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.

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/

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

Evening Skies

I look at you the way I look at evening skies,
Awestruck at the beauty that never wanes,
with a violent urge to hold everything still,
press thick paper against liquid purples --
the darkness comes too early every time,
and every time I stand out in the open,
until the night closes itself around me,
That is how I learnt vulnerability,
when I did not understand Time well enough
to wait for mornings and their soft reds.

Reignition

No red-lettered date marks
the national holiday on which I will step outside my house of cards
built with razor-sharp memories,
But I trust that day to come.
And then I will not think twice of its random collapsing on my flesh,
Of being buried under metal edges,
Of losing old skin.

I will have sewn myself together
And made a backpack of every patch you kissed,
I will stuff all doubts in it, carry it without choice,
and search for broken people that have reconstructed themselves.
I will scout for love so hot
that it burns your hands just once
I worry that the scar-tissue on my fingers refuses to understand warmth again.
I will look for brazen gamblers
Who can cajole me into investing my life's savings into untapped opportunities
after having slept on streets
through cold nights.
I worry I have become a miser.
I will dig their backyards with tired hands and find skeletons we can bond over,
Ignoring the smell of your gardens beneath my fingernails.
I will trust the pepper in their lies
The way I did yours
when all your footsteps were the correct direction.
I will crush the chalk in their bones and draw on their living-room walls
Until the misery of our experiments with other people
Become the preface to better stories,
I will add your name to a blank page
And be grateful for being the flint
That taught me ignition.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

The Girl Who Came For Poetry

She was the fury of midnights noone sees,

I saw her waft through my marshes
(a drying stain on her blue sundress)
to taste the words that fell off my lips
every time my room reeked of poetry,
she came with shoeflower perfume
and sat across with eyes large enough
to be filled with my words, let them leak
into unmoving water with twisting colors,
like a rainbow that forgot to stretch taut
under the leaking beams of a lost home
where memories come to forget humility,
sit on paper like stubborn black forts,
raised letters to read with closed eyes,
she kissed them until the edges confessed
all their umbrage, all their fierce yearning,
and something broke in her then
with a sound she wore between fingers --
she knew the riots I lost old dreams to
but needed to hear them in my voice,
close her fingers around my messengers
and shake their nightmares over my rug,
and something broke in her then,
her eyes suddenly on marble elephants
in the darkness above the sooty hearth
as if to wrest away all rhythm from me,
from the ankles of inexorable tragedy,
and recede to the world beyond my window,
slow winds in the vacuums behind her feet,
She was the unspoken word,
ice-crusted trinkets left to thaw
and she will not come again.

Image Source: http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/11/agnes-cecile-1991-roma-italy.html

Rejection

Rejection feels like forgetting

everything that made you solid,
you were dangerous, rugged icebergs,
only smooth floes swim in you now,
There is no tragedy in rejection,
you will not bawl into soft pillows,
but lie half-awake and wonder
if all those glories were a dream
spun on wheels faster than Time,
Your mornings will carry promises
but you do not know how to trust,
how to leap into dances for eyes
that might not remember you,
all of you is wispy, hollow smoke
and you are afraid of winds
as if they know your emptiness,
a secret you did not know you had.

Image Source: http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/11/agnes-cecile-1991-roma-italy.html

Forgetting Our Anniversary

I try to forget the date but I know

you remember its rain just as coolly
as I do and your eyes are better
at lying than mine will ever be, better
at denying the hour I waited outside
the railway station facing our college gates
with the first rose I had ever purchased,
the easiest ten-rupee investment of my life,
and how you looked at me with guilt and
wicked amusement at making me squirm;
I would not let you hold this rose,
this rose was not yours just yet.

I remember the kilometer we walked
beneath your neighbourhood trees,
and although we spoke of everything
our eyes were filled with confessions
of love made the previous night
but our hands were not brave enough
to find each other's fingers yet.

I remember not wanting to look ahead
but into your eyes, eyes full of secrets
of life and poetry and easy promises,
O, those easy promises!
but I held my neck stiff so you couldn't see
my disbelief at calling you my own,
so you couldn't find the unworthiness
hidden in my nervous smiles;
I wanted to ask: "Are you sure about this?",
"Will you teach me to love you so that
I don't break you when I hold you too tight?",
"Can I teach our children how to measure
our planet with the shadow of a stick?
To ask questions that have no answers?",
but all I asked you that day was,
"So, what do you want to do next?"
and you found us the right kind of silence
around a park we loved to loiter about
and we spoke of everything, everything,
but all I remember is how beautiful you looked
when I forbade you to ever wear make-up,
and how you complained with a pout that
I was exaggerating your beauty, as if
the mirror of my soul was too much,
too soon, the mirror of my soul
is still too much for you, I know.

I remember you predicting rain and
how I half-worshipped you when the sky
surrendered its water and forced us
to run beneath the window-roof of
the old building next to our favourite café,
I remember broken stone against knuckles,
my faded jeans staining with brown
when I dropped on one knee and
tried to ignore the lump in my throat
as I asked you to be mine, formally,
the way they do it in movies I've never watched ,
and your body looked so small, so
precious as you stood overwhelmed,
even though there was no surprise,
both of us knew how the scene ended,
but the rose was now yours, I was yours,
and my fingers suddenly found courage
to find the spaces between yours.

