If music could be made, Then all rhythms would need a roof.
I am just a quiet kid walking on a silent sidewalk, Measuring the distance between two tiles, Counting yellow leaves amongst green, Ticketing my thoughts beside the traffic light, And being a lamppost to remain unseen.
My eraser is razor sharp And my pencilled Picassos Burn without vapours, Leaving white carbon, Like an unprinted newspaper.
This is the heading of the day: “Do you not do not believe what you say.” (Was that a question. And…was that a question too? Yes, two. Perhaps. Who am I to question…)
They brought me from zero And they taught me infinity, So I could extrapolate The contraption called concession, That middle ground Where, no one is around, To plant a seed, Or to paint a shade.
So, my mind, like every mind has come To a common conclusion: That each drawing needs The name of an artist, For then, the art can be torn apart. You cannot hang an anonymous, can you?
It’s the way of the world, boy, It’s the task of time. If you divide your days Between work and play, You can have coffee at eight, And your wine at nine.
I am writing like a maniac, Mesmerised by my own vanity.
Didn’t once, amongst scientists posing as philosophers, In a shivering old shanty By the backdoor of my dream, I said that needle is the greatest weapon ever invented; For it sews together torn men And sends them back to be torn apart again, Stitch by violent stitch, Till it cannot know which is which: Cain or Abel, Bible or Aesop’s Fable, Eliot or Gertrude Stein, The Monster or Frankenstein.
Often, when my mind stills, I can smell my nostrils And taste my tongue, Draw mirrors with my eyes, And make my face go young.
It is a miracle that in silence One can hear more of all: The cocoon breathing for caterpillar, And incense stick in the prayer hall.
I have toothache since yesterday, So pardon if I seem to mumble, Bottling sulphur in my philosophy And murder whilst being humble.
I am a student of disguise; To believe me is to mimic surprise.
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…
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
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?”
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
“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”
I see strangers with my face Wave at me from afar They line the luminous city With knowledge in their hand While I am fishing for sequin sardines Left upon the land In my mind the caltrops stops Every thought that grew from ground For Promethean parentheses My open mind is unsound I shift and sway, I shift and sway Holding on to sweet yesterday For the World’s decree Is that dreams are free But to breathe life in them I have to pay
Pauper with papers I write of thousand priceless things I have feathers made of vapours But that does not make them wings So I turn around and retreat When it’s time for me fly For who would lend a lap When it’s time for me to die I have my fingers in the sand And I am searching for lost time Would I be shown mercy in the end If I solved my own crime?
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
I wish I could be the colour blue Not sapphire or cerulean But something old And something new As if waves of the ocean Are carrying pieces of the sky Moonlight and stardust Dipped in indigo dye A deeper azure A cobalt that will fade Part turquoise, part teal Your shade, your shade…
