It is the morning after And I awake as an origami undone Only yesterday I had her arm on my chest With mine anchored round her waist Balancing our seesaw soul Making whole Those pieces we planted Like bookmarks to find The stories we memorised Keeping in mind Going almost insane Being blinded by pain Once kayaking in chaos To feel alive again
Now I watch my face shiver In the ether of her eyes Now I am fire cold with fever Falling on the rise She is here She is mine She has no say to say Far near Dear divine So I kneel but not to pray Now I watch her face shiver In the ether of my eyes Now I am fire with her fever She is falling when I rise
But I dare not confess that I dreamt of her In the early hours of last night For that would be blasphemy My being alone With only her memory Drenched monochromes Some charcoal art Of me painting her toenails pink And she murmuring shape of my heart Waiting for the words to sink
For her voice is my hymn in exile And here I wander, mile by mile A broken kite Dead dynamite Waiting for her mirage to draw me closer Towards sun kissed horizons Across daydreaming dunes And purple fields Of my pulsing past Through this desert vast, desolate and slow I search for her As the seconds grow
I can see her white hands over black countertop Passing pepper into the pot Waiting for me to finish my worship of her Waiting for me to open the refrigerator And take half a dozen eggs to scramble To toss and turn The yolk and white In the shade of the dim light Wafting from her seashell skin With wafer thin petrichor Of our last night’s rain (Did I drown in her hair? Did my gasps made her growl? Did we swim in stolen silence? Did our motions knew our goal? To be, to be Half mad in ecstasy The sea falling apart At the lips of an estuary)
The dress does to her What dust does to a diamond But she knows it not Even when I beg; a child in disguise To breathe over her facets Between her navel and her thighs But she laughs and she turns Like flower between ferns She waxes into full moon And I am a candle that ever burns To ignite at her sight To surrender without a fight To be answer to her questions Which were never answered right
Has an ant ever crossed an ocean Or a swan reached the sun Has any flower ever saved a thorn Or lost love ever won
II
I scratched; Upon the whitewashed wall of my sanctum My nails bled With the semicolons and commas But the pain that rested Like autumn in my chest Stayed The heartbeats shifting dark roots and yellow leaves A raw pulse Decaying With each bartered breath (Perhaps I have written these lines before Or perhaps I have felt the same Long time back When out of the blue The blackness took over Like a bubble of bile)
Sometimes I want to be another man Someone whose shallow thoughts Never leaves his hollow lips And if I were to dissect myself In a cold blue room And remove these tumours that I can feel Lying along my spine like roadblocks I may perhaps get better But I do not want to be better Not alone and not by myself For I know my hand would betray Even if the scalpel stays loyal
So I sew my torn sweater One stitch at a time And I can feel at the back of my neck The mist beyond the window Hiding a drowsy world A quiet world From the memories of Edgar Allen Poe I don’t know… For I am sewing my sweater One stitch at a time
It is easier to break than build My grandmother told me Long ago, when my shoe size was half of what it is now We were sitting in the veranda Watching sparrows without nests Search for shade Her wrinkled hands were beautiful They knew only to give To me, to the sparrows Her today for our tomorrows I did not understand what she meant Only that she meant what she said
III
The face of my love Is an enigma A diamond made of star dust And dew drops I have seen her as none have During hours longer than light In dreams deeper than the night And yet if I were to hold A paintbrush Her shape would disappear In the shadows of my mind Like fragrance does from a flower
I know her to be beautiful Like rainbow after rain Or an ocean undressing at midnight Whispering the tales Of sailors and their sails And I often try In an absentminded earnestness That of a child never chided To try and catch her featherlight hair To hold that waterfall The obsidian madness as she sways Like a soft swan Without silhouette
The nights are hard Rebels and roses And I write of my love in poems and proses As I reach for the soft molasses Surrounding my heart Breaking and bleeding From Cupid’s blue dart
She taught me to write, you know… When all I could do was recite And bruise the pages Perhaps I with all my innocence Was nothing but a man wanted for my own murder But with her I am me; Irrepressibly free A child dressed in clothes too big for him. Perhaps I never grew up after 2007 Forever eleven An Abandoned ectoplasm Morphed in shape by satire Drowning in the desire To be wanted and stay haunted By the spectre of love
IV
I am rhyming the verses For I know nothing more My poems are to the paper What waves are to the shore
I wish I could be the colour blue Not sapphire or cerulean But something old And something new As if waves of the ocean Are carrying pieces of the sky Moonlight and stardust Dipped in indigo dye A deeper azure A cobalt that will fade Part turquoise, part teal Your shade, your shade…
A poet knows The name of all places And directions to none - Not a Poet
I write because it hurts And if I scream they will know my pain I don’t want to scream Don’t want to shatter the serene mirror That holds together All false reflections The world holds dear For the blame of it Would lie on me And I have enough confessions to pardon In my soliloquy
I slept late yesterday There was a tempest inside me And my mind was anchored loose I was swayed, buffeted And at once painted still As if my soul Was the albatross From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner And I thought: Every murder is a suicide in a way Isn’t it? To surrender the right of your life to someone else Without a fight There are many types of murders Of trust, flesh and mind Common massacres Gruesome One of a kind… It’s getting dark
I should have had dinner But the lights were too bright And candles too dim The plate felt soft And the spoon too thin Or was it me Who felt brittle and blind With so many dreams to dream And so few days to do (Now that was a lie For I cherish my own incompetence Like a child does it’s once favourite but now broken toy)
