devirginating desire

a grey sky is like a page resting in
a solution of redundancy and restraint,

i have filed my complaints, nailed them
on the doors of my assailants, their bite
marks still fresh on my wood-picked skin,
their claws bright-white where they once
etched a mark of this impunity
that they call desire.

no one ever told me that i wielded an agency
over the brownness of my skin, or utility
of my innards, or roundness of my ass,
or the thought of my throat,
well riddled in the ecstasy of wants,

so i began to write my loss of agency without
knowing what it ever meant, so i reclused myself
to a departed space of pain when i never
knew that it is but to be salvaged.

my tiredness is my reprieve, in my restless
lies and stigmatized submission,

of a hundred torn-pieces of this tapestry.
the white falls slowly. the red fills
the myth of my own charity.

erased — i write when there is nothing
to be known, reversed to the birth
of a sky, with a broken scaffolding.

picture me when i have yielded to
this vile wantonness of freedom,
and the stubbornness of my disease.

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

For my upcoming prompt at dVerse Poetics (The Art of Confession in Poetry) later this evening, wherein I am invoking the likes of Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and Das to understand the nature of confessional poetry. Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at WTR.
Image source (Charles Francois Mouthon, Academic Study, 1892)

in the ambit of flesh and desire

your hands caressing my throat
like it is your own,

gentle but rough,
little by little,
angling to my form and function,
fever-fervent and fastidious,

the calluses of your palm with a tight-
en-ing resolve, recovering spaces
between my hefty breaths,
the carotid pumping faster
                     for relinquishing
                     control over life-lines,

your eyes penetrating
my mind in an inebriated fullness,
the hourglass, broken,
the vagaries of time forgotten
in its absurd arbitrariness,

— i seek you, i need you, i want you —

i want the length of you against the girth
of me, the walls to be torn off, and
the electricity to wreck my anatomy — 
                                   my red lips chapped and bloodied to
                                                            your mouth’s savagery,

pick up my pieces, and claim the night
before it scatters to the winds,
and hum the dirge of this happening,
and moan as if this ache is all that is,
                                   this wound is all that we carve
                                   and draw from each other —

purple-bruised, volt-blue on a soft-brown skin
              merging into the skin of all things,
       submerging into a spell of an age-old
(lost) modus-operandi, for consumption,

                   — death, little by little,
                   living, by dying a little more,
                   and collapsing into heaps of
                   shins and skins, bones and beings,
                   and to forget that it ever existed —

      this venerable malady of sex and grandiosity,
      till loss is the only desire, the only particle
      left of me.

© Anmol Arora 2018

For my Guest Post/Prompt at dVerse to be published later today; I am entreating the poets to explore the idea and theme of desire & sexuality in poetry, especially through the perspectives of gender and sexual minorities.

Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.

Image source (Neck / Livingston, 1988 by Robert Mapplethorpe)

of lovely things

rise and flow, reach out and billow —
the caress of star-bedecked cheeks, of
coffee-skins resplendent with flavors
of earth, slings, of two-days old sweat,

encounter the mirth of every golden
brow – never else would be any but
for a poem lovely as a full-throated
ease of a desire – the divine delights

of souls quivering to the lip-service
of lust, one-two-inches deep – glassy
wounds – eager, ephemeral feelings
rising, flowing, deluging, dazzling –

.

Image source: Getting Rid of My Desire by Brooke David

For With Real Toads’ Micro Poetry

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RIP, Queen of Soul

setting

.

the centerpiece —

pvc ceiling, lilac. honey-
mustard edging across daft
corners, hibiscus’ death of
colors, trimmings of desire
into drunk deals ~

~ wait it out. it turns blade-grey
and coughdrop-red, sequent-
ially, hear that song of bro-
ken lines & fickle curves
of the gluteal

 — enfold,
when it turns bloody
and swift – breaks,
blues, gallows, dies –

.

Image source: Dutch Interior II, Joan Miro

Linking it up with Poetry Pantry at PU.

a silent vigil

Flickering Light & Shadow, Ridge Trail by Stephen Quiller

the ice has taken hold between the two passages,
carrying the crystal white burden of dreams
and the languages of intrinsic qualifications –

to choose the fog over mist, slush over dirt,
and to keep frozen into stone all deals upturned,
all wishes parted by a moment’s touch –

lost is the sudden acquaintance with sensation,
I am near the end, I am at the edge, always dazed,
glorified by the fear of tumbling down – just the bliss
of never seeing the light

for it’s hard to dream with open eyes, for it’s hard
to see through your lips where you reside –

who ever said that this mosaic of understanding is fulfilling?

that blithe sun has devoured all else.

you are the halo, the shadow, the skin to my desire, the symbol
to this paradigm of pain,
and I keep up my silent vigil,
I wait.

.
Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.