SONBAHAR

 Season after season I sit on my cot, frowning at my wasteful life 

a lazy melancholy in my brown eyes,  

so careful that I hold a scythe to kill the devil who tries to rob me.

I am a pack of bones wrapped in a brown paper designed with hair follicles, waiting to be placed in a coffin , a useless gift for him_ 

him with a capital H.

Under the moon I stand 

studying the delicate pattern of Van Gogh's ear

my grief weighting me like the wings of Icarus.

For me grief is a habit

passed down like a folk song into my hungry palms to be uncoiled in silence of a bleeding sunset .

It is the green mollusca growing in my spine kissing my neural system, cancerous spreading to every corner of my onion thin cells.

It is the misty air trapped inside spongy lungs of mine like an illicit child in a lover's womb.

It is an unsung lullaby to my favorite cat mutilated by some stranger in the street,

 it's head boiled in my luke warm love.

It is a poison mushroom

I feed myself four times a day, 

tickling my taste buds and scratching the line of my small intestine giving me a slow orgasm

The fire breathing tail of my pen silent on feverish sleep while the crows call me a deaf poet and I stammer to tell them that am not a poet afterall.

My mouth is full of words I wish to spit, and if I do can you promise me that you will read it in cataract blue or 

collect my tears in an old lapiz lazuli bowl which Salim gifted Anarkali and ferment it to make what you call "Poetry"



(The word "Sonbahar" means last spring in Turkish and can be translated as Autumn)

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