chaiNboli

I have heard that  when a poet falls in love, It feels like drowning,  like searching for a immortal grail. The water becomes a metaphor  as well as an oxymoron. Like the shrieking mouth of a mayhem, It burns and distills. May be, thats what you did, Virginia, May be you fell in love. You looked at the nails of history,  growing into a disgusting dome and  decided to free yourself by letting the river's languid tongue lick the stones of your soul,  worn smooth as a shingle, by surrendering to the currents. In the photographs,  your eyes are  two dark pools,  already brimming with the sea that would eventually  claim you,  a solitude so profound,  it became a kind of marriage to the waves,  a union of mutual undoing. The weights in your pockets,  like two cold eggs, Like first moon of holy month, laid by the river's own dark hand, pulled you under,  a slow descent into the weedy depths,  where the water's dum...

There is a room where God sits like a father of drugged son or a run away daughter,  and scribble congratulations  to the martyrs for  keeping up their insanity  till the last minute. The fault lines of his head are left unoiled, like the rifles hidden on backpack of a depressd teenage boy. His hands moves like a bug  inside a glass bottle, circling  with bandages of an artist. Like a sea on a city in wall. His walls are wails  no one really cares about, melting like an egg yolk over a pan. Like a red dress dancing in rain. Like euthanized dreams. He doesn't tell you that Birth is a disaster,  Life is a disease and  Death is happiness. So, you proclaim yourself  as leader of broken hearts, soaking in censored sunlight, without paying tear ducts for working overtime. You are more woe than wonder, more fragile than fulfillment, more patchwork than perfection. That's why god snarled  looking at your Christmas letter.

I have read that the memory span of a goldfish is seven seconds. In that case we are two humans desperately trying to be  orange fins. Life is the purring cat looking at us. We swim in circles,  devoid of emotions. We try to polish silver pearls,  with our rusty hands. We hemorrhage with a hunger, After collecting stardust from wounds. We stitch torn parts of the pond, where silence was oozing out. We envy a crow for its wings And an ant for its legs. We don't remember  the cloud that hide behind rain, the scarlet of roses and existence of traditions. Neither the shame of kiss  Nor the weight of knowing. And atlast we float in the water, aimlessly and draining colours, then where did all the memories go?

The morning after you killed yourself, your mother stood in the kitchen, her shoulders a map of sorrow, etched with the fine lines of grief.The scent of stale coffee clung to her like a damp shroud. In the counter, her hands moved with the precision of a cartographer while the yellow pigment of turmeric seeped into the knife just like grief into the skin of our stories. It stained her long fingers, carelessly and a little maniacally. Her fingers, wrinkled and worn, handled the root with a gentleness that belied the turmoil that must have been raging within. But it was a futile task, a gesture devoid of meaning. The turmeric was already grated, already powdered, already scattered on the counter.  I watched, transfixed, as the turmeric piled up on the counter, a small mountain of yellow that seemed to mock me with its brightness. It was a color that seemed to belong to a different world, a world where joy and laughter still existed. But in this kitchen, surrounded by the oppressiv...

Flowers are not flowers anymore. But the shoes bees can't afford. So, they melt on the summer heat  and take birth as nocturnal children  without parents. They take up the space  without much to do,  like plastic bottles, like ideas of a dead artist. They get shooed away by  elite icecream coloured hands  and when they die again they tranform to shutter soul of a camera. A mouth is not a mouth anymore.  But the dome where propaganda rests. So it turn to a stone which mocks a bird for its ability to fly. It warms the cold feets of pseudo intellects,  like blankets, like the last drop of water in a desert. It gets insulted by snakes  warming up for a tournament  and when it reincarnates  it takes form of a father's silence. A lovers kiss is not a kiss anymore,  but a murder under neon lights. So it escapes wild flowers and turns into a red lamp in your room. It twirls into a abstract absence, like a blind promise,  like the ...

