Poetry is the holes I drill into the walls
to hang a memory of
what I couldn’t sustain;
it is the invisible crutch
that blesses me
with invincible handicaps.
Poetry is a snowflake I chase –
I can neither ascribe
the tragedies of my life to destiny
nor accept
any meaningful story that it weaves –
I chase the translucence
that poetry offers,
to ‘be’.
I’ve danced on these staves all my life -
black bars that contain
my risings and falls, my being and not being.
There’s no dearth of sounds
that drown
my consciousness.
Yet I go on
spinning webs with my spit,
verbing melodies
that may trap someone
into a momentary timelessness.
I do not hope to achieve any better than this.
Who were the men who planted her voice
across their vast, brown, barren stories?
Scarlet, emerald and ink, her whispers -
smeared around the edges of nothing.
They told her that she’d been only a drum
they beat to feel the blood in their veins.
Who were the men who lit walls with her eyes,
and saw their houses come into being?
They bejewelled themselves wearing her hands -
who were the men who’d needed all the sheen?
She dwelled a persistent hum in their heads -
they belittled her, a God in their hymns.
There exists a bazaar,
claiming pieces of you
I believed were mine.
I shiver at the edge of your laughter –
this laughter that is a universe
you never invited me to.
How the lights about you
could never warm me;
how the depth of my yearnings
never reached you.
My poems lingered waves
never seeming to crawl
onto all your head-banging.
My meanings
only pretty from a distance –
in love, I shrunk a shadow.
The light from the bazaar
kept sweeping me away from you.
And yet I have been waiting.
Decimals appear on her dark skin.
Sound gropes her ears, colours thin.
Blacker she turns the blackest flower –
Between her folds suns cower.
The sky tonight reduced to a goddess!
Decimals are jewels that hook her senses –
piercings galore, the bride’s unsteady –
Hope’s an oar; the buyers are ready.
As bugles onto her body crawl –
sky becomes a frozen waterfall.
It bounces perfunctorily –
abandoned in a dark corner,
forgotten by the very hand
that once owned it.
My breath shrinks,
loses its music.
I am only a little limit now –
wanting lesser and lesser
of the great
that your hand had meant –
needing it
more than ever.
Frames have grown fangs
And pictures curl to warp faces.
Truth leaks, an edge to these hands –
Hours speak to the stasis.
Every day I look at your death,
Redo the memories, an oasis.
