But deceptive blood-robed pomegranates
With their piteous decay, and sullen seeds
Packed as kids’ taut skins in sand-tinted crates;
With bloom, with ruin, and sweet as reeds
Them reeds naught know of plain parched mourn
As wails it and yields to their illiterate lips;
As stumbles then snakelike out— thin and worn.
Begotten unwanted, poorly fathomed, forgotten wisps
Of old, odourless leisured hours,
That scrubbed, so gruntled, and scratched the fruit.
Then white silks soft within parched blue days;
And no heirs birthed, sublimed the flowers.
Touch it; the crumple and crêpe is not yet soot
If it could bleed, it could bloom alive, ablaze.

When the space between
threat and love disappears, I will find
my blood poem in your red eyes.

You nick yourself sometimes
in the light of the blue moon and the journey
of platelets starts for the unknown.

You said I am killing
myself. Around you the fire zooms.
I am standing on the deck, you scream.

Sepals to skeletal fingers, to yellowed limbs
sunken
She watched the moon, all hazy
and small.
So rugged its whites
as sheets with times stained
Watched it on she did.
(So dusty the skin) Oh, I had loved you
Tens a monsoon’s rosy day;
had loved you dry, as
the suns danced and danced—

So shallow the gaze and the dark’s quiet tusks
So deep she
into her noisy withins.

The forth storey roof with
its precarious railings
and the pitiful, grey street, a wound below.
Its drains and gutters all sawed open
and naked—
In the sudden, spinning fright
I almost held her;

a palm or a palm
or an arm
I almost held—

I knew you so ample.
Whispers of touch, and ballads
such and such
rolled so effortlessly now
on the tongues of memory
As birth her I
though tens a monsoon’s rosy prayer
Bead on bead falls

in this wretched, unending rosary

(With drought-coated of lips) I had loved you a petal
so chaste and unbloomed
and a sepal you had—

Not a blossom I,
still she held, as the winds
As vultures reeled around our beds
So frail our bodies
so terrified and alive,
As dirt bowed, and leaves bowed and all
to the vultures mad

Two lambs us, yet gods we stood

'til whites of her wilted to gold to rust
to dust, and slipped
through the cracked of my hold,
Through a thousand guarding winds
and tens a
vacant sepal
(As crowns and cages
of blossoms wilted unused, they stood)
So shallow a gaze

and the dark’s quiet tusks—
Wade I,
swim I, in the caverns of me where an echo
breathes, and
drown I, undying.
Such windless a serenity
As damp of monsoon’s mornings
rosy,
I had loved you a vulture mad,
but dare I—