portrait of the poet

Master Wordsmith Gulzar by Saurabh Turakhia

Sketch

Remember, one day,
While sitting at my table
You sketched on a cigarette box
A tiny plant

Come and see,
That plant has bloomed!

— Gulzar, tr. Pavan K. Varma

the box stayed closed as if
hiding a lost thought
from another time, when
your words would settle
like sediment
at the bottom
of my breath,

as i read you out loud,
flicking ash from one wrist,
upending the goblet in
gesticulation
from another.

you draw words
like those vessels
bursting forth in the kitchen,
strung to a high note
of despair & hope,

your love speaks to me,
even though i have barely scratched
the skin of that mischievous marauder,
and yet i feel i know, as if
from another life, another rhyme.

you free my closed thoughts,
and water seeds of my silence
as i sing you and praise you
to myself.

.
© Anmol Arora

For A Tribute to Poets of Our Time at WTR. I am paying my tribute to one of my favourite poets and lyricists, Gulzar. Gulzar is 84 now. So, whenever I talk about him and his sprawling work with anyone, I only hope that we wring it out of him — his poetic brilliance, his sensibility, his love, and all he has offered to us for decades — in this lifetime.

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moving on

 

you are lost, as i lost
in your loss.

the seas of time have come ashore,
flooding and taking away all that
remains —

you were once there, drinking
the moon wine (it is you who
brought me the white for a late
dinner), and addled potions of
a lone star at my lone window,

it’s at the end, that it all began,
the turbulence of words (said
and unsaid) created voids, built
of a few nights’ fantasized storms,

you made me see the fire-glass
that only showed your visage,
your eyes growing pit-wise, you,
yours only – form and facsimile –

and i knew that i did not have to
leave, because you were not there,
never meant to be, and so it was —

a singular bulb fuse that flickered
out, into the emptiness of the room.

~

© Anmol Arora 2018

More of a frustration than a heartbreak — For dVerse Poetics
Also linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads
And I somehow found something to go with it. Ha! Image source (Light Headed 3 by Leah Saulnier)

***

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.

let’s do it

love’s bulge seems to be pretty abundant-
lewd words weave a fulcrum of all dreams, wet to touch,
sweet-bitter tones serenade the ears, a silent breath
grazing the neck with a scimitar of nefarious thoughts,

don’t speak, just do the unspeakable, the unmentionable
with a velocity of a soaring plane, upending us into submission,
this is the art work people gawk at and fail to encompass
into any coherent knowledge, its deprivation, its salvation,

spilled paint is the canvas for this action filled space, love is
swallowing its saliva and thick puddles of misery foam at those
silent, nurturing lips. your mouth is my mouth is your mouth.

let’s do it. let’s unmake love.

.
Image source
Linking it up with Poets United Midweek Motif

Also read this: this vulgar handiwork of time and let’s draw blood
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Bodacious

(by Brishti Guha)

She thinks of an evening
An evening of spring showers
When they laughed, their faces in the rain,
riding steel –
Black steel on red dust.
Their contours welded together perfectly
Muscle against muscle. Tyres against tar.
Later, their contours merged again
As the thunderstorm outside raged
It seemed created for the
express purpose
Of matching their passion.
And she thinks of his back
The broad back that she loved to hug from behind
The back that bore her nail marks
And that he turned on her one summer day
To walk away.
And she smiles, thinking
Of the rain, the storm-
Of poetry, and of her love
For life and all that it offers
This bodacious babe.

.

*Brishti is a dear friend. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at a prestigious university. Apart from her research and writing in Economics, she is an avid reader and a practiced poet as well. You can read some of her papers and articles here.

Image source

let’s draw blood

blood transfusion in a fucked up poem:

eyes meet, hearts melt into puddles of misery,
a guy shot a man, and a man a guy
at midnight when the sky was pistachio-green
and earth slightly shifted beneath their feet.

love is common place – words are the dregs
of tea left in my battered mug, hugs are given up
in arms that rattle like broken windows, and

they dare say,

*“This is not what we came to see…”

.

.

*”This is not what we came to see” is quoted from Brian Patten’s poem The Projectionist’s Nightmare.
Linking it up with Poetry Pantry and With Real Toads.

Image source