soliloquy of a season’s change

morning winds weigh heavier and
the body feels like a helium balloon,
canvassing the landscape through
a bare string — surrounded in a haze
of lost headspaces, memories that
do not bring home the sense of peace,
all comfort cashed without a receipt.

when we have lived through the seasons,
it shouldn’t matter how long they last —
the fan rotates on its axis, turned very low
in a gentle rush of air to breathe all loss,
to compensate for mosquito bites felt/left
in the after-state of a day’s place of rest,

as the summer picks its tinders and twigs,
writes a farewell letter (a suicide note
that was discovered before its fulfillment),
and picks on its scabs and scars that
have survived the test of every crime
witnessed by the tender body of life —
high, helium, heavier, halfway done.

i pull back from the edge of the flight —
the flock of weathered passions and aged
ruminations, all in confinement —

i choose winters — undying deaths,
mossy sepulchers, fog-white dreams
and a ponderous pause — silent,
seething, singing.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Times Change by Dmitri Matkovsky)
For Midweek Motif at PU

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breakdown

the entry to the path of sorrow
begins with a moon-shaped tear,
a fissure made the exact measures
of guilt and trepidation —

the leaves are brown, shades
of evil intermixed with erased
shadows of hubris, the roots
extend to the edge of mindful
games, that we play and lose
against ourselves,

lifelike patchwork is the center-
fold to this closet-like space,
where any form of easement
into the wing and skin of things,
takes a toll on what keeps a breath
functional, carrying on the treble,

silver-busy emulations of the past
take the form of ghosts that come
out only in day-light, and work their
ethereal way through the doors
and dreams, the greed-eyed arrows
fixing, breaking disciplined griefs,

i have elsewhere to go, nowhere
to belong, enough of the calendars
and clocks have been spent, rendered
useless in the loss of feelings,

i gather exits to stop all my blind deeds
from recurring, and shut the banners in,
becoming the equipment of toil, to find
some need of listlessness, the coal-fire-
red glow spreading in criss-cross patterns,

as the ongoing landslide
is felt (the ground i tread upon in
beleaguerment slipping away)
before its coming.

.
© Anmol Arora

Image source (The Beauty Is In The Breakdown Painting by Kevin Cross)
For MLM Menagerie’s Bonus Wordle
Also Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

***

I have been working on a new Insta handle for about 2 months now, for literary and creative posts: @anmol.ha.
For contact, you can reach out to me through my multiple profiles, enlisted here.

a sunset song

through my bespectacled eyes,
i cannot pinpoint when the orange
turns to blush, or when the savage
evening bares its blunt fangs for
a final feeding, and still, i am
engrossed in the spectacle of
this agitation, or the sense of
its happenstance, its belief —

a half-dead day looks down on
its own destiny, of consumption
without pleasure. my pink-gold
lips flutter in this breeze that is
no breeze and i hear the drop
of a celestial bell, coming
into being,

purple sights cartwheel in this
shadow-scene.

where do you go from here?
where do you find a colorless sunset
for your blindness?

left behind —

a nightless mood
revels in this pause, that goes on
and on,

as survival hangs by the toe-nail
of a petrified sky, pure in the pale-
horror, turning into

ashes, tears, and
undesired rebirths.

.
© Anmol Arora 2018

For The Midweek Motif at PU
Image source (Magritte’s The Banquet)

***
For contact, you can reach out to me through my multiple profiles, enlisted here.

dear, you…

Arthur Weindorf

back there, lights must have dimmed
to sorrow  –
have you, too?
~
dear, you…

i am okay  – all is as blue as it can be
quenching the brown of my eyes,

i love the red-white lighthouse,
bereft of tourists, amid the green,
i come here often
to find the pain of my solace,
of one kind  – the other kind
is left with you  –

sweet salt fumes linger on my lips,
the sea looks deep like loss, grains
of sand end up everywhere, like
the thought of you,

i am holding reins over
the beach or i will drown,
and building castles, and collecting
conch shells, and stark-white pebbles,

i will gather some for you, too.

 

.

For With Real Toads’ At the Seaside Challenge. The last sea I encountered was ruined by the urban mess of a metropolitan. That is not what I wrote about.
I instead remember the seas of Port Blair (2013) as I go about it – I went up that lighthouse on an island nearby only once and still, it left an impression on me. I was on my own, but for the blue expanse ahead and the green on all other sides.  The poem is fictional but that memory stirs these emotions in me – the palate of my thoughts turn to blue, grey and blood. Otherwise, I have no recollection of having written a postcard or a letter of this kind. What I had to write stayed within, brown and forlorn like my skin, not turned into the coherency of lines. If it were, it would have been something like this. And as fiction goes, it is never completely so. *winks*

*Also linking it up with Poetry Pantry at PU.

Contact me: Instagram, Facebook, Gmail

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.