of ants, words, and passages

my room is infested with ants. their dark, mellow bodies struggle against surfaces, solid or not, to find a passage to somewhere. some of them climb on me, walk up to my calves, to my thighs, before i realise they are there with stinging pain and shed them away. some die in the process, the rest wriggle free of this temporary shortcoming and find their way again.

they are like my words, that are often incompetent and even inchoate because i see life as a long series of misguided and misunderstood syllables. they are like wor(l)ds that speak from the downfall and seek approval to be present.

last year that i spent in a far off city, i would often jump a wall, go out in search of a cup of chai and smoke, with words bursting like tiny crackers in my mind that got transferred to all those who sought (something) on the streets. and sometimes, i would want to be that tall woman in a magenta saree to have that purposeful gait, that man who seemed like a fleeting answer to all my shattered believes, or that dead butterfly.

(i encountered some ten of them this time last year, followed by dead dogs and dead birds till the end of the year, which i took as a marker of my own death but it hasn’t worked out too well)

i have a lot to say but words seem futile and rudimentary for something wordless, even soundless. like the moon seemingly in the wrong direction on that beach evening (i cannot begin to forget it) or those crabs carrying my weight in the dark as i ventured alone with only moonlight as my guide to a bridge i knew was there, but not reaching anywhere. when i had opened the maps application on my phone, it showed that i was in the middle of the sea, the unstable ground left far away. but i was not drowning. so, i retraced my steps, lonely as wind, frazzled like an ant.

now i am in my home, spent more than three months here already, which is at least twice the total time i spent here (before this) in the last seven years. words are simple here. they come and go, climb up and down, rise high and low, sometimes without consequence, sometimes requiring me to kill them because of the pain that they cause — a moment’s pain but measured in the depths of a lifetime.

and i carry that alone through the day to the next, through the month to the next. waiting. believing that the words would set it right, that i will learn to walk out and get somewhere again.

.
© Anmol Arora

This blog completed nine years a couple of weeks back. Marking the anniversary pretty late but here’s something.

Image source (The Ants by Salvador Dali)

an evening reverie (iii)

bricks, mortar, dull-white paint shedding
down the wall — the iron rods sticking out
like the full flush of loneliness — pennies
stuck to my palate — empty eyes stinging

with an evening demand for staying, clay
pots scattered, broken melon lips linking
skies with mouthed words, those unsaid
are never too dull – fuchsia pink – boiling

tricks, sweating armpits, a pulsing heat —
smoking, sweltering, steaming —

.

Image source

That kind of an evening — linking it up with Poetry Pantry at PU.

opinion

.
downward and low,
an opinion hanging

by the whiskers of their mouth, they all have
to say and demonstrate this or/and that,
keeping in store lopsided voices to
commemorate their oh so mighty wisdom,

i am giggling to myself, humble in
my own obtrusive opinion, filling
circles with cascading blue ink, drawing
eurythmic patterns of scutoids that form
the epithelium of this marriage —

the lofty union of art with garb-age,
a tirade of the song against poetry,

and i am still giggling, misguided in my
undernourished appetite for newness,
a well-rounded change for the worse, if not
on a revitalized road to salvation.

my locomotive-like scattered brain goo
gone off the tracks of an atemporal
listing, and i am giggling and giggling,
and they are oh-opinionating,
all for a single prose,

i am no screenwriter drawing storyboards,
i am a single founded, mutually admired myth
posturing for a life figure —

the so-called youth gone wayward, loosening
the coils of their and my very own time,
in a self-congratulatory realm of
opinions.

.

Image source: Screwfizzer Painting by Simon Birch
For MLM Menagerie’s Wordle # 206. Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.

P.s. I have an updated About Me page.

Contact me: Instagram, Facebook, Gmail

words and other kinds of addictions

jarred from a pint of smoke
swirling like a gothic eyeliner
in my lungs, i feel the white rush
of an unsung addiction all over me
(being breathless in lieu of living),

i have seen beatific dreams of
an obtuse octopus, jeering jellyfishes
through my inner-channel
of reprieve – the loss of only a certain
kind of mediocrity,

i do not fit into the lines of my sleeping bag,
too big to carry my shoes on the head,
or crown me with metal links, or to tattle
through fists – the truth of only a certain
kind of morbidity,

i am a wastrel marooned in the aftermath
of my demise by goodness, unfit to perform,
cease control to rememorize, or to chase
my ghosts – the habit of a certain
kind of melancholy.

.

Image source (Up In Smoke Painting by Meredith B)

For Wordle # 202 at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie

It’s been a while – I haven’t felt the need to make a post in all this time. I have still been writing and discovering new avenues of my own expression, developing and improving the craft of my verse and its corresponding art. I have incidentally worked on a short collection for myself, indulging in everything from writing and editing to framing the layout and designing the cover (owing to my amateur skills in layout and designing software). It’s been an invigorating experience. My thoughts are catered now towards the idea of getting it published perhaps – I do not know yet whether I should pitch it for traditional publishing or self-publish it instead.
Nevertheless, it’s good to be posting something on this blog again, which had helped me through the harshest of times and made me fall deeper and deeper in love with poetry.

let’s draw blood

blood transfusion in a fucked up poem:

eyes meet, hearts melt into puddles of misery,
a guy shot a man, and a man a guy
at midnight when the sky was pistachio-green
and earth slightly shifted beneath their feet.

love is common place – words are the dregs
of tea left in my battered mug, hugs are given up
in arms that rattle like broken windows, and

they dare say,

*“This is not what we came to see…”

.

.

*”This is not what we came to see” is quoted from Brian Patten’s poem The Projectionist’s Nightmare.
Linking it up with Poetry Pantry and With Real Toads.

Image source