I am afraid I have found The edge of my reason And the world beyond (And would you believe it?) Is a mirror… It seems me and this mirror We are obsessed with each other In finding faults In pointing out to one another Our own shrinking horizons Until one of us agrees The threshold of our limitations
I slept late yesterday (No, I already said that Pardon, it’s the mirror reflecting my memories God I am tired)
Why cry about things you can laugh at Said the quote on my bathroom mirror It wasn’t funny I thought And smiled to myself
The nights have been short Or perhaps it was I who has been stretched thin Between two impossibilities Of being here and being there An almost everywhere Every thought of mine now Feels like a bullet through the brain The very last; and in a way everlasting But new ones creep out Out of this philosophical yeast Growing in the dark keeps of my mind Nurtured with cold sweat And self taught paralysis
The toothpaste tastes funny Like old age These are those days of winter When sadness feels warm Like a hug or a cup of coffee Something to snuggle into and fall asleep Sadness; the elixir of a dying man Sadness, yes And melancholy (Pretty word) Made of me and the unholy: Thoughts, dreams, desires Snails creeping on a wet wire
I remember a time When I dreamt of being a dog And lie on the carpet Of fallen leaves Dogs can dream, can’t they? (Yes) And so I dreamt of being a dog To come full circle A perfection My being complete A zero
The wind from the window Touches my face And I blush; Love is in the air Or is it despair? How can one compare? When being utterly unaware… (I rhymed on purpose For they say poetry must taste like a painting) I gargle and gag There is blood in my spit A rose line Branching out like a symphony Clarinet and timpani Violins and bassoons Bach and Beethoven Mozart who died too soon The tap turns A thunder The tap turns All silence
And the world It is falling And there are no secrets Left to share I am found Someone’s calling And all I need is To be there So it’s a goodbye Everyone And I shall see you When the summer’s sun Is finally won
I sleep upon the windowpane And the glass cracks under my face Like lightning from my breath The night below is strange; Captured stars howling On streets and in houses As people dance To hide the shadow of their shame I can smell their perfume here Thirty stories high Scent filled with lost sleep and sadness It numbs me My throat, my voice And I choke without a choice (Should I shift? Should I turn? I do…and the thunder swims to my belly The glass gasps But the shattering never comes)
Sound of a million footsteps Collapse into a single chord Time’s thread This linear, pinpoint eternity Do I merge or do I dare Far foolish when being aware That there are no ripples in the ocean Just reflections of the air Lives, candles Last days in wreath Desire turned dream Dream turned to death
I now see the eyelashes Left by a lost time For cinders on the shore For hearts saying no more For children born sans choice Once people now toys And so the dying swans dance Vying for a chance To nibble the breadcrumbs Of broken down plans And I, this vain, stitched flesh in pain Lie supine, and divine, my tears through rain And sing against the chorus Those verses that say Ask and you shall get And to get you must pray As if prayers are questions As if questions would find a way As if ways would take me home As if home is for what I pray
So I await Under the cold sun of midnight Watching myself Falling out of sight First a man Then a memory Now a stranger Forever a stray A silhouette Some shadow All silence Is what I say
Dry twigs wrestle the wind Shadows burn on the ground Here I stand in the center And the world turns around With yellow leaves laughing White sand dyed brown In Nameless nothingness I named a pronoun All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Sand dunes shrunk to seashell Like past framed into memory
I watch dazed morning Walk drunk upon the shore Where my footsteps on the sand Leave footprints no more As if all of my life Was a mirage from the start A mirror holding together A man falling apart
All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea In the sky a sun wrinkled And stars breaking free Am I drowning Am I drowning Should I breathe this darkness and lay As a dead man in a dying womb being fed everyday The same old desires The same old silver songs The same old praise and promises That nothing would go wrong
And only if only I could no longer be here Be a past that never happened And a future always near But never coming together With the rhythm of our heart An end that is unending A beginning that never did start You and me, you and me The Sand and the sea Away forever Our little infinity
The edges of the world Like pages from a play A Recurring razzmatazz Occurring everyday The blue’s beats Jarring jazz And ballads on the way Razzmatazz, razzmatazz As Liquored lovers say “You be thought and I the mind To reminisce and remind That love is not litmus To be tested everyday Let it flower, let it grow Be careful what you sow For the soil takes it all Your flight and your fall And it’s the way of the crowd To take as truth what is loud While our love is all silence Strong sans the violence So take care of the petals They are flesh and not metal And do not look for reflection Till the water; it has settled”
Dry twigs wrestle the wind Shadows burn on the ground Here I stand at the edge And the world is not round Black leaves moan Under heels; trodden down In Nameless nothingness I named a pronoun All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Falling nowhere With two skies above me All of me All of me At the bottom of this sea Fading in the distance Once man now memory
I do not desire To lie naked in a rattrap life And lubricate my verse with victorian words; Filled with awe inspiring acts Led by mundane lust Of Angels and Men alike Nor do deep desires murder me Nerve by nerve Peeling away my eggshell skin To illuminate the onion within; A coiled rainbow, boiled white Neither am I a shadow Fallen far from crowded feet Awaiting on indifferent paths For a heavenly retreat If at all I were to bare myself and be One thing that should suffice how I see Myself, in this crystal world Of self reflection and askewed insight I would be a thoughtful statue Sitting alone in a far off land With infinity in my head And nothing in my hand
THE HUMAN ANVIL 