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
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
I heard There are things Out in the woollen nights Mosaics of happenstances And matchstick quick delights A life of unbuttoned jeans and restless jazz And lipstick stained tissue papers Left on countertops Under empty whiskey glasses and beer mugs filled with vapour Proof of a life at once loud and empty Like a vacant microphone Filled with dreams of hunger Like a dog with a buried bone O how the mind meanders In the test tube alleyways A ghetto full of false fire Spreading shadow for many days
I heard There are people Who count the twelve strokes of midnight Yawn at the break of dawn And search for moon in the twilight And gather molten menagerie In the effervescence of aftershave Wherein the limbs are nests of Nirvana And love a motion to enslave Till the flame of faces; it withers, And only wax is left to blame Those shivering shadows differ Like every lover with a new name
I heard There are places Where mortal wounds entwine And life is bet on races Which has no finish line Here the dyslexic dystopia Begins beneath one’s roof And the mythical myopia Does not end without a proof Dying under disco lights I lay colour blind to the pain Needles upon my tongue And yet I am singing in the rain
She lay on the bed like an open book And in the dim yellow light In the diaphanous albumin desire To surrender and to conquer I dreamt that I could read her Line after line Passage after passage Page after page Till nothing more remained Other than the bookmarked memories Those handwritten notes In the folded corners To revisit and renew our love That obsolete imitation Of imperfect life's pursuit for perfection
Mercury in my mind I hold solace in my sleep If shallow is my heart Why would my feelings run deep?
She was written anonymous In a language I couldn't read I was a gardener in need of shade But knew not the type of seed So I waited with bated breaths With my hand close to her spine Should I turn the first page of her tresses Or lay her open and in my hands supine In my listless mind I would picture her As a shape I could never comprehend So I went for the last pages To see if I could know her in the end But the ending was the same as beginning She was holding herself too close As if the hand that wrote her never bothered To find if she was a lily or a rose
Do not open your heart For you would have to borrow it’s beats And the lending would stop If another heart she meets
Night after night I searched for her sorrow Against the scale of her past I weighed her tomorrow Numbering her pages I stained my fingers deep blue But her corners remained same Nebulous and new I went through the hyphens The colons and commas I passed through every comedy All tragedies, each drama Till lo and behold I could feel on my lips The words of her next chapters As if by my fingertips But O was I wrong And I was so wrong For it was her voice Singing my song And her pages they were Black from my hand Having unwritten her story In a rage to understand Mine was the fault For I should have known I was just a plagiarist Writing her as my own
I can feel my skin Drip on the floor Like the ink in my bottle I hold words no more
Evenings; splashed like red wine on canvas Now turn dark Eyelash by falling eyelash As I meditate upon the traffic sounds Upon the streetlights And the indistinguishable net of voices Falling over me Like a little rain, this brittle pain Should I see now Should I share The weight of those fingers Which rested upon my iliac crest Like a promise of an afterlife? Maybe my heart is not a heart afterall Maybe it’s a spade; A leaf leftover from the fall Black and decaying Prone to praying Lost and afraid Saying what’s been said Over and over Slower and slower Till its heartbeat’s no more Than a pulse on my wrist Which l bartered for love And ceased to exist
We should have been born in oyster shells Our lives a lunar cycle Circling the moon within our womb For this warm darkness I guzzle This phantom of my lies Lies like a lotus on my lips A rootless need sans a seed That divides and conquers All my desires which anchors The ships of my souls On your face with four moles And I know that the distance Has kept us apart And the time has been ending Right from the start And now and then again Our words have gone sparse Drowned by those voices Who called ours a farce But the ocean is changing There are waves which find home In shaping sandcastles Where they no longer roam
I wish I could dance And drown in my sorrow I wish I could regret My mistakes of tomorrow I wish I could be Someone you see Knowing what I am And what you want me to be So I try to separate My dream from the reason And hold back my love In my arms; this prison Inherited over years From those before me Who searched for freedom And found it’s not free
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
Has an ant ever crossed an ocean Or a swan reached the sun Has any flower ever saved a thorn Or lost love ever won
II
I scratched; Upon the whitewashed wall of my sanctum My nails bled With the semicolons and commas But the pain that rested Like autumn in my chest Stayed The heartbeats shifting dark roots and yellow leaves A raw pulse Decaying With each bartered breath (Perhaps I have written these lines before Or perhaps I have felt the same Long time back When out of the blue The blackness took over Like a bubble of bile)
Sometimes I want to be another man Someone whose shallow thoughts Never leaves his hollow lips And if I were to dissect myself In a cold blue room And remove these tumours that I can feel Lying along my spine like roadblocks I may perhaps get better But I do not want to be better Not alone and not by myself For I know my hand would betray Even if the scalpel stays loyal
So I sew my torn sweater One stitch at a time And I can feel at the back of my neck The mist beyond the window Hiding a drowsy world A quiet world From the memories of Edgar Allen Poe I don’t know… For I am sewing my sweater One stitch at a time
It is easier to break than build My grandmother told me Long ago, when my shoe size was half of what it is now We were sitting in the veranda Watching sparrows without nests Search for shade Her wrinkled hands were beautiful They knew only to give To me, to the sparrows Her today for our tomorrows I did not understand what she meant Only that she meant what she said
III
The face of my love Is an enigma A diamond made of star dust And dew drops I have seen her as none have During hours longer than light In dreams deeper than the night And yet if I were to hold A paintbrush Her shape would disappear In the shadows of my mind Like fragrance does from a flower
I know her to be beautiful Like rainbow after rain Or an ocean undressing at midnight Whispering the tales Of sailors and their sails And I often try In an absentminded earnestness That of a child never chided To try and catch her featherlight hair To hold that waterfall The obsidian madness as she sways Like a soft swan Without silhouette
The nights are hard Rebels and roses And I write of my love in poems and proses As I reach for the soft molasses Surrounding my heart Breaking and bleeding From Cupid’s blue dart
She taught me to write, you know… When all I could do was recite And bruise the pages Perhaps I with all my innocence Was nothing but a man wanted for my own murder But with her I am me; Irrepressibly free A child dressed in clothes too big for him. Perhaps I never grew up after 2007 Forever eleven An Abandoned ectoplasm Morphed in shape by satire Drowning in the desire To be wanted and stay haunted By the spectre of love
IV
I am rhyming the verses For I know nothing more My poems are to the paper What waves are to the shore
