A mirror for a mirror

A mirror for a mirror

I feel like carrying the burden today, of peace talk
And deflowered trysts, promises stripped of their skin
But their clothes on,
The sting tasted like the ancient dew, a life-spring of fragrant
Crackling century old pages,
Their print quite poker-faced. Like the eyes I see in the mirror while I speak,
To you dear friend,
I speak of and for you oh comrade, bleeding like wars unfought inside you, hanging, in limbo, in wait.
Godot lay at the corner of my view, waiting for the mirror in front of me. The deepest juice of lilting sun of an autumn afternoon spent in the arms of another. Mirror. A mirror for a mirror. A hole for a hole.

It was winter I believe. And as far as I can remember.
When I met your eyes. Broken like mine, dry-cleaned like wine-stained linen. Bearing nothing but the ash from the cigarette we shared in bed. The morning after pill; silence. So how was it.
Terrible, nauseating and splendourous like a two day old Spartan warsoil, dry blood and all. The smell of your skin.

As I conveniently dreamt myself into the warm cocoon of your orange lamp. Overhead, I overheard your squinting eye and the parched corner of your lip from a wintered day long sleep, breaking into a wry smile.
Cracked, your lip uttered not a word that your eyes couldn’t.
The lovely silence of you and your shadow falling onto this page you read.
Confession.
Overhead, I overhear your dreams as well when you leave your lips slightly ajar and I crawl into your eyes,
Or so I’d like to believe.
I slither inside the untread bones of your contention, the words I decode before you awaken to find me deep, deep, deep inside of you.
How long do you think I’ll last as a page in your hand?
No. Wait. Don’t say a thing.
Do you feel it yet?
We are turning, slowly, into a new species of silence.
Endangered from birth

Angry Tree

There was no fall for the leaves that day,
sunning their way, the prophets of end and a half,
the angry tree bellowed and burned right to the ground.
His was the sun, his were the waters below,
yet he wore no tears, might they moisten
his arson dream
Mostly muttering and sometimes whispering with intent
the wrinkled priest followed suit;
burning his altar to the ground and then his dream of god,
his jesus slowly falling from the worm-eaten crucifix.
Looking down from way above the bluest skies
and the darkest cloud, there he was,
my god with sunken, reddened eyes, sloshed
on one prayer too many.
My eyes were mirror to the all the apples on fresh
dew,
which were once in his eyes like I was in my father's. Perhaps.
Wide awake with his flaming lips, he spoke to my eyes,
'smother some mothers, steal all the clocks and watches you can,
sell all your dreams until they reek of the same, till they smell
like the decade old bible your hands clasp'
And all the while there was a wooden stairway,
many falling on their way to heaven to
descending upon this land as a milkshake
of a cupid, a jesus and silence.
White clouds came pouring down,
grated like cheese upon earthy bread, flowers all
deranged in fragrance.
The wind came down, caressing the old man
with iron claws,
He was finally going to make the grave. The one
he drew on asymmetrical toilet paper as a child, with
crayons and blood,
he had his way; persuading the molehills to adorn
cloaks of snow-tipped mountains, their beaks all
piercing the cotton sky, his pen with him sat meek.
And there was day!
The wooden jesus shriveled into a smile and forgave
all in a day's work while the shredded clouds
fell upon these pages praying for endless neon night.
Bringing the moon to the sun, burning to the ground
cotton-fields of the boldest hue and cry,
the angry tree churned embryos in his dreams
into a fine thin thread of silk;
dubbed silence.
In repose, looking as the angry tree narrated his
familiar story of being a worm-eaten wooden jesus in a past-life,
the haggard, hungry silence spoke;
of a time when he was never born, never needed,
just like eye do.

Confession box

There, there, on the sun’s brow you will find
a drop of fire, waiting to turn into what
was fathomed as tears, but daddy ate with
pomp and prodding at daughter’s full inner thighs,
she wouldn’t complain, she wouldn’t paint her tears.
She was meaning alone and so was her name,
bundled like soiled laundry, she hurled herself quite
like an astronaut, NASA emblems glistening quite like
her eyes, quite like the sun.
Now, that she stood half a light-year away from the
sun, she threw her suit away and stood naked.
Yes, she cried for a microsecond before burning like
another aurora gone a whiter shade of pale,
The NASA emblem wouldn’t melt till it fornicated with
An Earth-bound asteroid,
Asteroids don’t hurt no one except this groping father.
He burned like a pyre, he dreamt of last night.
Premonitions were his only gift except for a reputation, a holy man indeed.
She became the tears the sun learned to cry,

‘Where the hell is my bourbon Martha?’
This was another father choking on every psalm he read
at church.
He too had quite a liking for the nuns in heat.
‘See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly’
Beatles were crawling all over his moustache, he was the
Walrus they said.
But the really story began when he groped at that bald nun
and gave birth to a little girl destined to reach not the heavens,
but the sun.

