Holding Lanterns

If I don't find you in another decade
I will leave my heart on my bedside table,
You are dynamite in a forest-fire,
I need to knock into you sooner than later,
or watch you burn the world without me,
No, I will leave my heart at home.

You probably hold lanterns to faces today,
drench flesh with the amber inside you
and check for starched love-letters
between a creased spine and chequered smile,
(some people hold them in their teeth)
You're learning to shake hands with them,
because the only time they will open lips
is when they read their broken to you,
These are friends that will make me jealous one day,
I want you to hurry up with the discovering;
I sweep sunsets like dust on my window,
I cannot afford the colours of pining today,
I need to prepare myself for your amber --
pluck the freedoms of men with my tongue,
stroll unvisited alleys and spill hot poetry,
work the shapes of wonder into my words,
I need to become the storybook you will read,
I know the way I need to make you laugh,
I won't paste sweetness over your wounds,
You hate it, I know,
I will kiss the bells in your eyes,
and I know how you will stare at me
when you hear yourself ring in my hall,
You will place the worn lantern on my doorstep,
I will open the window and let the colors dry;
When I tell you I have waited for you,
you will not understand how I love,
but that is precisely what you were looking for,
I have waited for you since forever,
I hold you with hands that know emptiness,
you are the only song I will allow inside.

Image Source: Charles E. Waltensperger

Receiving Mother at Airport

The second thing my mother did when we met
was tell me that my t-shirt looked unclean and unironed,
that I should clean my clothes myself --
I couldn't stop smiling;
We would spend ten minutes in the cab talking about my face,
how a new weather has dented my face with unsightly holes,
She measured me like a stone-mason reviewing damage,
she always seemed to know what I should look like
as if she carried a photo-album inside her purse
and was in the habit of obsessively checking it,
My mother isn't fond of her smartphone yet.
Oddly enough, her litanies make me feel better,
which is weird because it was always me falling short
but that is better than falling without direction,
better to have her definition to rebel against 
than to grasp at meaninglessness every time I start sleeping,
When I returned from the market I knocked on the door,
After months I knew what is to wait for someone inside,
after months I did not spent a minute opening my lock,
and I realized that I'd much rather be impatient
than know that nobody is home,
The first thing my mother did when we met
was hug me tight enough
to compensate for forgetting love,
tight enough to know 
I would sleep without nightmares tonight.

Good Mood

I am in a good mood today,
I wear it like a birthday cap,
a little tight around my chin,
I will clap my hands a little harder,
Sing my grocery list a little softer,
Today, I will turn on music
and it will not speak of art,
it will not speak of auroras,
It will have no words, actually,
I will move my head like ribbons,
but my smile will not tell you of lies,
I will give you some chocolate,
No, don't ask me why,
I have enough lemonade today
to give out glasses to everyone,
I must be kind more often,
the glass is completely empty sometimes,
My head is not an orchestra today,
Sit besides me,
why don't you now?
We will talk of your temple roofs,
of olive oil salads and lazy winters,
Ignore the confetti on my shoulder,
I have had a crazy day,
I am in a good mood today,
and I feast on it like my last meal,
That is why you know of my sadness,
Thank you for not mentioning it.


Image Source: Daniel Perkowski

First Times

The first time we held each other's hands,
I was counting infinity backwards,
making sure my brain doesn't explode,
Your hands were so much cooler than I expected,
but that's okay,
my hands must have been warm to you;

The first time I bought a rose for you,
I asked myself "Now what?"
as if the train ride between the florist and a bent-knee proposal
was too unromantic to exist,
I hoped I saved the rose
from being squished enough to say "I love you",
You didn't look like they do in movies,
I was disappointed,
You were just being yourself;

The first time I wasn't single on Valentine's,
I expected us to monopolise the day,
Apparently, it is the most suspicious day to leave home
and my parents still aren't sure about us,
I guess cartoons on Valentine's don't hurt either.

