One postcard lovesong

Your name slides off my tongue

smoothly, sleekly

like velvet curtains

draping the dark stage

we stepped down from,

but I don’t recall the

sound of your name, I say.

It doesn’t stir up

any mornings of thickened

spring you speak of.

A mystery colours you

orange,

like a sphinx,

and you claim with tired smiles

that I have once

held onto you with

eagle claws,

breathing down

the scent of pressed roses

on new purple bruises,

you say, that I have often

attempted to fill up the

clear spaces of your eyes

with bubbled streams

of fantasies.

With my mind

like a slate wiped clean,

let us speculate

upon the past

once more,

and I imagine

your lips wet with fresh

summer rain, I imagine

clasped fingers

draining the little

remaining warmth of

our numb bodies,

our shadows lit with

fires from rumbling thunders

across blind lanes,

I imagine your whispers

shivering against my sleeve

with all its spilled tea stains,

careless kisses

lining the fringe of the

lack within.

Let us then slip into

our fifteen year old selves

stealing into balmy rooms

with my prison songs

and your guitar

making music and love

in the same rushed fervent breath,

you say.

You allow me to touch

this face I cannot place

until you ask about my long absence

and my make-believe

adolescent love

bleeds.

I blindfold your ready eyes

and escape through the window-

the city with its

dust trailing jaws

comes alive to take me in.

Kingdoms

The king has no memory
that we were robbed
of metaphors.

Dense amnesia envelops
the slave-child.
The present

would soon be lived through
(but he’d forget).
And the kingdom

has guided channels
serving anaesthetic
to a select few

who feel.

Today, unguarded,
at sundown fled
prisoners

of war
into forests
bearing familiar names

on raw, peevish barks.
Perhaps the Druids
still pray for us.

inklines

The Winter Jazz

[...inside the giant clock

sits his mother,

cigarette in hand

and unicorns in the eye;

she died sitting-

the mother of all winter stories...]

I did the artwork for this poem by Inam Hussain Mullick. Click on the picture if you wish to read the poem.

Float!

Here's introducing a sparkling new blog :D

This one shall have personal, i.e. mostly random meandering meaningless posts. I felt the need for a separate blog a long time back... especially because I avoid (ah well, usually at least) putting up anything that is not erm... art(?) on this blog. I have my doubts regarding the regularity of the afore mentioned random meandering meaningless posts, but hey, I promise to give it a shot. And be peppy and charming and light and frothy and notcynical. Wellllll... that might be promising a bit-too-much.

So, scoop up your icecream and some fizz... go Float!

Skin

The bell-boy stepped into my rented room

of elbow-brushed windows and I asked him,

Why does this hotel

smell of sunlight

so soon?

He pointed to a painting.

He said he knew.

So the rumours

of our sweat still remain,

clinging to the silvered frame

hung on this wall,

and the canvas feels like

a second skin,

Skin, I said, that was caught

on the corner of your bed,

old lover.

Skin, I repeated, that was

no longer fresh,

and I surely left it behind.

Yes,

I have seen your nakedness before,

and today once more

I feel it in these disturbed colours,

but who stands hidden

in the corner of the painting

possibly reciting songs from memory

to the red sparse tree, and making

the world believe that he

loves and exists

like the poor light

filtering in and drawing his shadow.

(He cannot be you,

because you believed in night

and miracles, only,

and your tinted glasses changed

the way you looked

at the world and me.)

And while I lean through

the frame, trying to

paralyse the night sky,

letting down my hair

like a shadow

of some fairytale,

for you,

my grey lover,

asking you to climb out over the edge

your smell stalks away into

the chalk-laden streets

far, far away from this painting

while your old whisper rings,

Girl, you said, make me violet,

like the sky in your pocket

and I will be your poem in death.

Then the bell-boy murmured

that he knew all about poetry

and he granted me

deliverance, suddenly.

I’ll take you, he said, to Bluebeard’s Room

if only you could pledge

to set free the demon of scents.

But I could only promise him

my name.

He must have agreed for soon

I let his steps roam,

as freely as his voice

till I entered the room

of blueprints and bones.

Silently,

the sea seeped in through the floor,

you crept in too, dusting chalk dust

from your clothes.

And I knew you wanted a reward

for your presence.

As the music ceased in your boundary

of blue walls, I lie down again

for I have transgressed,

and my slashed wrist must feed

the dried blood on your sheets.

Lover, I said, you must know

my skin is scarred now

and I cannot leave it behind.

Phew!

I waged a two hour long war against Blogger and its templates. Needless to say I lost.

I hate technology.

Letters

- I’ll write.

- Will you bring back prayers for me?

- I’ll write everyday.

- Yes, but will you bring back some bells too?

- Keep an eye on the mail. You tend to forget.

- You won’t bring back prayers it seems. Will you bring back letters then?

- I will send letters!

- Oh. Do send some prayers too. And silver bells.

- I will bring your bells, I promise I will.

- Small bells, but pure silver. They must tinkle sweetly, for they must compensate for everything I miss.

- Anything else?

- Can I send letters too?

***

On nights when the chorus puts an end to silence,
and their song unfolds on her wooden desk
she writes a thousand letters.

…I have heard that letters lose their way,
trickling into the hands of strangers…

And in those letters she said-
‘Bring back for keepsake
the muted prayers of the monastery
and the mist-like swirling colours
of the snow drenched hills.
Colours that would fill my palette…
for in splattered strokes your portrait stands-
unfinished.’

On certain nights of counting blessings
and remembering prayers,
nights of playing out desires-
the desire of clear voices and ink,
she writes a thousand letters.

...letters that do lose their way
losing themselves in the yawning strangeness
of strange men in distant cities…

***