Of pungent dreams and time

Dream, but responsibly

I don’t think I had much to say,
standing like a still-born tree, 100 years old,
a leaf to wear as a half-glowing Tiara
in the morning dew and sunbeam,
I don’t think I remember my earth-lusting
roots,
Standing on the sidewalk, I was blowing kisses at the sun,
hadn't met him in ages you see,
but I saw the number in my dream...
the number of cars that stumbled by (uneven-pebble-afterlives)
thinking I was insane,
The sun came by at the doorstep of my dream
a little later and we laughed just like the cars. At the cars. Stumbling by.
but cried each time either went to the wash-room
after the draught emptied itself like
rusty gun-barrel flavoured memory down
our pretence-lacquered throats without a thought, but only a bag full of dreams,
these cars, like time won’t stop, no matter how you look
or you don’t (for your shadow sitting behind, smoking the same cigarette you are),
nothing is a word they said,
in my childhood and droplets of dreams
of who I will be,
But, it don’t take too long change words into
homeless homes called minutes (and sometimes seconds),
Except that the paper-weight is wearing away,
scraping against broken shards of my tomorrows
and memories stained with the ink, smudged in
endlessly petrified rain,
I first stood on the sidewalk, and then lay down on
the throbbing heart of the asphalt,

now that the sun was begginnng to die once again out of his slumber,

from his bed of razor-sharp
stars.
Then even the railroad waited enough as my hair and my ankles shuddered in utter bliss

as the morning frost lay like drenched Persion carpets upon the tracks.

Yet, I awoke (or did I?), unfortunately alive again.
ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE like the still-born tree!

But the joy of awaiting an end.
An end of what we have been caressed with whips,

into naming life.
I don’t think I am awake as I write this.
So long live the dead. So long dear friend.
And I like summer rain and dead daffodils,
lay inside a box of still-born willow,
with my eyes almost closed, open only for the
dream to breathe. They called it a funeral!

I called it birth. And if I recall correctly, they were the ones dead

by the time I shouted out from the coffin " I am still alive! I am still alive?"

But what if my handful of dreams runs out someday?

I know I'd die without them. Life needs antidote you see.
Will they smuggle it, into this box I live in.
With the flowers laid above me (I can already smell the dream and the rain seeping in)

Even now I don’t have much to say
because I am obscenely in wait,
for something, someone or better still-
Nothing at all.
Oh hell! I remember now,
It’s only my dreams I need.
It’s always just a dream.
It’s only a dream.
So, my name’s time, what’s yours?

Backdoor

How much longer can I escape me?

Escape words for they happen.
For they irk you and your pen wont bleed?
Floor is an open sky
For us creepy crawlers,
So much awe for root and none for seed?

You dream far too often to live inside me

We have dreamt too often of the
sandy, balmy that evening
Unchained by time or space or thought,
licked by the sun's last
lusting yet inert sperm-shaped rays.
The sun kissed my toes as I awoke,
Awoken by her insistence that I should try dying,
for a while atleast.
'You can start living again if you want to, like the glorious
gaudy sunshine in the middle of lilting night'
(She said this as I saw the sun drown into
an imaginary dawn)
I understood. She needed time alone with the
frail sandgrains preaching of long weary journeys.
I think I promised her that I'll make it painfully quick.
'You wont have the heart to love, hate or believe'
the words spurting out of my mouth
like a tired spurt of paint upon a dusty canvas.
The thick blood-red paint dragged the dust
into an embrace. Like lovers making love for
weeks and weeks upon sand-dunes after sand-dunes.
'You dont have to eat, drink or dream if you
inhale the heady blend of love and death' I said.
I think after a long while of pasting the blue velvet
of the Goan night sky onto the curtains of my parched eyelids.
Those eyelids, which I wore to school, to college, to life.
I wore them everywhere, except my dreams.
The sky was now sweating in a imperfection
that only clouds hold in pregnancy.
'Will you stop your murmur. Will you atleast open your eyes?'
She had stung the moment with nectar, the venom
Fallen prey to the loving refuse of meaning.
While her hair involuntarily brushed my pupil,
I waited till my eyes went the same blood-red
On the canvas. It was precisely that moment when I realized that
It wasn’t any paint from a palette that I spurted
Onto the dusty canvas (I had always wondered how could the
Paint look so much like blood).
It was the second last hour before my second last death.
I too had fallen far too easily to the loving refuse
Of meaning. Time did not matter anymore. I was dying again!
‘Bliss atlast!’ I thought. Yet time, in its heavy, unmovable
Stance rested upon my wrist. It stood between the puckered,
Pierced veins and the irresistibly rusted blade. Yet
I found my way and died my second last death.
Even then, I remembered the journey of her eyes.
A decade in which the incurable innocence of her eyes
Turned into the same listless, soothing indifference
Of eyes, drenched in insomnia and the pregnant sky.