The first time we bought corner-seat tickets,
I realized that I am pretty good at being unabashed
I realized that courtesy comes easy when guilty,
I realized that corner seats are not good ergonomics,
but we did watch that movie twice
and I still don't know what it was about;

The first time you settled onto my lap,
you looked at me as if I had a degree in this,
I was surprised at how we pulled the stars into sparking,
I bit more than I could chew,
You looked like fruit-salad after,
custard and papaya,
You own a lot of scarves now;

The first time I wrote a poem for you,
I spent an hour trying to mix words into beakers,
distilling, filtering, titrating, refilling,
Your beauty was impossible to find,
but it kept laughing from behind non-smiles,
I revisited those evening walks like a homicide detective

and found nothing,
You were the one that got away.


Image Source: Tender Moments by Kim Roberti

Muse

It is August,
I was supposed to have forgotten you by now,
People tell me to leave you
like rice grains outside my threshold,
I tell them that you are my Muse now,
See, nobody questions an artist's sanity,
They are supposed to be bad for themselves,
When I trace your laughter on paper for the ninth time,
it is poetry, not an obsession,
My sleep-cycles resemble an owl on coffee
because the moon is my lampshade,
It is not my darkness looking for company,
It is not the chips of your bracelet on my ceiling
It is not the ridges of your neck under my sheets,
Poetry-writing is a montage of creative masterstrokes,
it is not slumping into pillows until I remember I need to breathe,
No, my metaphors were borrowed from the robins
that learnt Shakespeare over thatched roofs,
I did not brew these words between my teeth like a meth lab gone wrong,
I am definitely not addicted to you,
My smiles are poignant reminders of love,
they are not crumpled tissue-papers around my room,
It is all good art,
Thanks for staying, Muse,
I now know that art doesn't need to be pretty
to be beautiful.


Image Source: Kazuya Akimoto

Selfishness

 There is something immensely selfish

about loving someone that doesn't exist
except inside me as a humming prophecy,
a song my fingers do not know yet,
but I have strum the strings for long,
I want to breathe life into these dreams,
fill them with my lessons and repairs
until the laughter in my house is innocence,
Innocence that falls and breaks in chips,
Innocence that reminds me of wonder
and invites me to intervene but I will not,
because she must know discovery,
know falling to run with lighter feet,
learn that grief can be the weight of wings,
I will teach him to see himself with my eyes
when mirrors show the lies others repeat,
I will teach her to argue with herself
until what remains is indomitable,
and then I shall call her a diamond.
See, I learnt to dance with strangers
until I had lost thousands in the crowd
but my children will know how to find stars,
pin them to their hearts without burning,
She will know the charm within desert dunes,
and weather them like motes of sand,
He will know my summer-dream hide-outs,
those found when winters were meaner,
thus he will remember my nightmares with fondness
and tie long, satin ribbons to the gates I unlocked.

Sometimes I worry that I stock paint
but will never have the time to fill colors,
small fingers will close on large ones
until they are too large to fit inbetween
but I do not mind the winds in my chest
passing through foreign treetops,
to sing different songs to cliffsides,
I will bequeath the poems I wrote inside caves,
and when they sail to make new mistakes
my lodestones will point to the North Star
Their nights will coax their sweet fruit
into wines I will never drink, never taste,
and I will be the artist that left the world
work that changes with eyes and names.

Image Source: Dorian Florez

Loud Music

There are times when I turn up the music
loud enough to not hear myself think,
The bed is filled with knots of cotton
and they push against my aching back
like guns through faded bedsheets
but I cannot get myself to buy a new one,
I cannot get myself to leave this room,
to force the slow career of my thoughts
into changing its golem-face that smiles,
sad grimaces of my forgetful making,
I have created monsters and skeletons
and they sleep on my bedroom floor,
ambush my dreams before they find hope,
My midnights are an album of memories
that make no sense when opened
but haunt the mind long after closing,
I forget how to find blankness again
and wear faces that I will leave in a box
when morning comes, it always comes,
although I haven't seen it in weeks,
Mornings are too full of opportunity,
they light my door and mock my inertia,
throw challenges on eyelids as if to say,
"These are not smoke and mirrors,
All of you is broken; your loneliness is."
I pretend I do not know what peace looks like,
that happy is a puzzle I am still solving,
my pieces are missing and I am not whole,
all of me is not a pile of cardboard pieces
I hid under my blanket ages ago.

