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.
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)
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
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—
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
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
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
