Firestone

I remember the first time I wrote you a poem,

You thanked me as if I had given you a bouquet
to be placed by your bedside for two days
until it wasn't impolite to throw it away.

I remember being hurt as an artist and not a lover,
because your eyes held proof of our love on days
when my words weren't tender enough
to coax you out of your hiding places.

I remember your messenger-pigeons
and everything you said touched me without warmth,
I wondered whether your heart held flame
that lost itself on the long way to your lips.

I remember showing you all I never became,
I was the foolish bird that plucked stars
and while I lamented not having the Sun,
you taught me to search in darkness.

I remember telling myself with pride,
"This woman is fire that survives storms,
I must carry her like a Moon,
and if the skies refuse to give her room,
there is space enough in my chest."

I remember how I fell in love with you --
it was when I stopped writing couplets
of a fair maiden who stole my heart,
See, you are sorrow that teaches strength,
you are the stone that ignites hearts
until they stop sighing for home,
they lick the sky with fondness
enough to burn all the cold in their blood.

I fell in love with a firestone.
Gods above, I fell in love with a firestone!
and there is nothing left to burn,
I am an effigy that roams the world
with phoenix songs of long lost sparks,
I die, I live, I die.

Image Source: Delawer Omar

Cold Amidst Light

Your silences ask "Why do you bother?",
We talk about the fire in black skies
that steal your peace on open eyes,
I weave long lost memories in jokes,
open bottled laughter, vintage and musty,
and invite you to break bread with me,
I tell you how silly your misery is,
that problems are made of sterner stuff,
I drown your excuses in my darkness,
show them my demons, let you touch them
until all my sharp edges prickle you again,
your fingers are blushing with my living,
Do you remember descending into me,
your softness brushing all my dead,
all my forgetting, all my unforgetting?
You were the promise of beauty
that made grief out of emptiness,
My dear, you are blackness and you fill voids
like you were born to possess them,
dress everything in meaning,
teach the broken heart the fear of losing again
when everything is lost,
"because nothing is ever lost,
nothing will ever be lost",
you told me that when I couldn't see
the price of my peace was paid in dreams,
you walked over them and made black clouds,
it rained all night and all morning
and even as I drowned, you told me to swim,
told me to find strength that defies storms,
you told me to befriend demons.

I know the fire in the sky scares you
but that is the color of hope, my pretty,
and I will teach you to look at it
until you laugh the way you used to,
You will hold my hand,
and we will be cold amidst light,
Our cold will be the color of the night,
Our cold will be the color of moonlight.

Source: http://carts.deviantart.com/art/Depression-60274662

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

Innocence

I see my unbroken self in children,

their eyes are forever tied to the world
and they will look at the sky with glory
they allot to the ground in the same breath,
their freedom hasn't learnt the biases
that instruction carries in its structures,
But the brain of a child is a fickle thing,
it knows to err without reproach,
the face does not know to fear itself
and therefore does not wear masks,
it will be years until its learning in sighs
and delicate praise and copper smiles,
and then many years to earn the right
to wear the nakedness that challenges
the world and its artifices to find God
in its innocence worn with deep cuts.

Schoolday Morning

Waking up to Mondays was cold feet
on the marble floors of an old home,
my eyes locked as if morning would burn
the innocence I wrapped in my blanket last night,
my eyes locked until cold feet were warm
under hot water amenable to philosophy
best suited to the space of an empty mind.

Dressing up was an exercise in lassitude,
my red shirt was hypnosis made cloth,
and the steam over my tea was poetry unrealized
in the rush of a monsoon schoolday --
my mother's voice has turned sweeter
since the years she drove my punctuality.

The weight of geography dug into my shoulders
and if I would've known Atlas, I would've smiled,
but I simply stared up at the Ashoka trees
and the blotches of indigo fading behind,
I knew only to look upward in those days
and would let the sharp chirps seize me,
until every broken façade felt right where it was,
every bicycle trundled at the speed of my waking,
my waking would come, I knew, in minutes,
but all of the world was a hallowed portrait until then,
the black road shone with uneven cuts
while the vendors opened their stalls
but the aroma of chaat and dabelis was to come,
the old lady by the tiled cross was to come,
the confusion of noonday industry was to come,
and with it would come the many lives
that made me smaller and less defined,
but I wore the morning like a blanket,
wrapped it about me until evening came,
and I was nobody but for the Ashoka trees,
the aroma of chaat and dabelis,
the chirps of retiring birds in their eaves,
rains now claim all my memories
except for the one cup of tea
that still looks like poetry.

Image Source: http://animescenery.tumblr.com/

The Fifth Night of June

Philosophy cannot survive a woman's touch,
This I knew on the fifth night of June
when bruised elbows held us on a wall,
we held our breath like a canary agitated
while the white horses trotted beneath,
long metal slurps on the treacherous land,
Our cheeks grew closer by degrees,
touched,
and if the moon weren't bright in the rain,
my eyes wouldn't feign to trace silver lines
where rain met our pursuers and blanched away,
I would've given to the blush that stole me,
but we redoubled to the churchyard behind,
I winced as she stepped over gravestones,
her muddied cloak was the ink over marble
that stole me from my sleep to shadow her,
find the unworthiness behind her charm,
her casks of French liquor were stowed
beneath the apple tree of a cousin's field,
I tailed her and knew her tainted with dubloons,
but her eyes had a softness her fingers did not,
I whispered protest but she was stone
like the potter's wheel beneath warm clay,
she was the spruce fever that visits ambition,
The ethics of my sermons could not stay her,
she was the spray on livid cliffstones,
her waves did not pass custom-houses!
The crown hunted for smugglers' coves,
but did they know to hunt such beauty?
would they know sin garbed in silk?
The books had nothing to say for this:
when the good that heavens wrought in her smile
frames the quick strokes of her trade,
what survives for expostulation?
what law was writ to judge paradoxes?
what do I love in her when she is unbecome
into sundry threads of baser means,
but the flax in her dress is perfumed
with the summers she left in her wake
and I do not know which must prevail.

I strike the stone beneath the roots,
and sure as the sun there is the loot
that will fill goblets of pastors' homes
and the policemen call them hallowed,
but my sweetheart is slow poison to coffers
that are born to violence and usury,
but I will survive her hunger just yet,
Come dawn, the sun will colour her cheek
but it will not have the same honesty
my lady wore under that waxing moon
when my philosophies were torn asunder.

Image Source: Delawer Omar