I do not leave my room but listen to music,
loud enough to fill the empty in me,
until I forget the sound of my name,
I am not,
I am not.

"Yes, you are."

Image Source: htt548172585866315768/ps://www.pinterest.com/pin/

Forgetting Nothingness

I tasted the joy between your fingers
until oriental philosophies made sense,
until the nothingness of a Monday evening
was the highlight of my week,
the longest page in my diary,
the most difficult memory I ever wore.
The funny thing about our breakup was
that I went into it with such confidence,
as if you had left instructions on how to forget you
on the same tissue-paper where you scribbled my name
against a monster that looked lovelier
with every note of laughter it stole from you.
I spent my nights becoming that monster,
pinching my "Hello"s and laughing louder
so that I looked a little less like the me you left,
a little less like the me you fell out of love with.
Apparently, there is a rule that says
you may only bleed out your darkness in ink
and that is not really a rule
but a lie poets tell themselves
so that their art is not emptiness made beauty,
You are not poetry, in form or spirit,
You are not melancholy, you never were,
You are the nothingness that makes Mondays last forever,
and I am not empty, I am too full of words,
too full of pretty lies I tell myself
because talking is better than the silence
that reminds me of oriental philosophies
and everything just is,
but I remember what nothingness feels like.

Broken People

It is effort, I know,

But cast honest eyes around
And you will find broken people everywhere.
These are sunflowers that turned too much and broke;
They carry their own Suns now.
They carry a jar of honey with them
Because wounds and infections are too common,
And sugar is useless.
Their hands and brows are knit
with lines they did not have when they wrote their first love-letters;
The graffiti on their skin
Cannot be contracted into creation.
Look away, then,
They are too much effort, I know,
Their covers are leather you cannot afford,
And their stories will have you looking for references you clearly don't have.
Walk up to them and become friends,
But they are not pure scripture,
Do not expect your deeds to sit alongside theirs
You will breathe their air and your body will be revolution,
Their colours will find friends in your shadows
And paint murals inside your chest,
Until you cannot piece apart their thunder from the quiet of your flesh.
Taste their unbecoming and
You will yearn to shatter into nightmares
That you may become the master of your dreams.


Image Source: http://alicexz.deviantart.com/art/Airplanes-200997113

Blood Sacrifice

Words have too much power,
I carve their altars and find myself
worshipping them in mornings,
Who made these marigold nosegays?
I want to write poems until I see
the quiet inbetween monsoon days,
the pepper on a lover's lips,
but I am an impatient priest today,
I know to run before my Gods awaken
to the bells I string between borders,
before they claim my fractured soul,
fill the valleys with my silences,
possess my bones to voice melancholy,
my books are religion I will not preach,
my Muse is beauty I will not teach.


Image Source: The Dance of Good and Evil by Curtis Verdun

What I Learnt Outside School

Value Education lectures never taught me
what to do when mirrors become horror stories,
there is blood in my teeth sometimes,
Was I supposed to check into hotels 
and wait for the piano music to stop
every time my house was haunted with music-boxes?
I try to hum in time with the plinks and plonks,
I carry the haunting with me like a bell,
Do not wonder why I am always on my toes,
I step around creases with practiced skill,
I fall a little less often these days,
Sometimes I wonder if that is fear or courage.
I know the number of steps to my bottle of antiseptic,
but forget where I kept the bag of balloons,
I run longer distances without colours,
I collect scars and scabs like spiky seeds,
and it seems a good enough currency.
Sometimes I come across chessboards in the forest
and it took my years before I could look past
the first row of chequered graves,
I win more times than not these days
and cry more promptly every time I lose a pawn.
There was a time when my home would walk away
and I would wait until morning swept under my garden-stones,
I am used to chasing my chimney-smoke these days,
but running is no less painful on tired soles.
I still remember the first time I became religious,
I left my hopes outside the temple-gates
as if only proper beggarhood deserved faith,
my emptiness was the first and last offering,
I will never be able to pray again
and I am no lesser for it.
I am less than the dreams of a future I made
on the riverside of a lonely glade,
I roam bazaars and barter help like coins,
my words are worn with the employ of several people,
this is my wealth and it has the warmth of many hands,
This is my wealth, it multiplies,
and my days are not without strife,
but my mirrors are history books now
and all the blood is fact and preparation.

