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
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
It’s a terrible tragedy you see To be away from you The farther you are The fainter I get The harder you hold The longer I wait Tonight the edges of my soul are clear And I can see my heartbeats through my chest They come and disappear They pulse and fade Alive and dead Red over red
I can hear the wall clock Can hear the teeter tatter of the seconds Turn into the silent hour An hour without you Then one and half, then two I am mesmerised in the act of missing you Part proud, part desperate Juggling memories and dreams Promises and themes Like Picasso and his paint Rhyming his story and history Balancing the devil and the saint
I close my eyes now and then And hold you to my chest Close enough to collapse Onto myself First in tears, followed by laughter Then silence much after Dents in my denial Rust on my reins I falter like a colt And stand still until it pains Deep enough for my marrow To call out your name Madly enough for my mind To believe that you indeed came
The night is falling fast And I am writing against the flow To reach the side of your shore Where you await in your pink bow; That tiara of innocence Which broke me Slowly apart Till I lost all of my aces To the hand of the queen of heart
I wrote on paper And was called a poet I wrote on walls And was asked to wait On a chair nailed to the floor In a cold, cold white room Where the only sound was of my breath; No different from a writer’s womb So I sat in the pleated emptiness With a glass of water left to precipitate Watching the walls seduce me to sadness When the pendulum peeled an eight And in came this ladybug green Glasses carved on the tip of her nose She had grey pad and a bald blue pen And a red ring in the shape of rose ‘Ahem, ahem’ She said ‘Ahem, ahem’ And I coughed and cleared my throat She looked at me for a second Then this is what she wrote: ‘The subject is kind of rude He has no manners so to speak He sits like a beggar on his throne A man of power sold in sale to the weak’ It made no sense, nonsense, I tell you For she was no poet for god’s own sake She was too tidy to have chaos inside And that is how I knew she was fake ‘The subject now seems annoyed He is watching me with furrowed brows As if I have stolen something of his And now pretending that everyone knows’ Ah the audacity of this usurper Who claims my kingdom as her own I have pieces of paper in my pocket And a dozen verses to loan ‘The subject is trying to smile And I am feeling all sick and ill There is wrong with his mind He says naught but I can feel’ She knows nothing of my madness Of how it hurts to sit and smile For only writing on the wall I pretend to die once in a while ‘The subject has tears in his eyes Maybe my saying something will change But what should I say at this point That will not make him seek revenge’ The fool, the fool is writing And what a caricature does she draw Looking from behind a pair of glasses She writes what she thinks she saw ‘The subject does not comply To any form of my treatment So must be treated in harsher terms Or in an asylum must be sent’ Oh I did snatch her pen and pad And wrote down my own choice Before you judge what others have said First make sure if they even have a voice…
I painted a white line Upon a blank canvas And the people they praised me no more They could not see; That the painting was an echo Of my silence that wasn’t seen before
The broken flowers they fell at my feet Gold and silver, ebony and peat And I knew not where this road may lead Will I find in the end what I need And I need... A silence in the shape of the sun A bit of violence with the face of a nun And someone who won't turn and run When I face down the barrel of a gun But hear now... I don't have a penny to pay as your price I spend my nights cold and filled up on rice And I know my heart is my own greatest vice Always afraid that my love won't suffice You can see... Out there those houses of princes and kings Whilst I can only shelter you neath my own wings And I have no diamonds to tie our rings Just the hollow of my chest to rest your sufferings So beware... Of my sweet words that may seduce and sway They only ache so to take you away And keep you happy come what it may We will be children till our hair turn grey But I know... This poem seems just a practice in rhymes And does not cover the cost of past crimes But I shall spend every penny and all of my dimes For our today and the end of our times So... Never forgive if you want but don't forget The magic of those moments we met And I wonder if it's my heart you now so hate But wasn't our love written by the hands of the fate? Thus I say… The broken flowers they fell at my feet Gold and silver, ebony and peat And I knew not where this road may lead Will I find in the end what I need And I need… You
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)
THE HUMAN ANVIL 