a starry-eyed dalliance

Image by Mark Basarab

silhouette — eyes draped
to forget the view of
that touch,

stars wave their flesh,
hang together in
an unreliable
reminiscence,

of what it was, in its night-
time sagacity —

the landmark of my body
rose and fell, began, so to come
to an end,

every breath became star-dust,
haloed in the light of its own
remembrance —

can i be trusted with the s-shaped
curves of that juncture?—

a rendezvous
of halved lusts – biting, igniting,
believing – of a brazen luck,
or a chance companionship
or a calcifying causality
of a lost need for love —

broken beds, filigreed facts,
in the topsy-turvy, much-forgotten
tremors of a memory,

with hidden traces of what remained
and has to be returned.

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Originally written for and featured on Visual Verse. Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.

***
Now that I am back in the thick of things, I am thinking of reviving the old concept of Guest Post here. So, this is an invitation to anyone out there willing to share their words, prose, poetry, rambling, ideas, crafts, arts, publications, et al. to use this space for sharing and promoting their personal/professional work. I have a very humble readership (in quantitative terms, despite the rather larger figure of the total number of followers) but I am sure that the ones who read and visit me will love to hear from you. If interested, you can write to me (with a short pitch for the guest post) at hamusesanewtune@gmail.com or on my Instagram. To get an idea of what has been done before, visit this section called Guest Post (the scope can vary from Oloriel’s poem with the story and inspiration behind her piece to Jen’s short lesson on the World of WordPress and blogging etiquette).

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all that I left with you

drops, a photograph by Totomai Martinez

I left a losing thing in the shadow
of leaves of the lone standing teak,
it was a pond of reminiscence that
snatched it from me, that losing
thing, now submerged, lost from me.

an ant answered the call when I
arrived at the wooden frame prop-
-ed as an entryway to your soul, and
I knocked a repeated knock, but
there was no opening, no close.

will you return all that I left?
can you walk on the ice of my hand,
which pulsates like venom in cold?
I neither expect nor prod, I am
a hermit walking by and away from you.

I remind you all of me that still is
with you, to ask you to return
those drops I left, that smile I
left in the lightness of your arms,
return to me that tempest of my eyes.

return back to me all I left, or not,
I’ll be asleep in the end, and aware
of all that I have left in this valley
nuzzling the horizon, rearing the
river of a memory in its womb.

.

I began to write keeping some other image in mind, but my muse took me somewhere else. After scrutinizing carefully through the wondrous collection of Totomai Martinez, I came across this photograph.

Maybe, the muse responded to the song I was humming a few minutes back. It is one of my favorites; it is in Hindi but English subtitles are added in this video:

And I ended up watching the entire movie. 😉

For dverse Poetics.

Awakened: A Very Short Story

To bury my hands in loose soil, so to conceal them and embrace estrangement, was a choice. It is always a choice, only brought about by a fate that leaves you skeptical about the spirit of human.

I have a furtive understanding with those in my surroundings, which was not there earlier. And now when I meet them, they know that unlike them, I have many worlds colliding with each other. And sometimes I am in their realm and at other times, I am hollow when I am somewhere lost in the worlds of my own making.

I visit them quite often now, if not in my physical self but then, as a reminiscence, clinging to a wall as they sit and talk, unaware that the sun faces another eclipse.

“He is a Ravana with the ten heads,” they articulate. I cackle, my 320 teeth glinting in moonlight.

.

Linked up with VisDare 65. It has been a while since I last participated in a VisDare prompt and it is good to derive inspiration from this amazing photograph.

Image source