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
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
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
I opened the bathroom door And in the dim and damning septic light Of the months old lightbulb My face, blurred and bludgeoned, By night’s nihilistic apparatus Smiled back through the broken mirror Hanging above the dripping, dead sink And I think, that is how it feels To wake up, in the middle of the night Hours after having a fight
I cupped the cold water Felt my fingers sting where the ring Has cut in my flesh Had I punched too hard at the bouquet? Were the petals bruised and bloodied? As if freshly plucked on a dewy morning By a miner’s hand Oh the anger in my throat Blue Eve around my Red Adam’s apple I knew if I let loose the bile of my belly And roar the bull’s breeding call My landlord will knock And the door would open A sliver, then a centimetre Till I am naked in the flooding light Of the gallery Absolutely awake And utterly ashamed To mutter an excuse And retire in solace
I cannot shave without tasting something of the foam It’s bitter This taste on my lips Like a thirst long not satiated Lips, last kissed Perhaps a decade ago In an alley behind an alley Where a beautiful nymph in rotten rags Had found my face handsome than those walls Closing in around us “You look much better than the bricks” She said I smiled, hiding the mortar in my molars As the rain pattered down like tar Peeling away rust from the pipes Drenching us Head to toes Like a wet painting
It has been three hours But my beard still showed Dancing around my face like a Rorschach’s blot I felt my fingers feel my skin Smooth it was Like warm pages of a new novel A novel about this modern day Don Quixote Who spent hours shaving the black spot left on the mirror My blade had blood on it And the sink sprouted red roots I watched as they dissolved And slipped down the drain It was only when the last drop was gone That I did felt the pain
I stood still till the sunlight streamed in From the half open window Like an intruder Creeping along the floor Till the corner of the door Illumined And left me cold Years old So I turned, back to my bed Where nightmares awaited Under the blanket In a dark sequin gown For dark was my friend For dark is the end And beyond that I feel nothing And nothing I comprehend
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
My past now grows impatient Under its tortoise shell Eons passed and I have moved Only a fingernail Closer to you
Much of my music is lost Listening to the wall clock Counting, sixty seconds and a minute Sixty minutes and an hour Twelve hours, twice over, Again and again Through wind, winter and rain This dilemma, delusion and pain Of having met you And loved you for a millennia But having no permanent memory No cup of your captured laughter No mirror of your misty eyes No sunlight captured by your tresses No sweet scent of your sighs All I am left with, are yellow pieces of fractured time And a heart that mostly murmurs For all truths out aloud are lies
The blanket we wear Smells like Sunday morning A waking warmth Of hay and honeysuckle And a quiet happiness Equally sad and empty So we hold each other From falling apart From drifting into different dreamlands Where one of us ends and the other starts
I watch as you breathe in Life, my life For I am haunted By the ghost of your breasts Buried and hidden A catacomb of our heartbeats Growing restless Like a river ever running But never reaching The estuary of my arms
You see I am obsessed With the idea of your existence Insanely infatuated So unequivocally infantile To see your warm womb As the walls of my tomb And the pulse of your veins Like all the seasons I have ever seen
I know, I know I am mad to my bones But my death is being alone Without your hand in my own So, I place myself in your hand like a petal You drop me I am cold I am hard I am metal With nothing more to see And nothing more to be With nothing to call mine And nothing is for free
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
You came to pick me up in green And you came to see me off in ochre And so it feels like autumn in my chest Now as then When I count the seconds Left, till we meet again
This was our first October With mornings made of sore blanket Wet cheeks and warm lemon water Our feet draped in the sunlight Filtered through the faded time Of the year old newspaper I wish our nights had been longer Darker and deeper Like the colour of your tresses And I wish our clock had stuck at 3 am At that perfect hour When dreams take over And sleep had no power
The gardens we greeted Those walks that we shared Two bees out of the beehive Tasting honey in the air Weren’t our shadows far too behind Unable to catch us As we bartered the sunlight Across asphalt alleyways With strangers asking directions Of far off places And tying open shoelaces We answered in no For lost souls we were With everywhere to go
I can listen to you sleep all night long But the dreams that I dream of you divides me For I remember the first time I saw you I was wax in love with the flame Your face was my life on fire Your name was the name of my name And in the blank and silent space I saw my world being born again In the fragrance of your hair I found the petrichor of a long lost rain
By day and by night Through pages blank, white and yellow I read our destiny That started with a hello But now in this moment I am daydreaming like dust Your love is the water And my life is its thirst And the end I foresee; Is of us lying back in bed Sharing a single breath Till all we can say has been said