A strange god recalls his past lives,  with the gleam of cat eyes. Once he was a dancer  kneading bread in a whore house, humming lullabies to bastards,  when their tongues burned of childhood, which is why he got softened with time. Then he was a Buddhist monk who tried to find a substitute to prayer in solitude, afraid of breaking the rules,  who ivh is why he grabs  a sacrificed lamb with red greed. He was once a leaper  with bloodshot eyes of a massacre, resurrected by another god,   which motivated him to be a god. He was also a deaf dog, who was not afraid of thunder which is why he doesn't care  about dead reflex of reverence. He was once an orphan kidnapped by a pirate, who was  then taken as hostage by the sea  which is why his high induced eyes can stop a storm. He was once the front door  of a family home, kept ajar  from women who wished to leave,  which is why he lends his ears  to a mother's prayer....

Defeated fingers of a writer  gets lovestruck when a tragedy happens. That is if a desperate girl  chooses a rope to die, not to play, then a poet sings:  Run you desperate thing,  and put a letter on the box  outside god's ancestral home. Paint a part of your algal mind,  so that I can slip a rotten apple. That is when a heart is broken,  all its red turning to blues, then a poet whispers:  Detest the taste of first kisses,  with false promises of next summer. Walk like a toddler so that  I can mend nature's laws. That is when a war rages,  with silver spoons modified into arrows, then a poet laughs: Find peace in tea leaves,  when a civilization disappears as smoke, So that I can clip my nails  to take care of a socialist cheek. That is when a mother decides  to sell her blistered footprints  to a museum,so that she can  buy her child's milk, a poet sneers: Burn the birth chart of oysters  that will o...

If I paste my eyes on your hands, Will you let them peek  into the spring garden you  built over the mountain? Will you let them see  the poems you write,  only to feed the little match boxes? Will you hold them  close to your heart to  protect them from summer wind? Will you guide them through  your insane inferno where shadows dance and  moonbeams are caught? Will you make them understand  what a blind spot is,  when the prayer is chanted  by the predator? Will you let them witness  the birth of  a dawn, when an unnamed insect  decides to die out of curiosity? Will you share with them  the whispers of martyr god, while the wind carries  the secrets of longevity? Will you keep them out of a battle  between a shegnai and a gun,  where number of pyres  is the ultimate power? Will you let them weave  safe sentences in an abstract pattern,  so that no body will be  displeased of th...

Something is forgotten. Warmth of your touch. Mole on your nose tip. Lyrics of Ranjish hi sahi. Quiet whispers of bougainvillea. Old lanes of a coastal town. First book i read. A sexist god. Symptoms of a fever. Ignorant little kittens  Arms waiting for flowers.   A coral island with pearls. Buried nick names. Mimicked apologies . Non sense syllables of history . A muse in courtyard. Egg shells indicating mothers womb . A heirloom recipe. Crosslegged quadratic equations. Whispers of a static old radio. Orion tattoo on a city sky. Songs of migrating words. Dew kissed marigolds. Narcotic headed roses. Marriage procession of foxes. Twenty seven moons of uranus. Rooted sorrow in a tragedy. Fragility of a mirror. A warm bed. Aftermath of a rebellion. Muteness of a cruel mouth. Fish skelton on throat cracks. Secrets whispered in a dying language.  Two pigeons tied for sacrifice. A chipped teeth. A stagnant damage. Borrowed light from stars. Our hands shaping water graves. ...

You tell me about  snow, sea, and sun. And I wither in the agony  to know more, to be lured like an old sailor  who is afraid of seaweeds. The sun squint at us,  a boyish look,  just another practical joke  the universe playing on us. You are that air mask  I hold after three nightmares. So I ask you to breathe with me. You are my first person obituary. So, I beg you to burn  an incense for me. You are a conch shaped room. So I press my ears on your walls. I am afraid to spill my skies over you,   for you are the shade of blue  everyone romanticizes. So, I gift you hyacinths. You are afraid to seal your poems  with sapphire, for you know  I will wear it in my neck. So, you ask me to forget. I read you slow, You read me fast. I water mornings You pamper mournings. But, we are silhouettes of  the same candle a grave holds. We are sheets of coal  over an old outdated weapon. This means,  there is only one way:...

