You pour bald promises,

Sinking your eyes on my scars,

The ring of your teeth on my hand;

A leech kiss I loved.

Master, why this banquet?*

A lonely fish chews an orphaned poem,

The words soft as a baby’s fist

stuck on its throat, and

they call it a suicide note.

You strangle me between

The white paws of old letters,

Still on your play dress,

 laughing at silky grass carpet.

I drag my body into a shoe box

Hoping to find a home for ourself,

Only to laugh at the tickling of

Your chocolate sweet arrows.

You chatter like a small bird

Waiting for my translation,

Filling me with your feathers,

Not minding the clans, we belong.

In the dark glass house

You are the carpenter trying to build

A brave new world,

Stretching the skin of oceans

You failed to cross.

You and I,

Both on the two sides

Of a corpse wall

Tasting mercury fruits in a trance.

My part still doesn’t belongs to me,

It is a coin in your palm,

Blood stained and not good enough

To pay anyone’s hunger.

God drew you with a sword,

and me with a pencil

a lot before we gasped over rainbows.

“Dig deeper”, you said,

Not knowing that we are

searching for our own skeletons.

Sleep, my beloved,

Save yourself in the trenches you make.

The poppies on your neck grow,

Their little petals blue,

could be I might have

saved you?

They told me to breathe

And poisoned the air,

Before laughing at my foolishness.

The slave ship moves,

I lick the words you wrote

With the tongue icy and

I transform.

I am a grain of sand,

Silent under your warm feet,

Listening to your small breath,

Hissing at my existence.

 


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