rufescent dreams

Betelgeuse by Mary Lynn Smith

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.

.
© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT, where I am hosting this week and I have shared a Kaifi Azmi ghazal for inspiration.

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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

surviving a circus

the clown waits for the tingling
bell of classical conditioning
to produce the act for retaining
every measure of survival —

i had never seen the red-nosed
darling open his carnival mouth of
blood candy & enameled smokes.

he told me of a lion’s solipsism
jumping through the hoops of
an urban jungle, quite similar to
a modern generational shift, from
a Randian objectivism to graffiti.

~

the bell is rung at the last step of
a sleepy night’s solo performance,
to wake me from a circus dream
in which i am but a rope dangling
from the canopy,

for all the poor souls
to climb, and flee from
a cannibal crowd, caterwauling
like Circe in waiting.

.
© Anmol Arora 2018

For dVerse Poetics: Come to the Circus!
Image source (Circus, 2011, by Leslie Bender)

*Edited some more for With Real Toads’ Tuesday Platform

***

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

disbelief

a sense of disbelief —

people pleasing people,
shadows falling a-p-a-r-t
in their own figurative voids

make for an entirely new
picture, atypical of agonies,
realized but not really felt.

whiteness doesn’t scare me,
lights measure my body mass
and frequency of my beats.

the ground shakes, angles
come down, and i learn to
belie that very disbelief and

know, inhaling is vital for this
and every other moment
to pass.

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

Image source (Deep Inhalation Of The Cosmic Breath Painting by Ganesh Bhat)
Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

***

I have been working on a new Insta handle for over a month 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.