when you are still clutching at
the last few strands of sleep, and
the air is grim with envy for
the shape of your belief,
i want to entomb your fragility
in a mausoleum, made of
that first smile, the last kiss, the dread
of a heart, breaking into wet dirt,
that we scrap from our weary old souls,
after a half-digested need (breath-like)
for the other.
i want to be a tearful-sight, a shadow-
sign of your unfulfilled sleep. i want
to rest against the ghosts of your lies,
till wakefulness pushes me towards
the exit of your dire dreams.
do not rise yet, do not put me down yet.
i want to want once more, before the end.
a sunny rebuke is all that you need to keep moving
when the skin turns liquid (charcoal&stardust),
at the eagerness of a hopping day’s rest,
your redwood eyes in the dark cannot close
their own need for stimulus,
you see to see the cobwebs mined from your brow,
spiders crawling through the neural networks
of your (hop-hop-) hopping brain.
you need to sleep to stitch&stick the tapestry
of the rabbit life that you’ve lived,
for when you’re awake, you’re still
(hop-hop-) dreaming.
“It is Death which consoles men, alas, and keeps them alive.”
— The Death of the Poor, Charles Baudelaire
when the discordant music of late-night
drops its deep-pitch
of sleep&numbness,
i speak to Death, sitting in her unavailing
darkness, filled with wreaths&dreams,
her crown shattered by the treachery
of man. singular and silent, she sits,
letting time discontinue itself
before settling in.
this night, i cannot see her.
knowing that she is, is enough.
the red star over there, somewhat distant,
beckons me to leave the cold hearth
and seek the supple-sphere
of my beginning —
the cellular destruction, the neat phlegm,
the eyes that are weakening in their resolve
to see the world through its painful sutures,
almost always hurt,
i have a shadow that only shows the face
behind the face, the trust that has been
doomed for so long, in my own adoption
of time and its wreckage, its subliminal
annihilation of every atomic particle
on life’s horizon,
i wonder if it is to be free that i cage
myself, for if not in captivity, how would
i ever seek, ever speak when cowardice
is at my very door step, ringing the bell?
the red is deeper in the night, like a deep gash
on my thigh, and my mouth is of dust & blood,
and my dreams are but weighed and sold for
trinkets of sorrows, just so that another breath
completes its cycle in the dying light.
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.
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)
HA's Place 