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
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
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to music
I had a tendency to blink back tears To stitch myself beforehand Like a social vaccine so to say To stay rooted And choose no way For then the balance; it would break And I would have something at stake And I was afraid of being left broken Someone’s memory Another’s token So here was how I spent my hours With cold heart And long hot showers Making promises on blank, blind papers I wrote of stones that floated on vapours; Those dreams that were ruins from the start Still left so for they were born torn apart And the people they came to claim That all I could say was my own name Unaware, that all I had was my own mind That was seldom, if ever kind Thus melancholy is my poison of choice And sad smiles my go to guise For then I can claim to be Everything that isn’t me
Now the colours of life have dried And I feel like the fog of midwinter Spread across sleeping fields And quiet rivers running Like a toddler on a trail Without wisdom or any worry And no notion where to sail But as I look back at the way I have treaded I know it’s the same where now I am headed To my beginning To the end I am nosediving so I can ascend Through the little hells I have clawed in my bones From the promises I made to the unknowns Like those flowers I grew around my grave Knowing the wreaths won’t be there to save Me, from the parody called pain Watching my headstone go dry in the rain
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to silence
You came to pick me up in green And you came to see me off in ochre And so it feels like autumn in my chest Now as then When I count the seconds Left, till we meet again
This was our first October With mornings made of sore blanket Wet cheeks and warm lemon water Our feet draped in the sunlight Filtered through the faded time Of the year old newspaper I wish our nights had been longer Darker and deeper Like the colour of your tresses And I wish our clock had stuck at 3 am At that perfect hour When dreams take over And sleep had no power
The gardens we greeted Those walks that we shared Two bees out of the beehive Tasting honey in the air Weren’t our shadows far too behind Unable to catch us As we bartered the sunlight Across asphalt alleyways With strangers asking directions Of far off places And tying open shoelaces We answered in no For lost souls we were With everywhere to go
I can listen to you sleep all night long But the dreams that I dream of you divides me For I remember the first time I saw you I was wax in love with the flame Your face was my life on fire Your name was the name of my name And in the blank and silent space I saw my world being born again In the fragrance of your hair I found the petrichor of a long lost rain
By day and by night Through pages blank, white and yellow I read our destiny That started with a hello But now in this moment I am daydreaming like dust Your love is the water And my life is its thirst And the end I foresee; Is of us lying back in bed Sharing a single breath Till all we can say has been said
Summer falls on your skin And you become a photograph Taken in another time, in another world
There is so much to see in your smile In the delicate haven of your hair In the long awaited embrace In the absence of heat Under the cold bed-sheets Lying like lost Latin These folds of satin after satin
On winter solstice When the moon is a sorrowful sickle Or a pregnant womb of the invisible night I watch your form breathe The dark pink; this colour of our love As we hold on to the same dream Between our fingers; Like a tissue paper napkin
Do you dream of the daylight, child? When I hold you In the glass castle Where the vision of the world Is a filtered reflection Like thoughts diluted to diction, I suppose, you do All birds does And the Butterflies too
Your veins are in my palm And I am running out of breath On the cusp of madness I stay and I pray For the sorrows to surrender And bliss to find a way Is it too much to ask? Is it a leap of false faith? Will I find back the angel? Or fall down to death?
My eyes often betray The hurting of my heart When I walk and I talk While acting out my part But tonight, the symphony Is like syrup and the sea Goldfishes at the shore Eyeing my honey on the tree And I am here in the hall With strings in my hands And my soul playing a marionette That no one understands
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
“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