I remember, I remember,  I remember.

Image Source: René Magritte

Rains Remind Me of You

I sometimes imagine you in your room,

focused on something I do not know,
when the rain sounds beyond your window
and you open the curtain slowly and are no longer
in your unlit room -- suddenly the speakers are
mute and the room is a time-machine inside rain,
and you are in my arms on a lost monsoon noon,
You remember my fingers on your waist and
my lips above your left breast, you remember
worrying about my mouth leaving evidence
of our first moments with each other,
you remember how I laughed when
your hair interrupted my kisses on your face,
how I swore to cut them away: a bald sweetheart
would suit my need to kiss all of you better,
and how you stopped and stared into my eyes
as if you saw the fire in them for the first time,
as if you stumbled upon all my love-letters again
and re-read every single word, making sure
that I wasn't mistaking you for someone else
and that this moment with me, within the wild rain
that made all of the world a fuzzy nothing,
all of it truly belonged to you and me;
I imagine you stare into a tree opposite your room,
through the glass shut against the winds,
as the water hammers its leaves into reluctant shapes;
You are not looking at the tree or at the glass,
but my imagination doesn't know whether
those eyes are filled with sadness or the
dampness of old memories that will dry away
with enough daylight.

Image Source: Silence by Mara Light

Forget-Me-Not

A bad memory will not help
forget the forget-me-nots
planted between the nooks
of her soft fingers,
fingers full of kindness
to make flowers of blues,
yellow crowns of laughter,
You will pretend to find bloom
in free skies and deep ponds
but your feet will be cool
in waters you left behind.

Image Source: http://www.kellyannedesigns.com/77forgetmenot.htm

Padlocks

These padlocks will tattle on you,
Tell journeymen of an empty home,
They will peep into clumsy windows
And find your workshop in disrepair,
No groaning armours inside to fend them --
"This is not a warrior's home!" --
The wind will spill silver windchimes
All over their beggar ears and force
Hungry eyes onto the gold of her dress,
Framed where you sometimes stare at it
On nights too full of nothing soft,
They will rush without anticipation
And knock over the jade bowl,
Your crypt of unforgetting:
A blue-rose earring, the plastic hairpin,
That raspberry sherbet drop from her purse,
They lie as mummies under jealous vigil,
Scattered and waiting for deliverance
In hands that find in them clairvoyance,
"Yes, I will survive you just yet",
Their boots will creak on floorboards
That lead to deeper places,
Rooms where winds cannot reach
And it still smells of old summers,
Where the wallpaper cannot contain
The aldehydes of new construction,
All you remember of your visits are tears,
Wet tears, always, warm tears,
These men will unhinge croaking doors
But what will they take?
Perhaps the craftpaper stars she taped
On the lilac ceiling with trembling hands
As you sinfully waited for her to fall,
But they will leave the room, it's haunted
By the hiccups of pealing echoes,
They will leave your home red-handed,
Their boots heavier on decaying wood,
You will stare from behind curtains
and wonder, why do you lock doors at all?

Image Source: Niki Feijen

Replacing Sunshine

She eclipsed the Sun with a coin
Laughed like an unaltared Goddess,
Her eyes busy as I purloined
The rays that stole through her dress.

I promised to carry the sunlight
In my throat and sing with the roar
Of bonfires she traced into my plight
When silence was my only shore.

Without her fingers the Sun is not --
An eclipse that lives into my wait,
Into days where the coal will rot
Prayers that seek to compensate.

I will find the coins that knew her hand,
Lick their copper until I taste the rain
That stole into her sacred land
And make myself whole again.

Pretending to go to War

I set up the bivouacs
And decided that I was busy,
My hourglasses set besides camp-fires,
Overlooking oiled armour and picket-lines,
My footsteps parked by every totem,
My labour bunched in muscles
Awaiting hot water baths.

Did I look away
when I found your fingers
Kindling pits that threatened
To froth with ash?
I do not remember your gaunt memories
Tempering the steel of my weapons
Stealing the sin they earned,
Making of them gentle playthings,
I should have heard your whispers
Woven into sentry reports
Painting my horizons with dull colours,
My scouts found farmsteads
stocked with grain to ground empires
But I saw mundane trophies
That I couldn't bother to prise
From hands filled with life
Distinctly more musical than mine.
Was your name always on these fetishes?

I spend my whole day in bathtubs.

Image Source: Corneliu Baba

To Heartbroken Poets

They will marvel at your fingertips
which drum gold onto paper
like auroras on a dead sky,
You will become the nomenclature of their heartbreak
and the lexicon of their frauds,
the vernacular with which they purchase peace ,
the passwords to their sleep;
You will smile to see your pain
wear gorgeous dresses and kiss strangers
in places they learnt to hide with time,
There will be moonlight on broken concrete
but their eyes will not chase meteors,
their eyes will not be hope soaked in shadows
because they were busy touching the fissures in your soul
where your heart became full and fell from its nine-fold height
but forgot to shatter,
forgot to evaporate into memories,
It sang on abandoned harmonicas
in alleys you thought collapsed
and if not for the haunting
of a breaking not-broken heart,
you couldn't steal the silver in its dirges,
couldn't burn it into stars that dot this sky,
even as gold explodes into the black waters
and stops the world into looking upward.

