Livelong

Livelong

these are days enveloped in grey
packed in cartons of weary sighs
pickled in the brine of yesterday's rainy night

the dark damp brings with it the
faraway sounds of unknown breathings:
a child's kite that has snapped
its lifeline and floats off softly

these are days blinkered in tears
when laughter is cocooned and splintered
into disparate pieces of lying nerves

the dawn's mellow greetings have
soured and all the sparrows have gone
leaving their nests behind like
prisoners set free after many
thunderclapped monsoons

these are days saddled on aged horses
whose hooves furrow the wet earth and
drag gunnysacks of dying faces for miles

the wind no longer nuzzles the curtains
squirrels tire of the jackfruit and
sunshine melts into calipered hoods:
a sinewy hangman at crack of dawn

these are days huddled in mute throbbings
smothered in snakeskins of venom
befuddled in the dishwater of soporific vision

Desecration

Desecration

Making love to women
how you desecrate their essence.

This the eye of the mind cannot see.
The eye of memory is blinkered by
formless thighs swimming in sea-lined roads.

And how these folds, pink and velvety,
pale and sometimes liverish,
flap their eons through the irises
of this cruel memory.

Dumb memory,
whose tongue has been singed by
the acridity of sweatcreases.

The mind's eye cannot travel
beyond these moments
and memory, cruel as lipless laughter,
creeps away amputated.

The Sea's Women

The Sea's Women

The drops of the surf cannot reach them.
Waves sway like blades of grass
and fall forward softly,
undulating eels silently unfurling their children.

They creep up the sand,
speckled with silver worlds.
Broken snail-trails tattoo the gritty earth
as the waves merge into
a foam-edged slice of their lives.

The movement forward to their pains
is slow like the breathless swaying
of a saree's hem.
Ovoid prints perambulate
against the skin like bruises.
The gloss of their background shimmers.

The waves of the sun are blackened here.
Only the whisper of the castaway sea
rolls up to these boxed lives.

And within airless rooms
other worlds exist like islands of mists
swirling out of the past.
Memory thrashes within,
thrashes within like a flapping fish.

The eyes glaze over with scales of sardines.
The salt of the ocean smarts
the bitten lip, the bitten nipple.

Flesh refuses to split open,
wounds do not bleed their pasts,
no blood taints the moment.

The lips are dry like dead fish.
The lips are small
and the skin is taut;
but fingers can press the lips
and they yield like the sands
at the edge of the foam.

The skin does not break:
the lips' skin remains whole
like the silver surface of mackerels.

The tails of stingrays have whipped this back,
the scalpel of the past has parted the flesh here,
searching for fodder:
red without anger,
dull with the deadening memories of
waves breaking against the sky,
far away from this land of bodies.

The waves lash the slimy rocks.
Thrown back like startled goddesses,
they freeze in the nets of the air
as seagulls circle for flesh.
Fishes have grown since the last time
bodies united,
scales have dulled the ocean's green.

As weary as the sluggish sigh of
the ocean at night,
a body descends onto the absent peace
of the other,
filling the space like bubbles.
From this supine position
knowledge of the past retreats
like scampering crabs
into the grainy holes of the flesh.

This world that is poised above
like the hood of the surf
is no longer alien.

When bodies enter one another
the skin rolls back in pain
like a bandage exposing a gash:
another angered world.

The eye is red,
inflamed like the pulp of proximal memories.
It weeps like a wound.

Suddenly, the bodies of the women
burst into several worlds,
islands of splintered frenzy.
Like small furry animals
they seek to burrow into pretences
scurrying from their fright, their anger.

Why must we write?

Why must we write?

We must write since
words are like raindrops
that traverse the vastness of air,
encapsulating all that went before
and hurtling on to confront
all that is.

We must write since
the words in this poem
can often struggle to burst out of
the skin of this page.

We must allow these words to
bubble slowly, percolate at leisure,
undress and change their letters,
shift allegiance.

We must also write to
allow the whiteness
of the page to dissolve
and reappear in distant skies
as blue.

Mannequin

Mannequin

Through windowpanes of love,
my heart on display:
a mannequin in mauve,
passers-by beware!

Prod me
feel my muscles
not yet flabby

Ogle me
let my dresses
arouse envy

My fingernails have jagged edges,
the corners honed even finer
to prick my skin with steady progress
and delude myself I'm still together.

Steal me
take my grudges
away firmly

Grow me
watch my puzzles
crumble early

A Child Named Palestine

A Child Named Palestine

He cannot remember his mother but
but he will never forget his midwife.

She was the bomb that hurtled through
the crowded orange sky
while he was still curled up, unprepared.
Her hands were cold and rough
They ripped open his mother's belly
and hauled him out bloodied.
Her screams preceded his,
endlessly announcing the agony they shared.

No hands needed slap his buttocks
to make him cry.
The flames around forced open
his mouth.
The acrid smell of gunpowder was
his first intoxicant.

