golden sandals like marigolds are left behind
in an uppity world
&chipped nail-print on prim toes—
his pink kerchief is smudged
like the season of no return.
a lover looks for lice on the long tresses of the beloved,
fingers nimble,
but calm on a rotten evening.
wrapped together in rapture, the wet ground is slippery
like the tongue that is on its way home.
the screen light turns sharper than the old lamp
where mosquitoes love
and die in a daze.
.
© Anmol HA
all these years erased, memories faded
to blots of ink&dust (rewritten and smudged
in/by a whirlwind of a mind)
nothing is real (nor unreal) in an unchanged sun’s
beckoning light, that falls cold
on the fullness (red pulp &orange rind) of my ripe skin.
this air is not the air that carries
voices &smells across the plateau of another time.
years that were gone/erased —
i never left, never became
a person (more than a hollow bone &pain)
never knew of my left side from right —
as i enter the body
i left behind,
it opens —
dreams drained of any colour, swallowed portions
of rotting needs, all figure in my deadpan speech,
all slow motions to a dead end, as in a little disk of a film,
b&w, sepia, deepening into monochrome lines,
breathing, talking, ageing
but not alive.
.
© Anmol Arora
Image source (The Past is Present by Ellen Brook)
Linking it up with my prompt for dVerse Poetics on Portals
they say dying by suicide should not seem like an option
(in a world where we would rather admire silent suffering)
“you shouldn’t have” “i wish you knew that i cared” —
a person is like an apple with layers of lives lived and unlived
in the course of a simplified reality
(not for you to decide or decipher),
when they die by suicide (no one commits suicide),
the core is still not empty,
in their absence, your words are not solacing,
they are empty vessels (cyanide seeds of pilgrimage)
that mean nothing to a non-existent god.
i read that there comes a time when you realize
that you do not want to die anymore
but you’re just living the memory of wanting to be unalive,
to be buried in endless despair, so as to placate
the familiar need to stop it all.
i wonder if my skin is as supple as an apple’s —
if i cut it and square it for your consumption
(social media consolations and memorials),
would it bleed or would it not anymore?
would it hurt or would my lips quiver and pause…
to the sweet perfume of a fresh wound?
my blood clots at the thought of an apple
that may not be as sweet as it may look —
so shall i choose a pomegranate seed
to bind my life and plant it near my empty heart
(no space within)?
when i wish to return to what i knew best,
i feel the pull towards knowledge that this fruit
is yet to accumulate me, still to ripen before the fall comes.
.
© Anmol Arora
Image Source (Sebastian Black, Concerning taste let’s ask the apple: Hey apple sliced in half (muzzle). Hey you of black seeds and rotten core (whiskers,nose) of yellow skin, and stem split twain (mouth), of etc and also of etc. Who left you here on the round glass end table (head)? Are you sullying up the Eileen Gray “piece”, the Heath ceramic mugs (eyes)? Or are you, like the film of dry coffee, (pupils) adding just the right touch? Think about it. I’m gonna take a nap and if I’m sunlight when I wake up I’ll alight on you. But if I’m still just meat with arms I’m gonna move you (ears) over by the couch., 2016, Oil on linen, 60 × 45 inches / 152.5 × 114.3 cm, Unique)
Linking it up with my prompt about and on apples at dVerse later this evening
i treat white words and black smiles as one
when the moon looks like a lamp,
a river of despondent virtues
&potential sins,
i look like a mirror, an image of an image,
drinking from the same chalice
as a millennium of systemic subversion, my stigma
is attached to my body, and
i carry it around like a baby
in a cradle, like a queer impulse
of my hope, like open eyes that
do not shut in the dark, like my skin’s
craving and engravings on my skin.
i do not mix
love (as reductive as it is)
with pity,
i do not change my face
as i once did, i pickle my smiles
and feed them to your glances,
i am an expression, not either, nor both,
but all at once, the first one twice, the second
in intervals of time (joined to my hip),
i am a hole to take you in, to engulf
and succumb to this impulse
to see death, in its non-binary
view — this itch to know,
and to know well,
that i am the one, who
i am, who i see,
without a mirror, without the sky,
not transparent, nor opaque,
but still visible in the shadow
of my own light.
.
© Anmol Arora
Image Source (Hand Mirror by Gwendolyn Zabicki)
For my prompt at dVerse Poetics this evening, where we are celebrating some amazing Black poets, as part of the Black History Month. I’ve tried to emulate Audre Lorde’s style in A Woman Speaks and used one of her lines (in italics) — “I do not mix/love with pity.”
black is the sound of a phone call
through hazy lines, that keeps on
ringing — delayed response,
stopping short of despair — its greys
subdued, in the harsh daylight.
black is the smell of fresh blood, lip-
shaded hurt that keeps on aching,
rising — tendrils of lust reaching out
for a dark, dark touch — i’ve wondered
if i can rise to the height of burning.
black is the nail-paint — matte, you
said — it makes my fingers look long-
err — these short sardonic evenings
to gather at the shore, monochrome
boats returning to a long night’s door.
black is the imprint of a stranger —
shadows and sighs, desire held aloft,
succumbing to these charms — my
hurt getting wider, my lies deeper, as
hopes trickle down in half-streams.
black is the taste of your smile — sly,
shy, standards apart — white masks
falling from our eyes, to see the shape
of nothingness, its skin we wear unto
our hearts, like a hole stretched apart.
i see black remorse — no spectrum
to measure its length and width —
a world missing, where i could be singing
to the clouds, and they would pour down
all the colours, remembered and lost.
.
© Anmol Arora
Image source (Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt; © 2018 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
Written for my prompt at dVerse on Shades of Black. Don’t forget to check it out.
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