disguise Laughing somewhere between My heart and the horizon With a storm in your chest And sunset around your waist Wherefore I set sail Alone with an oar Parting bubbles and blossoms To touch your darkening depths Beneath white waves, And now I am drowning In your purple pulse Safe under The midnight’s dress And my hands they are coloured bright In the light of your enraptured face
Breathe baby Nights like tonight (When cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare
The stars wheel Don’t they? Like an umbrella on our head Once I knew Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Ursa Major But now when I look up The stars tremble Beneath the tears upon the rim of my eyes Dear lord, am I drowning? While reaching for the sky beneath my feet Like ink in water
A long while ago Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry that I could not travel both I turned back Away from the scintillating offerings From oft repeated quotes And ever appearing jargon I turned back from literature From Shakespeare’s sweet sonnets From Orwell’s orphic auguries From the cold contours of Plato’s caves From the new nothingness of Nietzsche I turned back To the primitive mind of mirages Of breathing seas And singing trees But if I were to begin my philosophy It would end with this sentence; The whole world is a theory Words using words to make sense of the words So I write with chalk on the paper And with pen on the blackboard To see if the meaning Is lost in the act of asking (It is)
So, breathe baby Nights like tonight (When the cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare And in the end here I have No melancholy to spare
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
Hold me And let go Of the world Like a child’s hand Getting lost in the fair
This partial and minuscule mould Of slow moods and slower murders Is not for us We of souls made of cotton candy And sandpaper We of transparent flesh and silver bones We suffer from the sulphur, Sold by this world An ounce for a pound So much glitter in my hand This velvet turned sand
Most nights I watch the stars go dim and die Most days I sit and hear people birth a lie Thus, I and this world Are not for each other But You and I Are made for one another Like a spiral chiral Part dust, Part DNA
Beneath my fingernails I find Dreams that I once wrote on the wall A wall now painted over White and light blue To hang a new Modern art of some kind Ah, the delusion of time What river gets lost in search of the sea? Would a dying tree wish for lesser roots to be free?
I wish I could breathe in your nuances Those pigments of your pain Your open skin Your bottled sin Your morning blues And your rain And on my lips lie vestiges Of our time spent together Like a coin in a wishing well Alas, not all wishes can come true Alas, nothing was and will ever come through So like you now I too Stand by and blow Dandelions on a dying breeze And fire on falling snow