I slowly lifted my head off the pillow and watched
The maternal love of the clouds letting her children fall.
‘They were born to fall’ the cloud whispered to me
As I let one of her sons fall right into my eyes,
Turning them red.
I went right back to my pillow trying to
Paste the blue velvet of the Goan sky
Onto the inner curtains of my eyelids.
I tried wearing my eyelids for the dream
But she refused. She liked to be called ‘eyelids’
For she was night-blind.
…her insistence that I should try dying,
for a while atleast.
'You can start living again if you want to, like the glorious
gaudy sunshine in the middle of lilting night'.


'You wont have the heart to love, hate or believe'
the words spurting out of my mouth.
If only I could pretend my eyelids
Were the canvas. Just like she believed
She was an eyelid or two.

‘You dream far too often to live inside me’

Talk

They dont teach you to float, or sink even
they dont even have enough air t0 breathe in,
They undo everything they are told to do,
They crumble into invisible, see-through
mountains of decomposed teardrops when told to
believe,
They are always there to see you fall,
sometimes even when you sleep,
uncomfortably nightblind,
They hear everything and speak in deafening
silence,
They have slowly learnt to glare
after losing their eyelids last fall,
They rustle like leaves
and befriend shadows,
They live your lives for you,
when you try hard enough to die,
They are many in number
and none in weight,
They often forget to eat,
while smoking your cigarette when you
talk to pretty strangers starved of truth
or tense,
They all look alike when you conform,
they slowly divide before you find faith
They are too old now to caress your life
into cold damp meaningful fruition,
They are breathing closer now,
to your ear because you are alien to your
malnutritioned pillow,
They are nothing and everything
as and when you choose to talk,
They craft your dreams only when they die,
one night at a time, as you
outweigh your respective wombs,
They can stop you from looking at others
and dismember yourself instead,
They can become you
you can never fit their shoes instead
They can sqeeze in opulent lighyears of space
between
any two minutes in your life,
They stop people sometimes,
from describing them in words
or death

I hardly know them

For

They look straight back at me
from the mirror

Lights out

I know how to stand, like an inevitable corpse,

hanging my sight upon kegs of indifferent births,

I like to get born every now and then, more so the death

is as warm as a vein in euphoric pierce,

wrenching a puddle-full of tears onto this gardebn of night,

i take a walk under the neon sheen of my plastic eye,

The sun has remained that harmless pest,

a shameless visitor to my hidden room,

these blinds melt far too easily under the warm-gun-push

of his beam,

Far too naked in my pride to lurk like thickening water,

uncertain in my trickle, i behave like ink,

With a pastel prayer wrapped in high-grade cellophane guilt,

I talk to god,

Like this technicolour glee upon your eye, i sleep like a

fruitless bark,

You have had your fair share of fire,

dressed in library flavoured silence,

your eyes begin to look like black black soot

and time turns into an aimless habit,

For you are all love with

just a little taint,

God breathes beside

a fornicating saint,

But they tell me you know how to smile!

like a full moon starved of light...

a day in the life of dear friend death

Underneath the ink, a thousand trees cry

overhead the fall, wets his blue cloudy eye

right beside the feet, have never walked alone

a roll for a roll, a stone for a stone

And right when the man laid his bed not to sleep, or dream but lie,

they called him a coffin, and coffins dont really get to die

a stranded TV anchor with a slliced tongue

today, i need to crave,

a crumbling cave, i have no more mountains to eat, no more pages to dry

frequently so, a white flash of light

upon screens of celluloid polygamy, mothers and fathers naked

beware the night,

she shines like a hollow star, between clouds and curtains of space,

dreaming her dreams, growing her hair, speaking like a death in wait

i have received the rainman's parch, lips torn teeth biting the air

today, i feel the bottle break without a sound, just a trickle

of heavenly red, this is why neon eyes can never bend

'how many more?' asks the asphalt to the moon,

'i have some time to kill, a lil innocence to buy'

'just bury me alive if i fail to die'

'just undream my dreams and let me cry'

do you?

do you wait?

like a street-lamp for the night to end,

for its too late for the early bird to prey

do you breathe

like a wine, through cork and fleshy stain,

satin you become with eyes in constant rain

do you care?

like an unborn mother with a baby to drown,

too many horses with paid saddles to mount

do you live like this word

like this word chasing your eye,

the world's a stage, we could be better lies

do you have?

what others dont like the air you breathe,

just like the tree trying hard to bleed

do you sell?

your soul for for bread and time,

living on roots and wheels and a lil rhyme

do you know?

enough to own your shadow, before you die,

renember your broken mirror was never mine

do you die?

to live or live to die,

upon your stage, i'm a better lie