These Circles, that they be Linked or Exchanged
Harness the Janitor in me maintain
Though Depressed be my Blinding Mind deranged
Help to Embalm this Un-Relenting Pain
These Sages through Time by their Words endow
And cause Wisdom one's Joy through Skin avoid
To force my Soul its Inborn Blessings enrouse -
Shake your Sugars from this fail-tripped Colloid
That's Milk to you. If your Matters be Sweet
Then carry your Mornings free from my Sense
As such would I, rake the Roots off your feet
And pledge my Sharp Evenings to recompense.
Funny how Loss, its Cross mint Cool Relief
Upon the Monk's Throne absolved your Belief.

‬

Damnably grey, I sink into
A lightless sea.  My breath falls
In gasps of air, my eyes
Shut as gas rises.  Dear Pity

May you have my lungs fill with
Cold, watery iron until the
Sharks carry my pieces like
Prayers to fishing boats.

Stuck in the colloid
Of my wasteful life I create
My own shadow - malachite jaw
Swallow me before I am

Forced to burn the belly of
A whale.  Moon thief lends
My paper body a dapple of stolen
Light to dry my soggy skin.

If only the black water could
Clean between my numb ears -
Instead it sits tepid and full of
Mosquitos leaking with eggs and blood.

All I wish is for a wind to
Uncloud me, for air to inflate
Me.  I breathe, I breathe -
More fool I.

she says
i should neither touch her
light-plastered fringes
nor the sibilance
of eyes.

it would be unwise
while i am amidst
the storm of laughing
if you say
that my heart
does not shatter
in our despondence.

trilling in light
is the colloid of breath
foaming in the silence
shrapnels of this mellifluous
separation - we, flawed,
dawdling is this punctuation
of you and i
are no more

because you do not
gape with the voice
of sweetness like a cigarette
receiving the shadow
of my once dark being,
yet, someone within me
whose hands still carve
the figure reminds me
of
you.

These poems are always born colourful.
Pointy and symmetrical, they are life, crafted
Specially for schools that have no bell-rings
Or even recesses. How dull it must be.

They come in different morals: steaming ships
And inexperienced rafts, all trying to taste the
Same water at once. The ships do have an advantage
With big chimneys but it’s the rafts that are more careful.

And how kaleidoscopically they flaunt themselves!
Angels are always with their kin (how saintly), and tigers proudly
Race with their predation pride. The normal ones
Adapt normally, till the gold one comes oval-gaping for air.

It is almost operatic, the bullion fatly singing
A joyful soprano that spirals its corpulent body,
Indelibly marking its forte and making
Everyone else envious. The rest soon join in the orchestra.

Colloid-free, their airy world so thin and wet, the
Little air bubbles drop, drop, drop as clock-like as possible
To balloon and reign the surface. The water’s
Fully bloomed now. They are ready to breathe.

Doctor’s miracles, they are born with unblinking eyes.
Their skin flat and overlapped like thin slices of birdfeathers
And wide bloodless cuts run at each cheek. They defy
Physics with their aerodynamic bodies and a thousand striped hands.

Every nook and cranny of their house is carpentered accurately:
Mirror-rimmed and exact. Windows glued for viewing, flawless.
The tenants move about freely, occasionally pausing to wave
At the guests through the translucent eye pieces.

Untiringly they follow the irises that gawk at their gill-full skins.
The cameras icily smile flashes and these water-gods snap away
Like graceful thunders. Their scissor-tails dance from side to side, panicky,
With only three precious seconds added to their memory.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002

darling i have meat stuck in my teeth
             i have not a wreathe on my dome
             i have a long measure of water
             rammed in my throat, hemmed in like
             your body’s canopy in the stream of me
             i chase the silence like a tractable beast
             in this hollow den of nothing
                                                         darling
i have not hands but chains
      i have volcanoes and not moons
         i see past the banners,   an army of   light
       unfastening itself  from  the poles of foreverness
     I have in my eyes   again the frail azure
            and the gyration of clouds mangling themselves
         to    figures,   assumptions,    colloid
          endless   snow,     frayed beings moseying towards
                     rows     of   lengths and   the autumnal abode  of  hills
   turning     green,    brimming with    the ***   of pastures,

      feasting in this fill of such   heaviness,   a name    of what I cannot   recall
         darling   the yellowbell       darling   the lignified    amaranth
               darling      here   at   such   meeting    I    am  starved
         with    little    movements     of   flesh

Like the full mug of coffee that special coffee mug spilled it's drops....
The same way I  dropped  my happiness in your each saps....
Coffee  sweet and sweeter......
Remember the first eyes' colloid glitter....
Sugar like sugar.....the soluble we.....
Nothing is like that there is now it's only me........
Accumulation of that thick layer over the surface......
The equal amount of unremarkable guilt I face........
But what is the fault of that unfortunate worthy spoon....
No no no not in that worth to be envious of that moon......
The plate at the base of that mug that coffee mug. .......
My dreams are the same way lied below the false pride of thy smug.....

The heat around, lullabies the jubilant,
Sings the nocturnal to sleep.
Vapourizes the sweat of mine into you, yours into me.

Sweet was the taste that reminds me of your skin,
Sour was your core;
You clothed so spicy,
But bitter were your lips,
As you whispered you glimpsed Hope.

Would Hope bring forth this heat,
Suffocating, sweaty,
Devoid of air any-
yet addicts, depresses.

Is it Despair then?
The tumbling motion,
Ever retrogressive,
Past crumbling skyscrapers into atoms,
To a colloid of Anti-Brightness.

Is Despair not cold?
A chilling, shaking hand-
Skin withered, cut, wounded, ******;
Gangrene, pus, hair-draped;
Which claws up the ******* to the throat,
Feels the very pipe of wind, presses;
Pressure, pain, excruciating-
As chokes the distressed damsel while drinking the poison.

Well, supposedly, the heat might be the rage,
Which vaporized all,
And that left behind might be the despair, cold,
As I glimpse Death.

-Ruksana Saryak