Image Sources: http://cyanparade.tumblr.com, http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Scrambled-Portrait/308858/199347/view/

Foolish Geniuses

There is clarity in distance

That makes geniuses of lovers
Every priority snaps into focus:
Your hand must spend more time on her wrist,
The coffee was an excuse.
There are strangers to be offended
With the sheer force of your fingertips
On her lips,
They are strangers for a reason.
There are meetings you need to be late for
Dressed in her smoldering kisses
Bedraggled dreams and smoking kisses,
Hot, searing kisses that brand you
Leave you electrostatic.
There are conversations to start and finish after midnight,
Over kitchentop counters while baking cake
Your autobiographies being spent
Over chocolate-chip aromas.
The weekends will be roadtrips to hills
Where clouds do not spy on black skies
where grass swallows the two
until nebulae and stars are magic
you will drink second-hand from her eyes.
Everything needs to be second-hand.
Distance makes fools of lovers.

Introducing Myself

I am the guy who claps the loudest for good rhetoric
but believes that Truth cannot be found in sophistry,
I leaf monsoons as if there are memories I cannot afford to lose
but only invite them as strangers on dreary afternoons,
I will sing and dance as if I were inventing  rhythm for the first time,
but will find no problem in picking apart your routines with panache,
Hypocrisy is not basis for rejecting the Truth
and I am still learning how to be the best I can
without being dishonest to the conclusions I drew
inbetween my lunch hours and long walks home,
I am a walking tower of contradictions
but they all have a point
and they want to be resolved,
how can I throw them away?
I am an album of emotions, really,
Flat and precise in the framing of my words,
swimming with dimensions of wonderlands,
I have more paradoxes on the tip of my tongue
than the hem of my bookmarks in musty volumes,
I don't write my poems on paper
but type away in bathroom stalls and
colorful museums and empty meeting rooms,
unstable train coaches and the trees outside malls,
I still love the smell of the fungi in old books,
No, the microorganisms do not take away the romance,
my romances are quite unromantic,
I am in a one-sided relationship with Existence,
sometimes I wonder if she gets my letters,
sometimes I wonder if she is a dream,
sometimes I decide that Truth exists,
and that often means I serenade about not serenading,
repeat the prayers of atheistic inquiry,
There is no God under my fingertips
but I feel Holy all over,
I am eyes that are always empty enough
to fill with wonder, drink possibilities
as if my life can fit any tale written well-enough,
I am an artist, you see,
my roses are filled with columns of light
and my violinists don't know how to hold a violin,
but my portfolio is childhood in formaldehyde,
I carry it inside my sleeves like a poker cheat,
my face will never lose at losing itself
in the whirlpools of whims and drama,
My brain is not rational but endorses it
like a secret that needs to be spilled all over,
forgive me if I think some skies are better sung of than studied,
I will not tell you that I have already studied them,
See, I am obsessive compulsive about knowing things,
I ran out of subjects and decided to know about knowing,
There are levels of meta-cognition that deserve mention in Dante's Hell,
I feel like Lucifer sometimes,
Morality doesn't make a lot of sense to me
except as convenience to make things work,
a broken society doesn't seem important to me
but my friends tell me I forgot how to be selfish,
I tell them I am the heliocentric model inside Earth,
I will never learn to pivot the planets around me,
their ballads make no sense to me then,
I need things to make sense,
Beauty and sense, yes,
that is all I am inside my words,
I hope you find the time to talk to me,
I love honest conversations.