I know your city  just as I know you . It walk in its hind legs, the ironed collar hiding itching necks. I know your comradeship  with it in sleepless dreams. You both carry a punctured smile  in leather purse,  fully prepared to encounter  a strange miracle. Your hearts are made of  fragile china rock ,  by a blacksmith who  didn't know what tenderness was. You hum like the engine  spinning on the streets of your city :  that is, out of habit not happiness. You move in hushed tones  of morning rushes your city has,  graciously and fluently. And you both have  leftover memories of a spring  inside your shoes,  which you take out only   in comfort of a silence. And when sunlight touches  the pavements of  your city,  it spins a dervish rhythm,  just like moles on your skin. The honey  Your city, an art of contradictions, where stone meets dew,  like love and hate inside you....

We are both skeptics,  me and him, two atheists in a world of believers. We doubt the existence of everything except the ache in our chests,  the hollow of our bones and the weight of our skin. We question the veracity  of every truth except the one that  beats between us,  like two rivers converging in dark. We are both skeptics,  me and him but in each other's eyes,  we see a glimmer of something more,  something that defies the laws of reason and the rules of physics. A spark that ignites,  a flame that flickers, a beacon in the darkness,  a guiding light. In the end,  it's not the truth  that saves us but the lie we tell ourselves,  the story we weave together,  the narrative we spin- to make sense of this chaos,  this mess.

The eldest daughter is  a poem written amid military coupe. A forgotten goddess sleeping inside a prehistoric cave for eight thousand years,  her dreams infused with the scent of damp earth  and forgotten rituals. The yearning of blood, like that of a sycophant mosquito,  that feeds on the sweat of the living. A reminder of the hunger  that gnaws within, a void that cannot be filled. A chasm that yawns like the mouth of a milky way. A portal to the underworld where the dead reside. A story unremembered,  except in the dreams of a vampire.  A land where God weeps  when cigarettes are out of stock. Nails struck on eyes of a stray dog. Plastic heart that doesn't  decompose for ages. A sea threatening to drown itself. Fraudulent copy of apologies  that doesn't make sense. Stab scar over a butterfly's eyelids. A frost bite never intending to kill. A titanium bone inside plastered leg. A censored war documentary. A mashed tomato sticking ...

Historians believed that love is a myth invented by the desperate,  a fleeting dream that dissolves like mist, the hollow of a chest that  holds something precious, the shards of a mirror  reflecting fragments of a soul, a conjurer's trick. Scientists believed that love is  a chemical reaction, a spark of dopamine and serotonin  igniting brain cells, a flame that flickers with every whisper, a pipeline with clogged metaphors, something rationality can't explain. Poets believed that love is a bruise that blooms in the darkness, a flower unfurling in the silence a magneta tongue stumbling over the syntax of the heart,  a phantom limb aching in monsoons, a seaside story before a storm. And if you ask me what love is,  I may call it  a fist of sweetness like a guava, a summoning to surrender to the void, a substance that goes with prayers, a pattern of sorrow that  I've learned to read, a dialect that only  the broken can understand. I will ...

A girl came out of the dead,  her nails sewing roots of roses, a gardener of the damned, a loyal confidant of clouds  when the world oversleeps. Time runs barefoot,  a shark without tooth, that can't kill,  but can scare even a god who has chopped fingers. This is when she realizes  that her heart is resting  under her lover's shoes,  like the clumsy gift of a child. Like a bold faced clown  not afraid of limelight. Like a dark tunnel  ashamed of its loneliness. Like a half ripened mango  falling by accident. Like a writer stuck  in monotony of words. Like the hair of a witch  that clogs a fisherman's kitchen sink. Like the cardigan  of a refugee  trying to find address. Like the mouth ulcer  of a rotten fruit in  the garden of Eden. Like the rusty ear lobes of your grandparent's fridge. Like an overcooked season,  shaped in a burning clay stove. Like the blood of a red chilly  taking a holy dip i...

