on loneliness

can i believe my own empty sighs
when they appear too far and too little
between my symptomatic need for
despair and disrepair?

“be strong,” they say, “exercise your
agency over your adust remains,”

i wonder if wisdom lies in being aware
or being a practitioner of that awareness —

i, for one, seek redemption in verifying and living
the knowledge of destruction, holding it like
a cosseted corolla of memory,
that is becoming of me — a spoiled sepia-
sequestered detail in the possibility of
existence — a fierce idea without a fulcrum
to safeguard harmony.

“you are not lonely,” i say to myself,
but i do not know where it becomes me
and when i become an evidence to
breaking, and a splintered sensation
of nothing.

i am the last inhalation of smoke,
a testament to the fallacy
of my name.

after all,
where did loneliness surge & stage its act
if not at the juncture where my words trigger
an acid reflux, and transmogrify into aphanitic ash?

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Falling by Clara Lieu)
For “How Does the Story End?” at With Real Toads.

 

Advertisement

all our riches

i spend the exact change (i have left) of simple words,
gentle words, neurotic words, hunchbacked words,

to have the evening speak and last for some more time —
every second of the same quality and ruse as the lingering

fragrance of raat ki rani, dreaming dreadful thoughts
and foregoing them in a simple parable – “it is only a phase” –
i laugh at my own conjecture that it will perchance still
get better — normalcy lies ahead in a neo-noir paradise,
waiting around the corner.

“life is like a dubious pile of ash” — but Gulzar has already said
that the ashtray is full — no more space (maybe money) left
to fulfill the urge for another puff.

perhaps it is not, perhaps it is another currency,
unfamiliar in shape/size, when the exchange rate
is not known and sapphires already spent —
the parched mouths do not ask for another name
of the word — the spendthrift work over moments

to make sense of a cloud-befuddled mood, depicting natures
of the orange moon (lost in the haze of untarnished selves).

“there is a worm within us that turns everything into a threadbare
experience, a frayed impression of our yearnings,” you said.

it is good that i have another penny left in the pocket within the
pocket, where words do not reach, budgets do not measure
our wealth.

you can have it.

.

*raat ki rani (lit. the queen of the night; Night Blooming Jasmine; scientific name: cestrum nocturnum) — the fragrance abounds anywhere and everywhere these evenings
**Gulzar’s poem, Ashtray puri bhar gyi hai; trans. The Ashtray is Overflowing

© Anmol Arora 2018

For Midweek Motif at PU
Also linking it up with dVerse OLN
Image source (A Trompe Loeil Of Paper Money Coins by French School)

 

 

 

soliloquy of a season’s change

morning winds weigh heavier and
the body feels like a helium balloon,
canvassing the landscape through
a bare string — surrounded in a haze
of lost headspaces, memories that
do not bring home the sense of peace,
all comfort cashed without a receipt.

when we have lived through the seasons,
it shouldn’t matter how long they last —
the fan rotates on its axis, turned very low
in a gentle rush of air to breathe all loss,
to compensate for mosquito bites felt/left
in the after-state of a day’s place of rest,

as the summer picks its tinders and twigs,
writes a farewell letter (a suicide note
that was discovered before its fulfillment),
and picks on its scabs and scars that
have survived the test of every crime
witnessed by the tender body of life —
high, helium, heavier, halfway done.

i pull back from the edge of the flight —
the flock of weathered passions and aged
ruminations, all in confinement —

i choose winters — undying deaths,
mossy sepulchers, fog-white dreams
and a ponderous pause — silent,
seething, singing.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Times Change by Dmitri Matkovsky)
For Midweek Motif at PU

breakdown

the entry to the path of sorrow
begins with a moon-shaped tear,
a fissure made the exact measures
of guilt and trepidation —

the leaves are brown, shades
of evil intermixed with erased
shadows of hubris, the roots
extend to the edge of mindful
games, that we play and lose
against ourselves,

lifelike patchwork is the center-
fold to this closet-like space,
where any form of easement
into the wing and skin of things,
takes a toll on what keeps a breath
functional, carrying on the treble,

silver-busy emulations of the past
take the form of ghosts that come
out only in day-light, and work their
ethereal way through the doors
and dreams, the greed-eyed arrows
fixing, breaking disciplined griefs,

i have elsewhere to go, nowhere
to belong, enough of the calendars
and clocks have been spent, rendered
useless in the loss of feelings,

i gather exits to stop all my blind deeds
from recurring, and shut the banners in,
becoming the equipment of toil, to find
some need of listlessness, the coal-fire-
red glow spreading in criss-cross patterns,

as the ongoing landslide
is felt (the ground i tread upon in
beleaguerment slipping away)
before its coming.

.
© Anmol Arora

Image source (The Beauty Is In The Breakdown Painting by Kevin Cross)
For MLM Menagerie’s Bonus Wordle
Also Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

***

I have been working on a new Insta handle for about 2 months now, for literary and creative posts: @anmol.ha.
For contact, you can reach out to me through my multiple profiles, enlisted here.

a dark communion

the crow perched on the black railing,
our dark eyes confronted each other
for a moment,

he thought it to be inconsequential,
looked hither-thither and flew away
in a gust of air, that hung before me,
leaving a trance-like image,
right before my difficult breath,

if i were him, i would have done away
with it, but his nonchalance
only made me wary
of my own condition,

i am burning without fever,
i am shivering without cold,

the food has lost its flavor,
water, its pungent taste,
to drench the morsels of belief,

what if

this was it, this is it,
this would be all —

this unremarkable grey sky
reduced to my grey vision,
my pudgy, little fingers
no longer capable,

every thought bursting in its own smoke –
left-over chunks of an explosion –

this wrecked structure, this unused
view —

would i be afloat
when i fall?

~

© Anmol Arora 2018

For Midweek Motif at PU
Image source

***

I have been working on a new Insta handle for over a month now, for literary and creative posts: @anmol.ha.
For contact, you can reach out to me through my multiple profiles, enlisted here.