There I stood, assembled, In the centre of a blank room: Unadorned and without any orifice, Time for me was a corpse in an ocean, Swollen, floating, rotten, unrecognisable But the salt still stung, As if death had forgotten about the pain of passing.
The silence of the world rested like mist upon my mind, A common sobriquet, I know, but still one of its kind, Oh and the dark took it, and made me one of its own, But I know not textures of such thoughts, This enslavement comes from whispers; Those slow daggers, Aimed at my slower spine.
But I do dream beyond this shackled dream; This walled precipice, I carry out my sentence, In a sense that makes me, my own judge and jury, And weave myths, For those who dip their finger in the wind, To fold the fabric of the world, One corner at a time.
Am I God? The omnipotent earthling of heaven and hell? The omnipresent search of science and eastern religion? The omniscient questioner of Egypt and Israel? No. Perhaps, yes. Perhaps, we all are a perhaps, A song on the shore made from echoes of lost oars, Each of us existing for the existence of other, We each another’s child, We each another’s mother.
Seems I have turned the men themselves into myth, So, another life sentence for me; I never learn, And it is a gift.
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.
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?
I dropped a coin in the wishing well But did not wish at all
And so it began The exodus of my existence: At night I painted The black skies On white bed sheets Spilling ink Spilling tar Spilling ashes sent back from war I painted Night after night From dusk till dawn But the stars never showed Neither the moon manifested Nor the auroras appeared The only light I saw Was from the white of my eyes
Rubies line my lips I bury diamond in the dark Deep in my throat Foams a rabid, rabid bark But I do not dare For the censure is too strong Lashes even if you are right Why wonder when you are wrong So I paint And I paint A monk And some saint Both parts of same hypocrisy Part blotch and part a taint
This endless evolution Is just revision of the rot Mirages made images And themes turned to thought For we begin our blasphemies By begging to be left Away from the trials While accepting the act of theft For then the onus lies On those ailing institutions Who accepts blood and bile To darken words of the constitutions Oh how I wither in this weather Where all claim the right to rest Whilst walking naked through the fire Hoping for the best
So, my bed sheet it is dark My bed sheet; it is wet, And my menstruating mind Loves to water hate And grow flowers that are golden And encased in a thousand thorn A beauty to be envied Not to be woven and worn Thus I sleep In the shadows Aware at my loss Dreaming of the silver disc Falling at the toss
I dropped a coin in the wishing well But did not wish at all
The poet in me, wants to write of pain, And the child inside is euphoric At the nigh nakedness At the bare it all bluntness For once, it won’t be alone Like a lotus left In the middle of the forest For once, it would be a dandelion Seeding away the agony In search of answers
Pain, I write, Willing for it to appear To bloom out Like wave, like lava Inescapable, obliterating And free me And my own Christ on the cross; Those wounds on my memory, So that I may get paralysed From the things heretofore unrealised, But all I found Were the dust motes Blowing from my breath
Pain, I thought As I smiled in the dark At the death of my spark In the hollow of my heart Was it empty from the start? It takes all my willpower To ignore the whispers from the wall And breathe in the ground So while floating I do not fall
Nobody knows a poet, you see For he is a never was And thus never will be; A saint, a servant, a shadow of the soul, All but the devil’s advocate And someone who stole Each morsel of truth From those immortal minds Who lived their lives Beyond the hives
Ashes in my ink I am the fire from the far A hope never igniting But guiding like a star An untouched absolution A dye that does not dissolve A rhythm sans rhyme An equation that does not solve But remains like a constant A fulcrum on the edge All the weight of the world Against the end of my page
I want to see you in the midnight’s dress Alabaster elbows and satin shoulders Open for my interpretation; To gaze and wonder at the sea green veins Charting their course From your heart to mine.
I slept early last night Holding onto this thought; The effervescence of time, Of how our memories drag on Centuries before we met Like a trail Running through the forever forests Of passing people and people passing Like shadows on a summer road.
You belong to my mind At the beginning of my dreams And the end of it An epiphany born of my eyelashes An immortal thirst A fleeting fulfilment That loves to tear me apart Only to make me whole My design is your destiny And your smile, my soul.
You look like an ocean in disguise Laughing somewhere between My heart and the horizon With a storm in your chest And sunset around your waist Wherefore I set sail Alone with an oar Parting bubbles and blossoms To touch your darkening depths Beneath white waves, And now I am drowning In your purple pulse Safe under The midnight’s dress And my hands they are coloured bright In the light of your enraptured face
Breathe baby Nights like tonight (When cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare
The stars wheel Don’t they? Like an umbrella on our head Once I knew Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Ursa Major But now when I look up The stars tremble Beneath the tears upon the rim of my eyes Dear lord, am I drowning? While reaching for the sky beneath my feet Like ink in water
A long while ago Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry that I could not travel both I turned back Away from the scintillating offerings From oft repeated quotes And ever appearing jargon I turned back from literature From Shakespeare’s sweet sonnets From Orwell’s orphic auguries From the cold contours of Plato’s caves From the new nothingness of Nietzsche I turned back To the primitive mind of mirages Of breathing seas And singing trees But if I were to begin my philosophy It would end with this sentence; The whole world is a theory Words using words to make sense of the words So I write with chalk on the paper And with pen on the blackboard To see if the meaning Is lost in the act of asking (It is)
So, breathe baby Nights like tonight (When the cold clothes the bones And flesh is just fistful of snow; Numb and delicate) Are rare And in the end here I have No melancholy to spare
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
I wonder if being truly lost Is the same as never being found Would I know I am able to speak If I never did hear any sound There, I have spoken A pencil pushing philosopher Watching the sunset out of the window And sunrise in my bed My years passed like traffic on tarmac But I am still a kid in my head
Before you I was an afterthought A sunflower shy of the sun Walking the slow shades beneath lost footpaths Afraid of every turn So I searched for radio-silence And grew deserts in my yard Thus no one came to claim me I was both bastard and a bard
I open my eyes and your face evaporates, In thin threads of memories From the diaphanous diary Of our love that is losing Its scent by the mile So I smile and you smile And wait for time to take its toll When our flesh turns to foliage And two souls are made whole
I know that my name For you is a blessing and a curse And I am holding still your world And trying to reverse Your agony and your pain And instances insane Like catching your falling tears In the middle of the rain And I have lost some And the rest I am losing Neither by choice nor by choosing The best for us both Promising a broken oath To heal and to mend Nightmares that never end But goes on like this poem With an intent to ascend The fate of a dying flower; Which has no beauty left to lend
Before you I was an afterthought With you I breathe and burn I now have sun on my left shoulder And towards you, my sunflower, I turn
