National Poetry Month

ritual of words

18 Comments

layered blood-thick, brown-washed,
on the walls of my restive seclusion —

the elemental, egregious thoughts fight
against the other for more screen-time —

tea dregs & shunted ideas pass through
grey matter, spilling out cranial fluids
of creative flow —

acid, sweat, water — the dust of dread,
the diligence of death —

how the ritual of words is mired in
the affliction of being.

.

© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT where I am hosting this week — I have proposed an optional challenge to write a poem in praise of one’s source of inspiration for the last day of the poetry month.
My #30Days30Poems can be found here.

Day 30
(Inter)National Poetry Month

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appraising identity

14 Comments

why 176 cms? 60 kgs? — fucks to give?

my anatomy//structure is a wilderness, drinking
through the air, one part mulch, the other
a hybrid of gas-dreams.

why rate my brown-bread-skin through
its number of moles and grafts of love?

why try to measure the length&girth of my life through
an arbitrary number of years?

my freedom isn’t your sugar & flour ration
that you can scale and take away per your
desired capacity for consumption?

how do you measure the taste of my ilk,
my sun-settled eyes, the fight of my cauterized
heart?

how do you see and experience my queer body, in-
tact, (w)hole, sweet&sour&salty like the rim
of your empty shot glass?

why do i succumb to the standards set in my core
by the (ir)regularity of your burnished soul?

i shred figures and hopes, letting the well-paced,
untold story of its desire to take its toll, leaving me
to rot, with a rumbling disdain for this mirror of
your eyes, that cannot tell or realize
the plurality of my roles.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 29
(Inter)National Poetry Month

Edit: (Previous title, the value of existence) Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT (June 4, 2019), where I am hosting this week and I have shared a poem by Kamala Das for inspiration and acknowledgment.

 

early morning

2 Comments

i have got a morning
that doesn’t come too often —

the wakefulness of eyes looks becoming
on my face, the arcs of hyacinth on my care-
worn cheeks, the fissures of words at the corner
of my lips, tricks of a thick smile, teeth like
scissors that cut through the nights of des-
pair, all look becoming on my ninety-
days of seclusion, i do not dream a dream,

but i have got a morning by my side

today.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 28
(Inter)National Poetry Month

untitled

5 Comments

lust, when cajoled & converted,
from the thing it was, becomes
a lascivious ghost, whispering
into your cherry-blossom-ear.

how easy it can be
to drown
in each and every
syllable of that voice,

how difficult it can be
to come out
of a well, where you’ve
bled & emptied yourself.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 27
(Inter)National Poetry Month

 

how we hug

9 Comments

 

he hugs me with a gap of two and a half meters,
as if to keep us both from hurting each other —
the slight embrace becomes a star-filled cleft
where we have shared eggshell dreams & thick-
hard seeds of pain, that have seen many trees
shed their leaves in the last(first) circuitous seal
of the earth in an all-evasive-expanding space.

she hugs me in a sudden jerk of the arms that
connect in prompt patterns, overcompensating
for the years we did not care to know the other —
this proximate touch is a meteor hurtling towards
the ground but disintegrating on the way, we have
held those sweaty hands as an adhesive for our
obvious choice to find peace in this orb-like space.

i have hugged them with a mark of disobedience
towards the yields of my isolation, with a rigorous
demand to perform the proverbial need for human-
connection, as if an entanglement of network-wires,
i have figured out that the way to my consolation
&satisfaction is to suggest&seek all i desire, to know
sums of my matter, the auguries of my life-space.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 26
(Inter)National Poetry Month