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: living
-
Ceramic Mornings
-
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 -
A Confetti of Concussions
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
-
Crevasses
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 -
Dreaming Through The Decades
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 -
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 -
Splinters
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 -
The Song of Silent Cicadas
“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” -
Comatose
I found the whiskey sages
Dancing in the dim
Their eyes on the music
And carved teeth on crystal rim
They wore leather gloves and spandex
They carried bullets in their heads
They spoke of liberty and lunacy
And took daydreams to their beds
I found the wounded women
Walking down the aisle
Their face a plastic painting
Melting for a smile
They held too many secrets
Their eyes were far too bright
For a world that loved the dark
Who wished let there be no light
I found the neon soldiers
Trapped beneath a grenade pin
Soon to be a sea of roses
For it is the war that always win
They guarded children in the basement
They were taught to stand and fight
They were told the recoil’s same
Even if the barrel’s wrong or right
I found my fallen pieces
Flowing down the ice cold river
My skin the colour of water
Burning with an old fever:
I had seen the cards beforehand
And called out the eternal bluff
With so many lives to play
One life is not enough