For him the world would forever
feel and smell the same:
his mother's screams the sound of
the earth turning on its axis,
the bombfires the many sunrises of his life.

Another Day

Another Day

weaves to a close slowly
like a grain of rice sinking
through honey.

Coffins on my eyelids
urge them down.
I have no strength left
to flick them off or moan for
the drone of the gaunt priest

I have no need to account to him
the discarded seconds, the minutes
relinquished, the hours dismissed
but I must try
to prise away these teak worlds
before he arrives unasked,
laden with centuries of resonant syllables.

The day was born,
like most of my previous days,
without golden-hued promises,
unannounced by hungry crows
or the tinkle of bullocks
shaking their beads;
the day has not vowed, though,
to grow wrinkled and pale,
like the skin of lemons left
out in the sun.

Perhaps I had woken too late
to see the first fingers of dawn
erase the night's foibles
and hence am doomed
to the specious rantings of priests
or the fresh emptiness of coffins.

The day has d shot past me
although it had the small
feet of torroises and did not
taunt m eor draw attention
to my long legs.

Another One

Another One

Wouldn't mind
another one
to take
me over the hill

Wouldn't mind
another one
to push me
over the edge

with that one,
I'm sure,
descends peace

Wouldn't mind
another one
to set me
on a roll

Wouldn't mind
another one
to kill my
fatigue

So please oh please
one more
just one more

Wouldn't mind
another one
to black me out.

An Unfinished Reply

An Unfinished Reply




1


All these years
your letters had defined my world.
Its sentences were my landmarks,
its alphabets my moorings.
Like the best of sailors
I was afraid I'd be lost
without them
and even as I travelled away
from their sphere
towards you the mapmaker
I hung on to one of them
afraid of the unfamiliar darkness at sea.

But there was no darkness,
there was no chasm.
There were no sparks either
only a quiet glow that we celebrated
in ways that we had not foreseen.

2

How could I have known that
your beauty would be like
cloves on my tongue,
sharp and paralyzing.
Every time you laughed
my tongue would struggle to
free itself from the silken net of
your words,
while mine crumbled like
dry palmleaves.

Blame me, then, for not having answers.
Understand that despite the ache,
blind to the dryness,
I tried to linger on, yearning
to be the foam as
the wave recedes.

And if I am quiet now
it is only because I am not sure
which sands those were
which wave the last one.

An Unfinished Reply

An Unfinished Reply


1


All these years
your letters had defined my world.
Its sentences were my landmarks,
its alphabets my moorings.
Like the best of sailors
I was afraid I'd be lost
without them
and even as I travelled away
from their sphere
towards you the mapmaker
I hung on to one of them
afraid of the unfamiliar darkness at sea.

But there was no darkness,
there was no chasm.
There eree no sparks either
only a quiet glow that we celebrated
in ways that we had not foreseen.

2

How could I have known that
your beauty would be like
cloves on my tongue,
sharp and paralyzing.
Every time you laughed
my tongue would struggle to
free itself from the silken net of
your words,
while mine crumbled like
dry palmleaves.

Blame me, then, for not having answers.
Understand that despite the ache,
blind to the dryness,
I tried to linger on, yearning
to be the foam as
the wave recedes.

And if I am quiet now
it is only because I am not sure
which sands those were
which wave the last one.

Another One

Another One

Wouldn't mind
another one
to take
me over the hill

Wouldn't mind
another one
to push me
over the edge

with that one,
I'm sure,
descends peace

Wouldn't mind
another one
to set me
on a roll

Wouldn't mind
another one
to kill my
fatigue

So please oh please
one more
just one more

Wouldn't mind
another one
to black me out.
A

Night

Night

Damp night,
hyphened by the mad wailings of
dogs set free.

Around me,
the night's colours
bleed through the window grills,
past the red curtains
long since blanched
not soaking them, not even staining them
until they skim over my naked chest
like the clammy limbs of furtive spiders

There, two three maybe five
white hairs curl and bristle gently
in the dark
warped hyphens of silence
standing up to the billowing night

Damp dark,
not my guest now,
no, certainly not invited
on this most baleful of nights.

Poetry Defined

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land and wanting to fly in the air.

--- Carl Sandburg

Mud Houses

Mud Houses

Into the thatched huts above the canal
only my imagination is allowed to enter.

There, above the slimy hyacinths
and the crush of healthy green stalks,
up the crumbling bank of brownblack mud,
my mind bumps against pots of earth,
denting prides.

There they live, scream and curse,
milk slothful buffaloes and even
slaughter pigs sometimes,
while from between dried palmleaves
curl smoke, upwards, out into the air
like the soft sighs of grandparents.

In those lived moments,
whose pale and mottled reflections
rock unsteadily on the water's edge,
on its torpidity,
only baked mud and parched earth mater,
and jagged thatching, as safe as
the wrinkled palms of aged mothers.