Fake It Till You Make It

I practice happiness like piano music,
it plays like a song I have heard too many times --
although these notes make no sense to me.
Apparently, hi-fis do not conduct joy through stretched arms like telegraph poles,
and the only contagious aspect of laughter is the giggles,
it is the opium I carry in folded napkins,
I wear experiments like a second skin,
my face is a psychology textbook filled with problems
raised to the nth degree of complexity
because synthesis of thesis and antithesis was supposed to be catharsis,
my native skin is caked with the lies I tell myself,
Ignore the cracks my smile makes on my lips,
my charades are not for you, believe me,
I am just trying to be honest to myself.
They tell me to fake it till I make it
as if the space between my ribs is waiting for instructions,
No, I am not broken,
but that is because I was broken long enough
to know how to make sunshine into butterscotch-tape,
I will never break again
but, you see, I am always breaking,
You take my palms and wonder at the sweetness in them,
you know nothing of the flowers I clutch onto when it rains outside,
My garden is a bed of trauma victims waiting to happen,
it turns out that anointing dead stones will not breathe life into them,
but I will keep stenciling my dark against walls
until my graffiti is everything bright,
There are winds in my bedroom I did not breathe,
paper-planes on my window-sill I have never flown,
See, emptiness taught me to search for beauty,
search for rosebuds over strange teeth,
find the lemongrass in unwashed laundry,
walk, no, run towards the churchyard balloons,
and I am convinced I have all that I need,
I need to find myself somewhere in my arts,
I am supposed to fake it till I make it,
Fake it till I make it,
Fake it till I make it,
There are holes you cannot fill with illusions,
It is not faith that moves me to paint lies anymore,
it is the weight of not having done anything,
I want to tell myself I did everything I could,
I cannot shoulder the weight of regrets,
my shoulders are busy with identities I carry,
bandages around my face as if I were waking from plastic surgery,
I have no face anymore,
this is as real as it gets,
I have become everything I was supposed to be,
I throw myself at blank pages and
push my ennui into ivory and silk
as if metaphors were what I needed all along,
I grow beautiful with every verse I become,
my hands are works of art that cannot make anything useful,
I do, however, make fires under rain without thinking,
Wet wood isn't supposed to burn but it does if you try hard enough,
all of me is smoke and mirrors,
I am dragging shadows inside the Sun --
my trips are supposed to kill them
but they come back stronger, sharper,
I am the silver cloud with a black lining,
I am dreams waiting to disperse,
I will never break again
but I am always breaking,
and sometimes I wonder which is worse.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Answering in Graphic Detail

You ask me what do I want from you,

I want you to count the number of unfoldings it takes
the next time you wear a saree,
and half-consider my request to stand under the shower
before smirking and calling yourself silly.
I want to trace poems in the small of your back
and have my fingers make you sing them,
have your fingers shout into my back
when words are too embarrassed to carry your messages.
I want you to wear dupattas like tarpaulins
until they hide all evidence of my exploits,
their pomegranate shades peek from the hem of your dress,
Will you remember falling above me
and call it reason enough to bruise?
I want you to open emails at work
and remember my tongue on your thighs,
your warmth will have nothing to do
with an overheating laptop,
I want you to know the elastic of your underwear,
how it stretches and folds when half-removed at your shins
and all its pillars are trembling masses,
You will not remember the trembling, no,
I want you to budget for clothes every time you visit me --
anticipate a torn kurti every now and then,
I want you to tell me that you did not know
that French Kisses were not meant for lips,
my breath will light your way into darkness,
that moment when the universe was born,
you will find God in my ministrations,
I want your salvation,
I want you to want it all like the three seconds
that purchased my flesh with murderous intent,
I carry those scars as an instruction manual
and I know that you don't need it.
That's what I want.
I want you to write on me
like I am the last thing that will be ever written,
the last thing to be read,
the last thing to be touched,
the only thing that will be remembered.

Glit and Glee

Prompt: "tomorrows are filled with glit and glee"

I layer sand to the skies
and chatter bowls with lies
they tell young ones that don't agree
that tomorrows are filled with glit and glee.

Watch me round the skeptics in rows,
their lies are made from scarecrows,
and when I burn their ranks today,
I will teach you not to fib with hay.

See, ransoms are sought in gold,
and I see no reason to be old
in calling our seasons so grown
that we may not steal a loan.

'Tis the emblem of rich lands
to ride to horizons behind sands,
and the point isn't whether you agree
that tomorrows are filled with glit and glee.

