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?
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
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
Every poet wants to be painter And every painter a poet It is the faint mist Between words and things visible Where great minds Are led astray, You can say From the paper bouquet of your everyday life From the half chewed pencil of your clerical nights; That I with my bedroom lights Turned off Am turned on By the slow shape And soft luminescence of the moon But that would be, probably A crescent quote; Lying halfway between truth and lie And even though it may soothe The immediate argument Like bolt of the door Thoughts would come knocking One midnight at a time Till madness makes me forget my heartbeat And remember only the soft taps The gentle creaks Of those faint footsteps Approaching Dim lit corridors of my conscience Asking to be heard To be understood But in my fragmented prophecies; At the altar of my falsehood I am an orphan Asked to adopt my parents And I am in a mood to err To give over to the permanent suffocation Of savoury sadness That comes from cold hugs In a stuffed room Filled with trophies and dolls Framed history on the walls And the pitter patter of acid rain On the window at dinner time For the cusp of my boyhood Was never crossed by me It appears I shed My skin on the bed And awoke An old man With childish desires Of milk and marmalade At the corner of my lips And though it is said That I have grown and growing Into a man the world can count upon I hardly know the numbers To make it count The stillness of my dreams Is a motion sickness; And I am diving against the gravity Unable to comprehend Home from horizon While the pivot of my existence Is a spinning top Balanced upon a raindrop Being painted by a poet Who writes for his pain to stop
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
I wrote on paper And was called a poet I wrote on walls And was asked to wait On a chair nailed to the floor In a cold, cold white room Where the only sound was of my breath; No different from a writer’s womb So I sat in the pleated emptiness With a glass of water left to precipitate Watching the walls seduce me to sadness When the pendulum peeled an eight And in came this ladybug green Glasses carved on the tip of her nose She had grey pad and a bald blue pen And a red ring in the shape of rose ‘Ahem, ahem’ She said ‘Ahem, ahem’ And I coughed and cleared my throat She looked at me for a second Then this is what she wrote: ‘The subject is kind of rude He has no manners so to speak He sits like a beggar on his throne A man of power sold in sale to the weak’ It made no sense, nonsense, I tell you For she was no poet for god’s own sake She was too tidy to have chaos inside And that is how I knew she was fake ‘The subject now seems annoyed He is watching me with furrowed brows As if I have stolen something of his And now pretending that everyone knows’ Ah the audacity of this usurper Who claims my kingdom as her own I have pieces of paper in my pocket And a dozen verses to loan ‘The subject is trying to smile And I am feeling all sick and ill There is wrong with his mind He says naught but I can feel’ She knows nothing of my madness Of how it hurts to sit and smile For only writing on the wall I pretend to die once in a while ‘The subject has tears in his eyes Maybe my saying something will change But what should I say at this point That will not make him seek revenge’ The fool, the fool is writing And what a caricature does she draw Looking from behind a pair of glasses She writes what she thinks she saw ‘The subject does not comply To any form of my treatment So must be treated in harsher terms Or in an asylum must be sent’ Oh I did snatch her pen and pad And wrote down my own choice Before you judge what others have said First make sure if they even have a voice…
He was born broken; one of a kind, A scarecrow one can find Here and there with splintered limbs Taught to always be half blind He was afraid even being undead As if everything he never said Can be heard through the silence Warring inside his uneven head
His name he remembered still Amen; meaning to fulfil But there were ashes in his waistcoat Of people he hurt but forgot to heal So he ran and walked and also crawled Eyes wide for one who had solved How a caterpillar in the end In a butterfly gets evolved
Days he spent in the random heat With shivering hands and on hobbling feet And at night he sought strangers known Who could tell where few roads meet And on bed made of carpet and cold He laid his flesh when it could no more hold The dreams of being young again When the promises were getting old
And in the morning, midst the fallen dew He thought of his life when it all was new Now what he has was being taken away When he already had so few But as the sun climbs its ladder high He marches once more to relive the lie Believing same as Icarius Wearing feathers would make him fly
And even today you can catch his glimpse The old man, who begs and limps, Through the mirror of mortal minds He is the maker of all the hymns One who tosses the coin for sun and rain The progeny of unrequited pain Hear his heartbeat as your own And in your vein his name: Amen.
I painted a white line Upon a blank canvas And the people they praised me no more They could not see; That the painting was an echo Of my silence that wasn’t seen before
