II

Blue base and pink hues, black lining, framing the face saw once in dreams, a face with a name that began with the letter M. The other painting – a hazy black, red lips, no eyes – is a man’s face. Flying across shadowed, spiralling stairs, I encountered exits blocked by chairs – all these impressionist paintings hanging along the corridor, where a painter was explaining to his students the woman he met in his dream… they all called to me as a dream factory, dream logic – where everything was bound and unburdened, and we were told to identify faces in these coffin paintings. All day we tried matching, mouth stuttering half-formed names, lost faces, amputated body parts, strangers’ fragmented memory. Then the old lady I was working with let out a wail. She bolted, I followed, and there we saw creatures known as man and woman – to the woman on the right, she greeted with the M-lettered name, and to the man on the left she pointed at the eyeless painting, said, stranger, this is you– and they wept together.

I

I was told that faces persist, could wear away pebble, wind, and sand. Rivers, long and winding, and the rain, always so strange, mingle with rippling ashes of our ancestors, their fingers dipping through charcoal powder, tracing animals over stone’s face, carving bodies out of empty space, faded faces on walls. We are not a dream, they were saying. Not flashes of an aged old dream. Sand-like memory, look for us.

I dreamed of an age old dream
when Old Man Time had not
bleached into everyday oblivion,
and the Sun still faced his two Foes

I dreamed—saw
you there
waiting for me with
your pastel camera —
the look you gave me and that
hard paper magazine which you always wanted to make art with—

I knew you, somehow,
we had swum among midnight sunflowers in bloom,
the twin Moons at our back,
the finger I lost to a crimson butterfly
which you told me not to touch

I knew you, and you me
as the Sun knew the Moons
as Starfish knew her Ocea—
it’s always known, I know, alone,
I know, and yet—

I woke up, again alone, knew not
that the Night was decaying,
and so was the aged old dream

Stranger to earth, to her body, to the church. I often wondered how she could remain stoic as her blood licked the grass blades at our feet, the moth falling with her finger, drowning with my grief into the ring of fire. How far can one go, she asked me, to live without participating in the circus, to resist clowns, to not register pain, family, injustice, rain. Look, I said, they endure, the sound, the visuals, the memory – episodic, yes, but they endure – people would not forgive bystander. The moth fell again, shuddering, struggling. And her finger, gushing with golden blood, was still pointing at the priestess, who smiled, and said, you decide, it’s your body. To sequester, draw a line on the snow, better with blood, but tears would suffice too – and so the stranger was repeatedly created and destroyed.

insomniac

tangible darkness
let me take a picture of you

paint you on the wall
scribble your name on waters

in your naked form
bend you, so no one else

knows you but me, alone

insomniac darkness — tell me
my muse, let me taste you,

bewildering, like arrows in disarray
and white birds

surreal as falling seraphs and forked tongues

moist darkness
what is sulking inside you must submerge

with manta rays hemmed in circles long ago
curled horns probing, testing bygones,

frozen dawn condensing my azure dreams ashore

language —
transparent,
like dew, iris, cells,
when things were yet to be named, at the beginning
in the cradle of nothingness,
where darkness came first, before light,
before fire and earth,
Oceans, the favourite child, and the sky,
with her celestial, feathery friends, lazing on that hazy chasm;
from the horizon,
emerged forms and words
and poetry

I look at you
and dream of sunflowers
because you told me once
that home was where the sunflowers were
and I’ve been awaiting summer since then.

can you see through the haze of
future parading shadows of commuters in the
                            crevice of time
past the kaleidoscopic glass castle and
                            sepia windows
reflected in your eyes
students baying within bubbles of blue
blaring muted, ancient, utopian cries
let's
       chase
                 clouds
                             from now

I discerned a face in the sand. It peered at me the way a child may peer at ants. I knew that face, had traced over the wrinkles marring the forehead, rubbed a finger on the mole below the eye, thought it was grime, realised it was not, and poked at the nose that was half an inch too long. It was a face of a woman, the eccentric lady who frequented my dreams, always walking with clicking heels, ivory robes dragging sludge, who dug pits with her purple fingernails. Are you look for this, I asked, handing over her face. She stood, corpse-like, and said, this lonely and bright thing, it beckons me, but this is not my face. This is yours.

Sweetness is —
the sugar cube that glitters
when sun ray kisses the crystalline surface
like a thousand sparkling dots;

It is the strawberries I savor
when you sat across me
smiling softly
and gave me the last one from your basket.

It is the bubbly feeling
when I gazed at you,
playing with our children —
sparks in your eyes,
a laugh leaping out of your throat.

It is the warm sensation
flooding my chest, and
filling every corner of my being,
whenever you tucked me into your arms,
and kissed away my tears,
telling me I am
the best thing that has ever happened to you.

