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
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
She lay on the bed like an open book And in the dim yellow light In the diaphanous albumin desire To surrender and to conquer I dreamt that I could read her Line after line Passage after passage Page after page Till nothing more remained Other than the bookmarked memories Those handwritten notes In the folded corners To revisit and renew our love That obsolete imitation Of imperfect life's pursuit for perfection
Mercury in my mind I hold solace in my sleep If shallow is my heart Why would my feelings run deep?
She was written anonymous In a language I couldn't read I was a gardener in need of shade But knew not the type of seed So I waited with bated breaths With my hand close to her spine Should I turn the first page of her tresses Or lay her open and in my hands supine In my listless mind I would picture her As a shape I could never comprehend So I went for the last pages To see if I could know her in the end But the ending was the same as beginning She was holding herself too close As if the hand that wrote her never bothered To find if she was a lily or a rose
Do not open your heart For you would have to borrow it’s beats And the lending would stop If another heart she meets
Night after night I searched for her sorrow Against the scale of her past I weighed her tomorrow Numbering her pages I stained my fingers deep blue But her corners remained same Nebulous and new I went through the hyphens The colons and commas I passed through every comedy All tragedies, each drama Till lo and behold I could feel on my lips The words of her next chapters As if by my fingertips But O was I wrong And I was so wrong For it was her voice Singing my song And her pages they were Black from my hand Having unwritten her story In a rage to understand Mine was the fault For I should have known I was just a plagiarist Writing her as my own
I can feel my skin Drip on the floor Like the ink in my bottle I hold words no more
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
