chaiNboli

  You shove sunflowers into my mouth, Hoping for words with sugar whiskers and similes of sunshine. Appear from it like a magician’s hat. You snatch away my pen thinking That it will stop me from weaving ink blotted black dreams And crush my metaphors in the violent hooks of your pride. You lock me in Xanadu and walk me through the doors of domes, Telling me not to raise my eyes, because I am a daughter. I am a daughter, with pistols in her fingers, In search of lakes where poets went to die.   I am a doll abandoned by the puppeteer Seeking refuge in the market mud, since I refused to dance his song. I am humpty dumpty, who braid my hair with spiderwebs, Knowing that the ache of falling is a hidden cry Kept under pink tongues and vermillion hearts. I am a street artist who eats fire for living And sell my mulberry stained soul to a baker, So that he can feed the dead parrots some fortune cookies. I am not a pet with your lash on its neck, ...

 My fingers are tiny prayers to my favorite goddess on your forearm seeking something holy in myself.  There are poems in terza rima you keep inside your eyes, while standing in the pink drool of evening sun. While counting lost souls I tuck your words inside my breast pockets,  an open wound dipped in lime juice and salt.  You whisper secrets to the daffodils in the backyard, holding a pen of dreams in your hands. You are not a thing,  but a God ,  a master of none.  An Anglo Saxon word everybody forgot. A stained glass angel, A nest where I belong.  My mouth is a rainbow coloured graveyard,  with words so blue and cobwebbed,  so how can I tell you how much i love you?

 The mulberry tongue of serpent split in two while we collect our home land in toe nails. Biting off the slender necks of marigold with long nails to adore our hair we sing hymns even angels forgot. The warm summer drizzle soaking us wet and we are green ferns, heavy and sparkling in evening light. We find ghosts with masks in family dinners and our throats itches for all the grief we can't swallow.  The pain is carving a Fibonacci's series, beautiful and tragic, in the walls we painted with layers of blues to hide the red coloured flowers. We move through the crowd in softness of the underbelly of a dead pigeon folding the flesh of sky between our black umbrellas. The strawberry candles flicker while gate keeping our unfertilized kisses blowing dandelions at sharp twelve o clock. We look at devil with sympathy, for he is a fallen star, helpless and hanging, his unfathomable hunger is his sin. We mothered each other perfectly knowing that we will outgrow each other, still we c...

 Young enough to believe everything, we are  stroking the yellow wings of dead butterflies: two pairs of blue coloured lungs echoing syllables of a distant memory. The summer evening while pomegranates kissed dates on iftar, we were holding our beads close to our chests. The angels were on a picnic while devils whispered in their ears about the things we forgot to consider.  We crushed cherry coloured streets sleeping under the blanket of sweet smelled jalebis under our shoes trying to find a place to hide when we heard songs in the ragas of anger from the saffron coloured mob.  Our wounds were big enough like our clogged throats when they asked as to apologize for all the prayers we uttered. They scrubbed our skins in chants we never knew while we offered a jar of honey colored nausea to the God our mother introduced us.  He was silent may be because they killed him first, calling an unworthy deity. The sunflower field were burnt and our father camouflaged into...

 War and peace are children of the same father who cremated their mother without a gravestone somewhere in the Saturn rings. He told his son war  not to cry but to conquer  and called his daughter  a useless one, snatching her letters and burning her tongue. He saw his son playing in the fields where people lived among corpses and sea gulls sang psalms.  The children cut their birthday cakes made of clay in which their ancestoral bones bloomed into red patriotic cherries.  Red sonnets where written on the markets and cement floors in syllables he couldn't read.  The girl without a name was given the best student award posthumously even though she was not good in reading braille of bullets.  The woman who painted her lips with orange colored bombs slept with someone humming mouth less oaths. The loneliness of a single shoe in mud, it's lace untied crushing love letters cremated in the poppy fields. Birds who knew the act of pickpocketting, their ha...

 There is August in my throat and rain in my hands like the breath of a dead mother we all wish to bottle up and keep. I miss playing in the garden of innocence while Rip van winkle used to braid my hair and the time my guns didn't used to bleed while telling his name.  My eyes have the emptiness if a graveyard and I was them three times a day to keep them shining and clean, even though no one comes to light candles with a whispered prayer. Do you know if I get a chance I will rob it's life from a butterfly and hide mine in the bitter memores, listening to the soft song of coffin touching the earth?  You can fold me into a piece of cloth and dip me into lavender shampoo before you clean your kitchen sink with me, because then the tears will be recycled. Plath understood all the hues of sadness, even the golden brown of it and that is why she decided to colour herself like a toasted bread. I read books of men on love because the women don't know the alphabets to write abou...

 There are love poems inside me, like blankets not enough to shake off the cold.  Like slave marks on the coffee skin of a dead Victorian girl. Like a swallowed glass with pieces stuck in bleeding throat. Like the  dark dreams of a prophet in the middle of a war.  Like ghosts wrapped in nostalgia, smiling and laughing. Like the bubble gum wrappers abandoned in a dust bin. Like the mercy of a cat playing with a dead bird. Like the pyre of a blueberry coloured smiles that forgot to return home. Like the helpless teeth tired of chewing but can't complain.  Like the strangers partying in the Mars avoiding the moonlight. Like the middle parted hair which is not ready to change. Like the songs of fishermen in Ganga, mislearnt and forgotten.  Like everything and anything.  There are love poems inside me and  I cling to them like a child to the breast of a mother, hungry and in search of warmth.