when a flame dies

& the way a drunk mosquito burns—roasted
when it strikes a humming electric
racket, sweet pleasure is found

in the touch of a fire, getting
closer, warming undulating nerves,
burning many skins and hearts —

i sit beneath a cornucopia of thoughts,
shaded by empty words and loss, un-
true to the universe, unforgiving of
black nights and their igniting stars.

i want to learn how to perform in symbols
and when there are shortages of voiced whispers,
i need to let go of my vernacular, my colloquial
lips in favour of a rusted language, that
i have borrowed and bracketed for my cause.

i don’t remember the words, not their units
of deflated lungs, alight clay lamps, final
sparks of a flying cracker in the air, so
i absolve myself of all that has gone,
not knowing, not even writing, because
i don’t know how to do that anymore.

.
© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with “Kerry Says ~ What is Metamodernism?” at With Real Toads
Image source (Untitled [glossy black painting] by Robert Rauschenberg)

grave news

Old Age, Sickness And Death by Brendan Kelly

death lifts its shroud
but there is nothing to be found inside —

who would i mourn?— i have no
temporal recollection — childhood-
paper-cuttings are fading, news-
print almost illegible — i do not
know how to react after someone
dies —

i bring a veil of pallor on my face,
my candy-lips quiver, a heat passes
through me, as if to denote the contrast
of my temperature — blood rushing
as a reminder, but life exists within me.

so i close my eyes, &heart — let moments
pass before it all starts to seem ordinary —

unoriginal, repetitive, coming daily
unlike some newspapers.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 24
(Inter)National Poetry Month

a paean to pain

Pleasure from pain by Chipriade Andreea-Luciana

have you seen the festering wound
with maggots and flea eggs, defining
the scope of pain and hurt as just
a preoccupation? did you pour liqueur
and salt on the scraped skin that has
covered the scissors with a ritualistic
charity, to part with your sadness?

unless there is a scar, no one would
know how carefully you have figured
a way to wound without wanton dis-
charge of pus and blood-filled nerves
that define your convoluted desire
for all this pain and hurt. catharsis is
the name of a tiny hair sprig sprouting
from an open contusion, like growth
in decay. they have restored cellular
activity (godly) in the porcine brains of
the dead. so what are you going to do,
if not pulling it all out with a tweezer
for a microscopic study of metabolic
activity that denotes that life reverses
and re(as)sembles itself, and applying
a gauze to move out, and hide and smile
till it looks becoming on your face?

grief is the name of your eyes that
refuse to cry. loss is the truth of your
lips that cannot remember the sparse
touch of all that you did not say, and
all that was injured by your mistakes.

.
© Anmol Arora

Inspired by the Day 18 prompt at NaPoWriMo

Day 18
(Inter)National Poetry Month

each spring

Dark Spring Painting by Sokratis Romilios

each spring, i try to count the gossamer-
seconds of a sun-stricken day, that
is not too long or too short anymore.

each spring, i return to the same old
snapshot, which is only defined by
its heat, against my lengthy heart-
palpitation or recovery of eyesight.

each spring, i try to return where i was,
somewhere down the rainbow mile of
a memory that is now too far behind.

each spring comes with its armored-
chest & wheezing cough, and i look
for a dial on my streamlined life, that
could turn back the flow of time,
encapsulating all these springs in
a needle-hand, pointing right at
the point of my origin or perchance
the drop-dead familiarity of its end.

.
© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with my ‘Open a Book‘ challenge at With Real Toads for the 10th day of the poetry month. I opened at random a page from the Six American Poets anthology (edited by Joel Conarroe) and my sentence of inspiration was the first line from Wallace Stevens’ Anglais Mort A Florence: “A little less returned for him each spring”.

Day 10
(Inter)National Poetry Month

in the wake of a life’s end

a kind of gloom sets in the body,
that you can feel lying underneath
your breath,

your words careful, so that they do not
harm the light, your silence loud
enough to make your presence known,

not to counter the void left behind
but to embellish it with your steps
as you move here and there, and
speak solemnly in the shimmer of
another pain that may always stay
within, like a story’s sudden end —

death always leaves one astounded,
even if it is writ in the sky, and on
our fingers, as we touch and hold
each other, we know it is there in
our very blood, and yet it shocks &
deprives us of our effort to under-
stand its proximity when it slithers
inside the room like a voice caught
from miles away to prick our ear,
and say what was not awaited but
known, visible just as the stars are,

until they disappear in a blank fog
and the eyes don’t want to see or
be seen any more.

© Anmol Arora

Something I wrote yesterday after we got to know of my uncle’s passing.

Image source (MOURNING CHANT OF A WHALE, 2014, by Hari Beierl)
Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads