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 found the whiskey sages Dancing in the dim Their eyes on the music And carved teeth on crystal rim They wore leather gloves and spandex They carried bullets in their heads They spoke of liberty and lunacy And took daydreams to their beds
I found the wounded women Walking down the aisle Their face a plastic painting Melting for a smile They held too many secrets Their eyes were far too bright For a world that loved the dark Who wished let there be no light
I found the neon soldiers Trapped beneath a grenade pin Soon to be a sea of roses For it is the war that always win They guarded children in the basement They were taught to stand and fight They were told the recoil’s same Even if the barrel’s wrong or right
I found my fallen pieces Flowing down the ice cold river My skin the colour of water Burning with an old fever: I had seen the cards beforehand And called out the eternal bluff With so many lives to play One life is not enough
I draw myself With a red charcoal Still breathing and burning In afterlife
The shape of my head is a shade Made of thousands of fingerprints Left by all the people I met Some I remember But mostly I forget Those with their teeth Sunk in my throat As if ripping me apart For the words that I wrote
Wind takes my torso and I am turning into a tide Flowing with flayed limbs; Deeper into the drawing Past pulp of the paper Into the girth of the ground Like roots and fruits I am sold by the pound Sold to wishes and worship Sold to order and obedience Sold to answers and acceptance Sold to nothing and negligence
Transparent flesh I design my thoughts so they can please Eyes of the beholder And as I grow older I intend to paint myself as a mosaic man And many see in me What I may see in many: Eyes coming closer Merging on the bridge of my nose A single center For my dissolving circumference And it is odd to fall inwards For the implosion leaves no leftover Other than the suspended emptiness In the middle of the throat That neither screams nor stays silent But echoes; this pencil stroke pain Rising, apprising my churning nerves Like nails dragged upon my spine
The shadow beneath my feet Portends a prerequisite that light must be nearby So I shade, the lines of my face The folds in my dress Gifting myself my gratitude In a bow made of shoelace For I am poor man Who breaks one pencil in two halves And loses both in no time For I am poor man Who when his world is being coloured Pretends it is a crime
Most nights I sleep Sitting and looking at a blank canvas As if it is the canvas which is painting me In colours kept secret by mirrors and mirages It is sad though that feelings cannot be reflected Only inflicted and affected Feelings by their virtue of being A past participle and present continuous Is man’s eternal tense A void with wisdom Aware that the sum of all it’s infinities Is simply a zero
There are times when I rhyme My gestating philosophy With archaic words So that when I speak There is rebirth And I am assured That my thoughts Those infinitesimal, dust motes Will live on In the veins of mortals Addicted to immortality
So perhaps I draw myself In a way I shouldn’t be drawn For who has seen one using charcoal To colour the perfect swan But I am not a swan, you see, I am crow beaten black and blue In an attempt to create something new Out of desolate frequencies And distilled time A still life portrait Dead by design
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
It’s a terrible tragedy you see To be away from you The farther you are The fainter I get The harder you hold The longer I wait Tonight the edges of my soul are clear And I can see my heartbeats through my chest They come and disappear They pulse and fade Alive and dead Red over red
I can hear the wall clock Can hear the teeter tatter of the seconds Turn into the silent hour An hour without you Then one and half, then two I am mesmerised in the act of missing you Part proud, part desperate Juggling memories and dreams Promises and themes Like Picasso and his paint Rhyming his story and history Balancing the devil and the saint
I close my eyes now and then And hold you to my chest Close enough to collapse Onto myself First in tears, followed by laughter Then silence much after Dents in my denial Rust on my reins I falter like a colt And stand still until it pains Deep enough for my marrow To call out your name Madly enough for my mind To believe that you indeed came
The night is falling fast And I am writing against the flow To reach the side of your shore Where you await in your pink bow; That tiara of innocence Which broke me Slowly apart Till I lost all of my aces To the hand of the queen of heart
