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.
I often notice that night Is right time for one to fight with oneself
You are naked with brittle bones And the heart floats, like stone Upon the impalpable air, Buried in your body With a weight, as you wait, For the world to surrender To bow down as you beg For the light to be shined in your eyes For water to be passed through your lips: A concrete kiss Of traffic light love And 9 to 5 passion So that you may be seen Laughing, smiling, walking, talking Along the chorus of the human hummus
The room is a soap bubble Ready to erupt They watch me as I speak A monologue I oar on speechless sunshine A mute morning Born out of Borrowed solace and forced silence Like a wall with paintings Having no need to be owned To be entombed or embalmed With stories other than my own Yet unable to Deny the desire Of loving the smell of lit matchsticks While afraid of its fire
Men must not talk of their mental health
I cut my photograph with scissors The outline cherry red From the bleeding background For it hurts to be left alone Even in the past It dismembers the delusion My silhouette without shape A broken geometry Held together by tape Of a world within with a world without Snow sealed Half peeled Body bagged Soul killed
Most of us mimic The same mistake And get better with time At convincing oneself That mistakes were truly mistake And they happen Around Gravity’s girth Like a natural law for unnatural things
I too mimic Practice and perfect The moment of my death The last words That final thought Fear, Anxiety, Regret and Fate Should I go closing my eyes Or will the irony of the effort suffice?
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
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—
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
Hold me And let go Of the world Like a child’s hand Getting lost in the fair
This partial and minuscule mould Of slow moods and slower murders Is not for us We of souls made of cotton candy And sandpaper We of transparent flesh and silver bones We suffer from the sulphur, Sold by this world An ounce for a pound So much glitter in my hand This velvet turned sand
Most nights I watch the stars go dim and die Most days I sit and hear people birth a lie Thus, I and this world Are not for each other But You and I Are made for one another Like a spiral chiral Part dust, Part DNA
Beneath my fingernails I find Dreams that I once wrote on the wall A wall now painted over White and light blue To hang a new Modern art of some kind Ah, the delusion of time What river gets lost in search of the sea? Would a dying tree wish for lesser roots to be free?
I wish I could breathe in your nuances Those pigments of your pain Your open skin Your bottled sin Your morning blues And your rain And on my lips lie vestiges Of our time spent together Like a coin in a wishing well Alas, not all wishes can come true Alas, nothing was and will ever come through So like you now I too Stand by and blow Dandelions on a dying breeze And fire on falling snow
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to music
I had a tendency to blink back tears To stitch myself beforehand Like a social vaccine so to say To stay rooted And choose no way For then the balance; it would break And I would have something at stake And I was afraid of being left broken Someone’s memory Another’s token So here was how I spent my hours With cold heart And long hot showers Making promises on blank, blind papers I wrote of stones that floated on vapours; Those dreams that were ruins from the start Still left so for they were born torn apart And the people they came to claim That all I could say was my own name Unaware, that all I had was my own mind That was seldom, if ever kind Thus melancholy is my poison of choice And sad smiles my go to guise For then I can claim to be Everything that isn’t me
Now the colours of life have dried And I feel like the fog of midwinter Spread across sleeping fields And quiet rivers running Like a toddler on a trail Without wisdom or any worry And no notion where to sail But as I look back at the way I have treaded I know it’s the same where now I am headed To my beginning To the end I am nosediving so I can ascend Through the little hells I have clawed in my bones From the promises I made to the unknowns Like those flowers I grew around my grave Knowing the wreaths won’t be there to save Me, from the parody called pain Watching my headstone go dry in the rain
Somewhere in between Our footsteps turned to silence
Summer falls on your skin And you become a photograph Taken in another time, in another world
There is so much to see in your smile In the delicate haven of your hair In the long awaited embrace In the absence of heat Under the cold bed-sheets Lying like lost Latin These folds of satin after satin
On winter solstice When the moon is a sorrowful sickle Or a pregnant womb of the invisible night I watch your form breathe The dark pink; this colour of our love As we hold on to the same dream Between our fingers; Like a tissue paper napkin
Do you dream of the daylight, child? When I hold you In the glass castle Where the vision of the world Is a filtered reflection Like thoughts diluted to diction, I suppose, you do All birds does And the Butterflies too
Your veins are in my palm And I am running out of breath On the cusp of madness I stay and I pray For the sorrows to surrender And bliss to find a way Is it too much to ask? Is it a leap of false faith? Will I find back the angel? Or fall down to death?
My eyes often betray The hurting of my heart When I walk and I talk While acting out my part But tonight, the symphony Is like syrup and the sea Goldfishes at the shore Eyeing my honey on the tree And I am here in the hall With strings in my hands And my soul playing a marionette That no one understands
Blue lines on my face Teardrops on my dress She said, she said There is no one at my place But he wasn’t standing far The man in violent garb Pining compliments Like flowers on the barb
His brutal hands were red From all life, playing dead And like a rose to the cactus She wed, she wed Merry was the man Like cherry blossomed lies The kiss was murder weapon Aided by garter and bow ties
And so years were spent Part in bruises, part as prize With smoke in the lungs With mirror in the eyes While the violent man he waltzed Alone on the floor With a corpse in his arms To a music playing no more