Image Source: http://rikreimert.com/2012/02/21/homeless-man-2/

Fifth Dimension

Some people read books angrily,
Do you know these people?
They will tear open titles as if to say,
"I couldn't find anyone interesting enough
to have a fertile conversation with".
These are sailors that swim into puzzles
written nine hundred years ago and
compliment its inventor with an invitation to tea,
These are dreamers that look at diagrams
of the moon falling onto Earth and nod their heads
as if Shakespeare could learn something from gravity,
These bookworms know seven different household items
to bookmark a chapter with annotations
and a catalog system that could sort the Alexandrian Library,
These are reptiles that know a lost traveller
better than the starched faces of a neighbourhood
where nobody dies in interesting ways,
These tacticians have staged more battles
than could be contained on the porcelain
of a boring candlelight dinner,
No, they do not wonder why they are single,
These are klutzes that wear their heads backward,
they will look at you funny for staring at them
when their rabbit-hole does not make sense,
You are narrative made time and space,
They are the fifth dimension,
They are wormholes that taste the universe
with the greedy fingers of a child,
and had you known their fury,
you would stop to worship
the temples these spirits play at.

Image Source: Book of Poems by Dan Beck

Rains Are Philosophy, Not Poetry

Rains are philosophy, not poetry,
It is a mistake easy enough to make
but the clouds are questions of identity,
The waterdrops begin to end with Sun
and break into beginnings with rain,
Tell me, then, which drop came to which shore?
How many Ships have been sundered
and rebuilt with new names on dry pages?

The mist begins where the ground smells sweet,
but where does the rain begin?
Is there a map for the skies with lightning bolts
to mark the borders of that country?
Or is the whole of world a cloud of water
that wanders and showers without knowing?

When the gutters swell and dogs lap at them,
do the grey skies grow gold and divine?
What colour is cast when the flood snuffs out
seeds laid with bony, then living, hands?
What court will condemn the procession?
Are moral ambiguities "Acts of Nature"?
Am I not an Act of Nature too?
Watch me tear hearts and their miseries,
my crying will be less ostentatious, I promise.

Is man greater than rain for watermills
or are the waters why man is greater?
Do rains, thereby, achieve greatness supreme?
Do dams owe their existence to tempers
of mothers that seek their children
from rills and streams and brooks,
Does man therefore achieve fatherhood?
What does it mean to conceive?
Are all effects proof of cause?

When you show rainbows to your children,
are you pointing at things that cannot be?
They will reach the promised Pot of Gold
and call you a liar that sows dreams,
and you will laugh and tell them of light
that breaks within the eye only on days
when the Sun is against invisible water,
but it is all within the eye of the beholder
and they will ask you if that is cheating,
Do you tell them beauty outside truth exists?
Is all of life a canvas for poets to paint upon?
Or will you tell them that their heartbeats lie,
all of the thunder and downpour is suspect
to the content of your fantasies?
Does truth exclude fantasy at all?
Do you exist?

Image Source: Seascape Study with Rain Cloud by John Constable

Tender Heart

Prompt: "A tender heart is full of grief"

A tender heart is full of grief,

because it never learnt to not open
when strangers come
knocking on the door.

A tender heart is full of grief
because its threshold is mistletoe,
and steeled hearts know to steal
a kiss or two inbetween winters.

The tender heart is full of grief
because it prefers the sleeve to its rib cage,
and knows that courage wears fear first
in its campaigns to conquer dreams.

Image Source: http://www.missplunkett.tv/gallery-shop/paintings/love-heart-colourful-03-2/

I Was A Dream

I held you in my arms because I was your dream,
your waking would be my unbecoming --
the weight of your knuckles tethered me,
my laughter was the hibiscus in your hair,
and I waited for you to tie me in knots beneath.
The winds threatened to pull me away
every time your fingers left mine,
Do you remember my eyes?
You saw the fear in them and called it love,
Did you know your softness kept me solid?
That I carried your jokes in a diary as if
forgetting your spirits would erase me,
I wonder if you could have carried peace
if you saw me fade inbetween the space
where sleep meets reality and unravels,
I am unravelled, untethered today,
people hear me croon to myself
and wonder if I dream of you.

Image Source: Spooning Couples in Love by Carolyn Weltman