conversation at the end of a time loop

Time Loop Painting by amber shack

the coffee-stain looks devilish in its laughter,
while the muslin tablecloth tumbles over itself
in the roaring delight of an invisible audience.

i am embroidered in red and deep cerulean,
looking at the passage of time through a key-
-hole, which is jammed with promises never
made. i know that my nerves pale and dilute
in comparison to your word-while capillaries
that shout & shout against my walled silences.

“it isn’t really that hard to hide,” you say briefly,
you smirk to the quivering of my voice,
(the throat-bell still ringing in the wind).

i will pick up the plotholes and yield to your words,
if you would only promise that this was never
a dream or a pigeon’s hope, cut by the Chinese string
of a wayward kite.

i am a diffused lamp-light, figuring & disfiguring
every stitch and flip like an old game of playing cards,
that i still cannot begin to envisage or win.

i still grin like the Joker to your objection.
i can still bury my head to hide my sins,
all that i’ve got to lose when it is dark.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 5
(Inter)National Poetry Month

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talk with me

Robert McIntosh, The Conversation, 1960

the shards of a halted conversation
are sharp on the tongue,
when the word is finally said,
a little one, a longer one,
two words that are coloured
with anticipation.

i have always wondered at this strong
bond, between the unsaid and the unseen
and how easy it is to forget that
the pause doesn’t mean a full-stop,

not in poetry, not in life.

the conversation is a piece of imagined
reality, a cake without icing, a ballad without
the rhyme, and the eyes without reflection.

so, talk, as if your words are going to rest
on my body,
before slowly sinking in,

the bleeding night-sky as the backdrop,
for this performative exchange.

.

© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with the Poetry Pantry at PU

opinion

.
downward and low,
an opinion hanging

by the whiskers of their mouth, they all have
to say and demonstrate this or/and that,
keeping in store lopsided voices to
commemorate their oh so mighty wisdom,

i am giggling to myself, humble in
my own obtrusive opinion, filling
circles with cascading blue ink, drawing
eurythmic patterns of scutoids that form
the epithelium of this marriage —

the lofty union of art with garb-age,
a tirade of the song against poetry,

and i am still giggling, misguided in my
undernourished appetite for newness,
a well-rounded change for the worse, if not
on a revitalized road to salvation.

my locomotive-like scattered brain goo
gone off the tracks of an atemporal
listing, and i am giggling and giggling,
and they are oh-opinionating,
all for a single prose,

i am no screenwriter drawing storyboards,
i am a single founded, mutually admired myth
posturing for a life figure —

the so-called youth gone wayward, loosening
the coils of their and my very own time,
in a self-congratulatory realm of
opinions.

.

Image source: Screwfizzer Painting by Simon Birch
For MLM Menagerie’s Wordle # 206. Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.

P.s. I have an updated About Me page.

Contact me: Instagram, Facebook, Gmail

I think I heard them talking along these lines…

This is one of the two… “J______t”

“My eyes are screened. I had three. I have them still but I can not see. I changed a lot from the colour of sun bathing grass to that of wet sand… and all that I wish now is to see”

“I think you can make up for it by revelling in the benefits of each of your organs.”

“Do you talk about my coarse hair over hard epidermis, those wretched fronds, or my grease; well you sure don’t talk about my milk. Do you? They are not for me. All I have for me are the eyes that I wish I could open and go fish.”

“Ah! You rhyme so that I feel it in my seeds.”

“And do they stick within your fruit and reach those humans when bulbs of your yellow flesh, they do pick?”

“Yes. But they know how to get rid of it.”

“My green, prickly love; how I envy thee and your clinging to the life source, the life-tree. Your heart beats with the earth. I am forlorn having fallen off, sitting atop the sand. I have forgotten the story of my birth.”

“And how I despise the way they stab me and when they wash away my sticky love. I am the pieces in the curry while you form the base of it.”

“How does it matter? We become the food that they eat and into their stomachs we go, giving to the world our last bow.”

“I am rather glad that we are picked off. Wouldn’t it be befouling that despite of our benefits for them, we remain ignored? I say I love those vegetarians.”

“You do. So I do. I feel their arrival. May be they will first remove my blindfold and let my pearl white entrails gaze at the sky so I could cry.”

“And there you go. I shall wait. My turn would come when my entrails would kiss their hands. Goodbye friend.”

~

The spot of the sand where the one who wanted to see rested was left with a hollow, a single long brown dried hair bequeathed by him to the past he left for, for the present, was left in the wake.

“Kalpataru…” A song lasted forever in the wind.

.

For Oloriel’s Tale Weaver’s Prompt at MindLoveMisery’s Menagerie. Can you guess the names of the “two people” in conversation here? I have already provided the photo of one.

Image source

Smoke

“I feel like having a smoke.”

“But I don’t want its stench anywhere around me.”

She gave him an incredulous look, “Oh my sweetheart, you are such a baby.”

He didn’t respond and kept on reading his book.

“Would you sometimes get out of this imaginary world of the books?” She asked, bringing the cigarette to her lips.

“And would you please not smoke? Anyhow, smoking isn’t allowed in the building. So, please respect the rules,” he lectured.

She ignored him laughing and lighted her cigarette and took a deep breath.

“Aha!” She exclaimed, exhaling out the horrid smoke.

“You are disgusting.”

And then it rang, the fire alarm.

“Please evacuate the building now. This is a fire alert. Kindly use the stairs, instead of the elevator. Thank you.”

source

*Well, the story does not compliment the photograph much. I just took the smoking part and introduced it into the story, to do something different, rather than writing about the gangs/drug lords; the idea I got when I looked at it for the first time. For VisDare 28.