Maybe Icarus knew,  but he loved and thus lived,  Like a brief, bright spark . Like a drunkard stumbling through the streets,  Icarus staggered towards the flame,  his wings beating wildly,  like the legs of a poet. Maybe Icarus knew,  but he loved the way  the sun's heat warped  the air into a shimmering lake,  its surface trembling with  each beat of his wings. He loved the way  the light unraveled the threads of his being,  leaving him a tapestry of scars,  a map of his own undoing. Yet he flew,  unmoored from the weights  that anchored him to the earth,  its solidity,  its certainties, its myths. He soared into  the unknown,  a comet of desire,  burning. Yet,  in that moment, he was free. Unencumbered by  the gravity of  his own doubts,  his own fears he flew,  a leaf on the wind's breath. And what remains are a few scattered feathers  and a shard of the ...

How many suns  would I have to travel  to reach you? We,  two polka dot winged butterflies  longing to touch  heaven's volcanic ember. You, Monet's violet. Me, Picasso's blue. Your fingers,  a wrong god I worshipped . Your name,  a wrong prayer   I whispered. I told you stories of  a pale courtesan  who fell in love with the queen,  only to be killed  and buried inside a stone temple. And this became a prophesy  from the chopped tongue  of a story teller. Because, I slaughtered myself, alone, to keep you from leaving. I pasted your name  in my tongue , a spell so enchanting, the eight deadly sin. I  offered you my heart,  like the silence of  a mother soon to be martyred- adamptant and foolish. I made an orphaned bird  distribute constellations  on your birthdays,  and called the grapes  I ate on new years eve  by your title. I tied your cap on my waist,  not tryi...

Forgetting you is a religion  I practice daily, a devotion to the art of erasure,  a ritual of unremembering,  a slow unraveling of the threads that bound us,  a gentle unweaving of a red tapestry,  a fade to black,  a slow dissolve of  the once bright memories,  a dimming of the lights: leaving only shadows,  and the faint outline of what once was,  a ghost. What remains is a shell,  bewitched by the siren of death,  sitting onthe ancient remains  of a building where God drunk danced.  What remains is a residue of longing,  a stain that spreads its darkness,  a slow seepage of  what's been forgotten into the soil of my soul  whereit germinates,  a seed of what could never be. What remains is you in the rubble of a forgotten city,  your eyes like  two lanterns burning in the dark, an opium kiss to the moon. What remains is the sun, burning a hole in the sky- a reminder that  tim...

Night, a feeble goon of god, it's hands haunting eclipses, sinking the golden orange into a sea, labelling it a foe. Somewhere you are making sand castles,  I dream,  and beg the ocean not to ruin it. I think of sending pigeons to  dupe morning calls to you,  so that you can wake up  listening to a love song. In their transparent cages  they fly, only to get killed  by my magenta knife. In my dreams,  my head is a electric wire  sitting in your insulated shoulders,  and you are not afraid to  caress the last lilly of earth,  pinned on my hair. And in another,  you are a seaweed  embracing my dead body,  guiding it ashore:  a cruel joke. What a shame that you were trying to love me. What a pity that  am scared of staying alive. What did you find,  while peering inside me: a holy garden or an ugly cemetery? Did you see the cold  pasted into my bones,  not ready to leave? And twenty eight wo...

 The trick is to mourn his absence  as a salvation and  believe that your prayers  are answered, finally. And to see love  more as a metaphor  than something you will find. The trick is to realize that  the city is a dirty animal,  which eats its own- it eats us whole. And you are just a flower  trying to grow in the outskirts  after nuclear explosion. The trick is to put  your words in laundry,  so that it can erase  the crayon ink of  your lover's mouth. And to clean dust  out of your shoes,  because it may be  spit of ghosts of past. The trick is to silence  your hunger with leftovers  and pretend you are full,  so that you dont have to  dine with your father. And to remove your layers  in the light of a fake satellite,  while the memory of  your first kiss fall through  the gaps of your fingers,  like a shooting star.  The trick is to ignore  th...