Solace is the
worn-out blue shoes and
quiet poignance of last night's dream;
an old conversation putting on loop —
a forgotten cascade tape;
morning light flitting through faded curtains,
hand holding a cup of sour coffee,
freshly brewed from loneliness chanting
stay, stay with me


Despair, old friend
visits after a dinner of pasta
blue shoes hitting pavement
passing the lanes of green and grey,
strolling around the meadow where
Gentian flowers glisten in full bloom
clouds wailing, pelting tears on
chilled cheeks, purple fingers shaking —
go home, go home


Forlorn,
distant beckoning lights,
swaying lanterns overhead saying
come, come to us
white sand on a winter shore where
you wrote my name,
next to a set of baby prints
before the waves came
and lapped them away murmuring
no more, no more


Sojourn,
running barefoot
down empty streets, crescent moon chasing
my back, scattering thoughts on the way
pine trees bending, cobblestone grumbling
at the scarlet sky, dancing with
your ghost one last time, whispering
farewell, farewell

The aquarium is a jar
that crams the bottomless sea,
within a glass bottle.
Like the pool of liquid in my palms
that reflects the starry sky above,
it is a fragment
of what cannot be fractured.

The dragonfly
that perches on your finger,
on the wall, at the doorstep,
like still life human history,
on the page, close to the vines,
balancing atop that blue teacup,
fanning steam

as time slips, whistles, rips
like stitches twisted, which
unravelled, like a wish
you made last summer
when horses snickered, reined by
steel knights sweating and kissing
gloved hands, ladies laughing
over earl grey tea and shipped silk,
the dragonfly danced upon
melancholic waters

what is skulking in the moist darkness
must come forth and answer
how one equates infinite and none,
vain, like history, snow, and gold,
before sung poetry from the old —
to live one’s life for something, you say,
is to live one’s life alone for something

what is repeated,
wars and manipulation,
mutual destruction, human reproduction,
drilling and penetrating,
with rhythm and with force,
Is intrinsically obscene,
the mechanics ancient and ******,
beastly brutal and brutally simple –
the human wheel of time

dawn broke
over churning waters, a cycle of
chalky, foamed flowers grew and died,
quivering is the white fish washed ashore
twitching, pulsating, then stilled

the dragonfly, sensing death,
skitters away

silhouette of sails breezed through the twilight hour,
the working man was long aroused from his sleep,

long strips of inked paper billowed out into the dank alley,
infused with the rotten aroma of yesterday.

the paper-thin veil draped over the construction site,
the working men had their silhouettes enslaved to the sheet,

an arrow of shadow shot through the muted screen of the cinema,
a line of laundry zigzagged the sky overhead, ******* pages of blue,

the rickshaw man was crossing stairs,
toeing winding train tracks, children nimbly dashed past danger

a fisherman was dreaming of secret deluges,
he would oar his way through the overflown streets, catching a dim sum box or two

a seagull fixed its hungry gaze on you, chewing stick
you leaned on the cart you have been pushing, facing habour

numbers & figures are
nothing more than a flicker
of the winter chimney's smoky snicker;
fleeting as the sad beggar's liquor &
grandmother's empty wicker
chair, rocking with the gentle gale
breezing past rootless weeds
to settle on the frozen well —
Farewell, numbers & figures.

You told me
there was a certain beauty in the never-return —
cherries wither into whispers of smoke,
river shivers upon winter's stroke
sparrows mourn and sing and forget,
how we used to be strangers, lovers, then strangers again
deep in the darkness you stared at me, smiling
with a mouth of pearly teeth
crushing the piling blossoms underneath, saying
I better remember this fading fragrance, and
carry it to your grave,
for this is our last parade.

Lost to us were the
bright and sunny days in the 60s,
lazy afternoons & the pristine scent of grass after rain,
all that matters is invisible to our naked eye.

Time is the bottle
we cram memories with &
fleeting is our being ****** into an unprepared tomorrow,
drowning in the long-gone reverie of yesterday

Nostalgia is the sweet lie we murmured, the small
cloud of dust suspended in the air &
the smoke rings spiralled toward
a December night sky.

Forgotten dreams & present madness is a
scratched vinyl record stuck in the fissure of time;
crackling noise muffling our sighs —
Gone, they say, gone.

Crooked
shadows, lonely figures
yellowed pages, splotched ink
broken promises littering nostalgic
lanes down the river of green and grey.
Reduced to these pile of letters some drizzle later
dusty, wet, and so so bitter.

my love letter to dreamers is the

solitary snow flower in an ashen field

missing your sweet innocence & the
dimming embers of your fiery heart

leaking a deathly pallor too cold to touch
bitter rue tasting like moonlight kissing purple cauliflower

ephemerality is the gentle promise of something
beyond this world of banality

for you know, dreamers of young & old,
the silver, the blue, the yellow,

the colorless & intangible is
where you will reside

forever & more
forever & ever & more

“I miss you,” she said.
The words departed her lips,
hovered in the air —
chilled by the emptiness of our hearts.
I watched them
twitched, fluttered, and deflated.
Falling onto the table,
like dead birds.
Broken wings shot by old guns,
empty words strung together —
I read between the lines,
and heard the unspoken —
“The old you.”

the body is a lonely mountain
mosses and fences kiss my skin,
curious deer nudge at my nose,
brown hare huddle up my feet —
my amiable friends at spring

chirping birds & summer cicadas
sing my sorrow
evening haze & morning dew
collect my tears, sliding them
past the valley of the throat, to the pit
of the stomach, forming
a crystal-clear blue lake glittering with diamond dust

run run run
fallen red leaves surging with the rapid,
spiriting to the sea, disappeared
into the white, cold mass

echoes come back from the dead forest
palms open, decaying
the body is a lonely mountain