& 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.
the sun bears the weight
(of a culmination of clouds)
trying to break through,
trying to hang on
to a clear sky
that has abandoned
any thought of light —
i see the silk-green texture of people
through my spring-leaf glasses
and everything seems distant
in the tunnel vision of my truths,
i wish to see, i wish i would not see
at times, when the daylight lifts its robe
to the hues of darkness within,
to the stories that I have kept in check
for long,
i am the fading away of a date, of a month,
of a year, spent in madness & confusion,
writing paeans to a sky devoid of any blue,
for the colours have kept me apparent
to the one who is no longer mine,
to the one, i wish to undo.
what is with this newness that doesn’t change anything?
the air still pricks like a year-old thought, the water still burns and scars the remnants of a shed-skin, the blue stays a blue and warmth only comes in intervals of counted breaths, and all is fine, as fine as it can be, on a fragile winter-sun, still uncanny in its resemblance with oldness and frailty, and yet a pithy belief for rest and peace.
i pick moments from this stagnancy, and venture for an apathetic re- conciliation with my old selves, drinking from the same pool of aging and forgetting, and in mind’s eyes, i can see that it is but the same, the angles and frames have dearly changed for a different, if not a better perspective, of the dipping sky, going beneath my window, into my words, and quenching the need for change, which is not in the coming today.
the demarcation of identities may become
concrete beyond any measure of trust,
suggesting a clear-cut boundary (line out of control)
set with laced edges for an open-field view of
all the action, where stars rupture, mind swells
and foot-long visiting lists and eager spectators
wait for an epiphany in their limited visage,
or form, or expression —
i could light my body, turn paper into a wildfire,
stone into an insolent air, and turn my named
references back to their semicircular beginning,
without the complexity of politics of my body
or desire, obstructing the moon to rise in its tiding,
leading to a vasectomy of all craft.
there are seeds that grow without the spurt,
some pollen have a similar quality of disdain
for birth,
and i know that i cannot open
the undisclosed aftermaths of attention
depleted into this sin, or the afterword of joy,
to become pen and ink and words.
i fuck up like a fucked up alarm clock
(going cuckoo has cuckooed and gone)
springing to its climax at inopportune
times, when even time cannot be shut-
off, visions silenced, and this extravagant
search for a home in the buried remains
of self-hood finally discarded off in
neural pathways and cardiac tunnels.
an individualized treachery is preferred
over a displayed form of acceptance, with
its soft-toned and hard-knelling voice
that thinks that just the right tone would
change the facets left unexplored, deep
in the recesses, way away from light, because
that is all they are, in the eye of the storm
that won’t bring me down or go away on its own.
do not worry about me, do not worry
about my fiefdom of lust and loss,
or my faces split open one by one,
little by little, without hurt and pain,
as the death’s wagon parks at my retina,
harnessed by my sleepless eyes,
and i wake, and i wake, and i breathe,
galloping through, breaking away
from all the signs.
I wonder if the intersection of self-appropriation and poetry suggests a kind of depravity. Nonetheless, it is for me a kind of resistance to even consider the same — it is supposed by the experience of letting it be the subject as well as the object of observation. Perhaps “my act of understanding” is flawed but it is as honest as it could be in the current struggle. Is it failing the internalized resistance or is it resisting the resistance?!
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