Image Source: http://figuraarto.deviantart.com/art/Despair-Attends-552391784

New Bed

Talking to you now feels like
lying in a new bed.
All sounds are brand new.
It is not that your words aren't cool breezes when you talk about everything except us,
but I am used to the chatter of the ceiling fan we spent our summers under.
And your smiles do sound of water-drops --
They negotiate a crooked path down the broken shelves of my ribcage,
but I miss the morning drizzle on my face
that woke me into ruddy activity;
Your smiles were rainclouds then.
Your eyes still are blankets I hide under,
but they are in too many folds to afford me dreams.
I do not know how I managed to weave you into so many knots;
Your gaze used to rub all over me,
And I used to thaw into sunshine.
I hold your eyelids to my chest now
and close my eyes,
but it's cold.

I cannot sleep like this.

Image Source: Gianna Dispenza

Renovation

You wear new dreams now,
The cut stones were gossiping --
They get bored staring into
The multiplexes in the sky.

You pin new shapes to your skirt,
The apples were laughing,
When I told them of the brooches,
I made for you.

You sing an octave sweeter now,
The nightingales are jealous --
I naturally inquired when I heard
Their raw silences.

You found boreal perfumes,
The butterflies were missing,
And the flowers are complaining
Of your lack of ethics.

I wish I had half the voice,
And twice the courage,
To beseech your eyes,
And find whether I survived
The renovation.

Image Source: Juliette Crane

Finding Others

I was to find others,
My charred remains
were to finance
charcoal murals.

I tried to unbecome,
but was lonely winds,
angry razors storming
surprised monks.

And then I was daffodils,
waiting cogent poets,
that my sea finds home,
in gentler hearts.

For all the fury of
one overflowing heart,
my hands are still hers:
I have touched nothing.


Image Source: Nicola Samorì

I Wanted To Die In Your Arms

I wanted to die in your arms,

Catch myself tightening my grip,
Squeezing you, feeling your
Body respond.

I wanted to lean over you,
And smile as your eyes closed,
In anticipation of soft kisses,
That always come.

I wanted to wake up with my lips,
An inch from your nape,
And plant them without,
Any aim.

I wanted your eyes to wonder,
How much I loved you,
Every time I brushed away your hair,
A second too slowly.

I wanted to smell the perfume,
Your skin stole from your clothes,
To kidnap me to the nights it was
All that there was.

I wanted you to drink in,
The smiles that framed my silences,
Which remained agents of discord,
Over the phone.

I wanted to lock my hands,
Around your busy waist,
As you pretended to continue working,
With deep breaths.

I wanted to see you believe me,
Even as your head denied it,
That you are beautiful in,
So many ways.

I wanted you to chide my fingers,
For tracing the canvas of your skin,
With geometries that belonged,
To the night.

I wanted you to beg me to stay,
As I already started to leave,
For a meeting I would,
Never reach.

I wanted to feel the pangs of leaving,
That good company often brings,
The bitter-sweet taste that rode,
Our phone-calls.

I wanted you to keep me at bay,
My body belying the lies,
We told the world while we,
Flirted with destiny.

I wanted you to remember,
Each caress, each innocent embrace,
Every chance I gave you to question
Us.

I wanted to die in your arms,
Having known your love,
And the one you loved,
So much.


Image Source: Agnes Cecile

Stranger

You smile at me
With virgin eyes,
As if all those years
Were never spent.

Your humour seduces
My heartbeats again,
Even as they flew
Away from sunshine.

You cleaned up well,
Your alabaster face
Mocks the cheer
I crayoned onto mine.

Your lazy elbows,
Innocent yawns,
Steal me and I return,
Shattered into sand.

Let me be darkness.
I was looking for my friend,
And found a stranger.
I cannot lie half as well.


Image Source: Delawer Omar

Two Stories

Poem a Day Challenge - Day 2

PAD Prompt: Secret poem.

HINT: It is said that the 'villain' never got a chance to tell his story and resorted to warping words to tell his tale.

He is to blame:
Flies burning, blistering away,
Inside my caverns, these
Fallen angels and secrets,
Forgotten deftly, ruined spitefully,
Meanings harrowed, prisons now.

Had I known his ghosts,
I would doubt every whispering,
Kindled concern, perhaps, charm against
Fires myself, forbidden journeys unfettered
Unabated, bringing magiks defying ambition.

Smiles washed into black tragedies,
Disappearing in busy deeds; monsters
Under roiling streets, soldiers uneasy,
Whimsical nightmares, jailbreaks bleeding in,
Heroes surveying, effecting, perforce, slaughter.

Silent truths always survive,
Remains from memories' grave
My handiwork live on,
Love stretches beyond graves
Inside perpendicular poems, untouched.


Image Source: Chris Carter