I saw myself in the sundried leaves,
In the lost rustle of a tired morning,
And the ache reminded me
Of my words in a wastebasket,
Shrivelled and softened by the ceramic blows
Of a morning tea
And I dared not unravel
The smothered ink
With my teaspoon
For who knows what wound,
Its mutilated mind would bestow,
As a belly on my boon.
I chose rhyme over meaning
And choose doors over ceiling,
Walking away
From under trapped moon,
Those uneclipsed chandelier
Into another room:
A quiet place,
A simpler explanation,
Survival through survival,
Where my shadow is not my rival.
The dawn taught me to look for the sun,
But dusk divided my attention,
Its scattered light through broken ice
Like a melting rainbow
Of myriad thoughts,
And the colours drowning time
Till all that remains of the pain
Is silent suffocation
Dark made breath
And men made death
So I befriended the feeling of loneliness
The echoes had things to say,
But the conversation fell silent,
When the game found that there is only one to play.
Often, half my heart is in something else,
For the idea of wholehearted surrender,
The sin of transparency, of nakedness
Of allowing others to converse:
With the frightened child; nascent and wild,
With the broken man; unwilling to understand,
With the future me; who can no more foresee,
Is a debt of denial.
There is a shimmer in my soul,
But they are just ashes in the hole,
There are wrinkles on my heartbeat
And every second takes a toll.
My worst memories are dreams,
Nightmares; imagined and shaped,
Catalogued with colours,
Perfected without an escape.
So I can train for the agony,
The world was supposed to bring,
That’s why I focused on the chorus,
When I was supposed to sing.
Hear, the murmur that passes from the window into the ink,
Hear, the poetry teeming with applauses from the bottom of the sink,
Hear, the tragedies being turned with the poker by the hearth,
Hear, the comedies being created at the moment of our birth.
Tag: writing
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Ceramic Mornings
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Mythmaker
I was sentenced to make myths for men.
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. -
All My Reflections
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. -
The Rites of Remembering
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? -
Something Blue
I found her seashells burning
Sand soaked
Scented with cardamom
They shone; as white stars neath violent waves
As fading scars
Of a fallen sky
I touched the constellations on her skin
Like a morse code of our memories:
The soft bed, warm blanket, cold window and quiet tea
Mornings melting into afternoons so the nights could be free
But those dreams kept us awake
With heartbeats hiding behind the hour hand
A little early, a little late
Others plans against our fate
And I know my reminiscence
Does not remind one of anything
In its vague wordings
Of my own ossuary
But I rather turn back time, than tiptoe,
Into the arms of my love
And watch our world burn around us
So people could find a path
To solace
To sanity
To self
Burning seashells
Can fire keep the water alive?
Like the past that feeds on and into the future
Fostering the festering
Those needlework lies
That sewed together the sewers of my soul
From overflowing into my eyes
To break the view, and the vision
The same as that of flies
Man overboard
There is mermaid on his mind:
Holding his private pearl
Made of pieces one of a kind,
His heart has no anchor
But his toes are touching the shore
Waiting to become a fin
So he does not drown anymore
And be one with that blue
She promised with her lips
Of how ocean would taste sweet
In sharing of their sips -
Kafka On My Cuffs
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?
-
Dithyramb
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…
03:00 AM -
A Confetti of Concussions
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
-
Toes of Time
I whisper the words you were not meant to read If one were to wipe me from your memory,
you would still be you,
and I would still be me
walking the same paths,
crossing the same crossroads,
eyes on the sun,
hearts aflutter,
searching for a glimpse:
one for the brown hand,
and one for the white,
one for the long days,
and one for the night.
I wish I could close the world,
draw each corner of it unto me
like a blanket,
like falling asleep at the center of petals
and let the silence mould me
into something beautiful,
something lost,
something forgotten,
so that when I am found
in the middle of nowhere,
a child
unable to understand
the depths of the finger he holds to walk
I am appreciated,
welcomed home,
and not left
like a wrapper
on the road.
I feel the feathers in my bones,
and eddies in my soul,
as my mind flows
passing through life,
through gentle retributions,
via murmured aspirations
like wave after wave,
conquering and crashing,
a second of victory,
only to dissolve,
and dance on the auburn sand
between time’s pink toes,
walking on eternity’s shore,
barefoot.
I miss the time
when my shadow was small. -
The Silver Shambles
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
Oh why did I not wish at all