Display Picture

I compliment your display picture
and become a superficial spider
strung on the world wide web,
I don't tell you I want to trace you
in my words like I know your lacework,
like I know your baroque and grotesque,
I know the cipher to the divine in them,
I don't tell you I don't know you anymore,
The furrow beneath your lip hides lies,
I am not qualified to know them now,
I skirt your inside with patchwork smiles
and pretend that the gold was in your skin,
that my temples were made to your beauty
and all your divine was always in hiding.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Talk To Me, Please

We don't talk anymore and I don't know why,

Silence would be difficult if I had reasons
This is rollercoasters in pitch blackness,
This is impossible!
I cannot see what goes on behind your sad eyes
and I do not know if I am supposed to wait,
I wait behind closed doors with warm palms
but every twist of the doorknob is ice
I do not know if I am supposed to keep feeling
Tell me to be numb and I will do it
Talk to me, God damn it, my legs ache,
Remember all those days
when I whispered through closed doors,
you spoke to me then in breaking anguish,
I told you how to find stars in the darkness,
I was a blind man but I knew the stars  existed
because you were beautiful and you existed,
and the universe knew beauty in that moment,
I knew it in my bones because you made my heavens,
you made the rhythm I carried all day long
and please, I know you don't have time now,
but talk to me for five minutes,
you promised that you would always talk,
I counted on your words to reach me
I do not care for what empty shore they come from
but I counted on the air of your breath
to feel familiar when everything else isn't,
I need to be brave today and I need you,
I need to know that someone cares I exist,
I need to matter in your eyes,
Tell me your silence remembers my hums
and I promise to bend you into songs,
Tell me your ice remembers my warmth
and I promise to set both of us on fire.

Image Source: http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-close-up-Catherine-tear/298693/2111616/view

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