THEY ASK ME TO SPEAK

 I was born,

I don't remember the day,

I wish I could...

I don't remember the exact time

 I found myself

surrounded by words,

words,just words,

words.only words.

I was always a reader

not of future, but of past.

Words, meaningless,

yet not harmless form 

a pool around me and

I tu led my molten grief

inside my brown skin.

"Speak something,

tell us a story "

they always say,

everybody asks me to 

speak, speak...

how can I speak?

what can I say?

My tongue is my

third eye,

useless, disturbing.

But 

unlike my mouth

my hands are unprincipled: they

crush, hold, bleed

and they speak.

My fingers tell 

thousand and one stories, without enough

enchantment for the king.

My fingers,

they remember me of snakes,

 the tongue of snakes to be precise.

There was a time 

I thought of being 

a change,

a cause of revolution.

But then i fell in love.

Fourteen days and I 

realized am a revolution.

My world, my moon, my stars- 

everything in his

brown eyes...

Only if I could see

the marshes, 

the drenches and 

the caves with a dragon.

I burned in its

evil spell, and I had to 

run, where I didn't know.

I buried my lover

 in the tomb of memories.

Every night I visit him,

with blood red roses-

a pilgrimage..

I talk about him

(my hands are my advocates)

once in a while, and

some call it poetry

(How fancy!)

Am a metaphor,

a simile or

any other ornament..

am not what I think,

neither what you think.

/only if I could go back 

to the day I was born, 

to erase myself from life/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 I am longing for death.  Forever longing for it.When people around me crave to live, do everything to have a life, I could never understand it. I could never understand the meaning of their desire. I always wanted to die… slowly, painlessly, and alone. Over time, my death instinct  became an inexorable habitual thought. The yearning to merge into an infinite darkness is there, always. The swelling torment I can't put into words. There was nothing, until him, that could dilute my urge to die. I used to think I can hold on a little, until he disappeared. I was obsessed to wither completely.  Look at me now. I think I have died, when he left. What a metaphor, the old cliché, you may think. I can declare this without embarrassment, but I can't express it. It is really so heavy to be afforded by my vocabulary, thoughts, and consciousness... Many moons ago, I listened passively to Nee Mattume by T.M. Krishna. And yesterday night, like a little miracle, it came back to me...
Read more

THE BOOK OF SETHI

PROLOGUE: THE FIRST TIME GRIEF SANG I don’t remember the first time I heard Ali Sethi. I remember what I lost when I did. Something inside me— the part that kept sorrow folded beneath my tongue— opened its eyes. It wasn’t music. It was recognition. A voice that didn’t arrive like thunder, but like memory—slow, precise, mercifully cruel. It sang in the key of ache I inherited but never named. This is not about songs. It’s about the ruins they left glowing. It begins, always, with silence. And then: Ali. 1 TO THE VOICE THAT ARRIVED BEFORE STORM Some nights, I don’t know if it’s rain, or your voice pressing its forehead against my window. Ali, you don’t sing— you stitch. Each word, a needle pulling centuries through my skin. I keep your ragas in my wrists— they flutter when grief walks in, asking for tea and permission to stay. Who gave you the right to know what longing sounds like before I could name it? Who taught your throat to echo the ache I buried beneath my mother tongue? Sometime...
Read more
If love is peeling oranges, then  God is the transcultural smell  residing inside crescent of fingernails. Consuming prayers,  a bead of fragility in hands,  he tells you that : In love we are blind,  In love we are far sighted. His delicate crockeries inside  a filthy broken sink is  his metaphor for us. The way he scrub them is his synonym for violent love  and antonym for soft grief. Once in a while, the shards of his anger  turns me into a silent film  suffocating under city lights. Then you change into a morning  with mourning , Into a ship torn under monsoons, Into a broken concave mirror, Into a prime number in solitude, Into a black hole singing opera. Still we exchange kisses with words  inside  the holes on our throat.  God chain smoking in his evening gown interrupt us with a question,  What is your religion? This is when a love letter switch into  a propaganda poem  written by plum faced ang...
Read more