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

Death of a Star

In a soft, hidden niche of heavens,
you levitate in infinity’s embrace,
burning with your fiery tunic
with the astral winds on your face!

Within the crimson and the vermillion
lies your throbbing heart, your cyclone,
A sweetheart’s blood rushes in your veins,
molten gold sings in decibels unknown.

How many flights your messengers take!
and how their legs run deep!
Yet with every other journey they embark,
their feet keep losing their keep!

Two immense invisible fountains,
one which consumes another,
that are like arms outstretched,
and any metal core do brother.

Your captivating charm has allured
so many sycophants around your dance,
whirling and dancing along like tops,
pulled by the string of your glance!

They say I am the vestige of a star,
your brother perchance, who still shines,
and I live not for a proton’s worth,
my time is infinitesimal to your primes!

Your reddish flush of weak health,
in the sky of mine scintillates white,
your adamantine dignity in the sphere,
keeps shifting in my black nights.

Slowly your color has deepened
and your heart grown weaker,
but your build has grown larger,
and my eyes are now meeker.

Expanding your inferno to legions undecided,
you explode like imagination may never recite,
into trillions of diamonds and pearls
and a wizened dwarf is your sight.

Every speck of your reach is a grave,
you contain within your ashes lights which last
for times long in my unworthy character,
and those invisible to my unworthy cast.

Tombstones furnaced, that shall roam the cosmos,
forever shall tell of your beauty and law,
It is the way your kind is resurrected,
for mortals of flesh to be in awe.

Image source: http://facundodiaz.deviantart.com/art/Canis-Mayoris-106714461

Spilling Freshwater

I spilled you all over my life,
the way I spill water sometimes,
clumsy hands knocking glasses
or happy feet splashing puddles,
because water always evaporates;
See, caution is just a bother with water --
water always leaves before dawn,
like a welcome guest too polite to
trespass your tolerance for strangeness,
It will be thrown on flowerbeds until
the concrete outside weeps excess
but the sun remembers to carry it all
like a matron chiding spoilt children
back into some nursery above earth.

There is no sun where I spilled you
every time you knocked your head
against mine with liquid smiles,
where your words cleaved broken soil
and disappeared and men dug me up
but could not find you, like a God lost
in prayers to a wind that cannot be
plucked out except for the wetness
in all my corners, my body is a cave
that cannot stop dripping, cold always,
I did not anticipate so much darkness,
did not plan my gambols and gambles
to account for waterproofed nightmares,
so when I call you rain the next time,
my dear, know that I am blaming you
for making me rich enough
to purchase debts I can never repay,
know that I am desperate to
see anything in rainwater but melancholy
and all of you is freshwater
but under your summer lakes, love,
See how I decay!

Image Source: Andrew Salgado

Love Songs

The problem with poetry is that
heartbreak sounds like a love-song
and if I strung it to a harpsichord,
it would be dedicated on radios
to new sweethearts on Valentine's
before the roses could be shared,
as if the cold lacquer of my words
was polishing delicate musicboxes
made of ancient oakwood forests
where the sun never stops shining,
My darkness accosts these hearts
but they hold hands and await dawn,
while I distribute a litany of sunsets
with ink borrowed from long nights.


Image Source: Phoenix Decor

Nostalgia

Words are poor messengers for emotions,
for what I am when I sit on the marble
of my bedroom window in late June,
as rain needles through cool air,
makes dark spots on my trousers;
I am in a lost childhood dream,
the last ten years never happened
but this is just a really long déjà vu,
I simply forgot not to grow up,
to keep building castles in games
and none outside;
I sip tea from a mug with painted roses,
and have just returned four hours late
from a school-library filled with fairy-tales
and new-smelling encyclopedias
with DNA helixes and blue-white comets
and my mother chides my forgetfulness,
How do I lose track of time, she asks,
I fall on the freshly-washed bedsheets
of a bed I no longer fit in and ask myself
How do I lose track of time?

Grey Skies

Grey skies are grand ivory cloths spread
above us like an uncoloured ceiling,
but that is not what makes them beautiful.
It is the light that descends softly
onto mundane, decrepit buildings
and lonely trees, otherwise lit
by a bored Sun or a miserly Moon,
How all colors seem sharper, brand new
in the pearliness of air that remembers
rain, but forgets everything else.
How the birds do not time their songs,
how the winds will beat the leaves
into paranoid dances without notice,
forcing you to anticipate wild rains,
angry, lashing, cold rains,
Everything has a voice with which to cry
in joy or fear or downright despair
and it doesn't take a poet philosopher
to read a world in motion.

Image Source: http://www.simonsgallery.com/001landscapes.php

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