Psk

Tag: meaning

  • Ceramic Mornings

    Ceramic Mornings

    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.



  • The Rites of Remembering

    Measure me in marigolds
    For in a throw-away thesaurus, outside a church,
    I grappled with the dappled god of meaning,
    And lost.

    What is light and dark? 
    Where is heaven and hell?
    If not in the act of becoming one,
    At the last peal of the bell.

    (Pardon my parody, but the juxtaposition is justified)

    Am I pregnant with pain?
    Crawling on the polyester carpet of my burnt-down building,
    Wondering if the watchman can watch my agony,
    Or the torch is just an ornament,
    Like for a cripple is the cane.
    Should I wither or give birth?
    Is there not enough on this earth:
    Pain, I mean; the people they can pray,
    Dancing upon the anthill,
    A divine massacre so to say,
    Thus I ask for an answer and the Answer, it asks:
    Is that your true face,
    Or the mask of your masks?

    Should I memorise now,
    The punctuations on my face?
    Or claw down to a carcass,
    The primordial preface?
    Whence time could be tasted,
    As old flint struck new bone,
    When men bowed and prayed,
    To the shape of the stone.

    So, Summon me, Suleiman;
    Who darkened the Siberian plain,
    Red snow on his arrow-tip
    From the blood of a thousand slain.

    Summon me too, Great Elixir,
    He of immortal name,
    Who tore down towers of sandstone,
    As part of a checkered game.

    Summon me, Lady Myleth,
    She who crowned her husband as Queen,
    And watched as the kingdom danced
    On the watered edge of a dagger unseen.

    Summon me too, the People Pleaser,
    For whom did the senate end,
    But died as an enemy
    In the circle of enslaved friends.

    Thus, my answer to the Answer,
    Is a question in disguise
    For isn’t truth an orphan
    Born out of lies?
    I ask: Do I dwell on the delusion,
    That maybe everything is as it should be,
    That change is a charlatan
    Only a reflection of what could be,
    As the nature of all things,
    Is to echo and not sing, 
    Why tie the knot and be anchored,
    When you can hold onto the string?

  • 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.

  • The Dying Dandelions


    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)






  • 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


  • The First Light

    We are sitting in a sun-blown café 
    in the far corner, alone,
    at 6 in the morning.

    You are wearing your blue jeans
    and my t-shirt—
    washed out, white, far too large—
    fitting you perfectly.

    The waitress is dusting the tables,
    pulling up the chairs,
    shaking the table salt containers,
    piling up tissue paper.

    I watch as the dust motes play in the breeze
    by the window—behind your hair.
    They glow auburn—your hair, not the dust motes.

    I was wrong to ask for open hair.
    It looks lovelier now, tied in a loose bun,
    with wayward strands
    falling and cupping the contours of your face.

    I watch in silence as the cups of coffee are laid,
    watch as the steam rises
    and veils your face—
    You wink.
    I smile.
    You sip.
    I smile again.

    You ask something.
    I nod, far too captivated by the rings on your hand—
    the black from me,
    and the blue from your mother.

    They rest on your skin,
    absorbing your essence,
    your touch,
    the warmth I long for—
    something more than black coffee.

    The conversation begins,
    and I try to keep up
    as words cling to your pink lips
    and memories roll down
    from the tip of your tongue.

    Your eyes dance,
    the brown in them melting
    under the sunlight.
    I wonder what you see—
    how deep, how far?
    Can you see my soul, that I wear
    so close to my skin,
    almost like a second shadow
    when you are around?
    Can you feel my heart beating,
    painfully, avidly,
    as it grasps
    the reason for its existence—
    sitting two feet across,
    legs crossed, feet dangling,
    covered in white socks
    and tan boots…

    Maybe yes, maybe no—
    but I long to know.

    The breakfast comes:
    omelette, jam, butter, and bread.
    You look at me and ask…
    “Was it something I said?”

  • Toes of Time

    I whisper the words you were not meant to read
    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.

    I miss the time
    when my shadow was small.

  • Slow down Sisyphus

    Dear Diary

    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—

    We are, each one of us, a self-sustaining slave.

    I face the mirror. And the mirror turns away.

    The End

  • My Mirror Has A Mind

    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