I Cannot

I cannot know, I cannot answer:

I cannot question nor seek solace

In solution; I cannot I cannot I can

Not be bothered anymore by you. 

Mock trials and tribulations rise

From the ground to my ears, drown

Me in the din of the words that dribble 

Down your chins as you chew on hate. 

It is the blind man's complaint of light;

Her garment cost her his dignity so

She put on cheaper silk and paraded to everyone

That her blind husband would not clothe her. 

In my darkest hours I only remember you

As beacons of tragedy waiting to shine

And in happiest hours I avoid thoughts of you

Lest I remember the innate cruelty of man and his kind. 

Yet you sit across from me flinging hooks

Into my scarred skin digging for sympathy:

Of which I have none to left to give or take

Not in the name of love or abstinent mercy. 

Spare me I beg of you, while you stab each other

And cry out in pain at each gutting infliction

Not in your own voice but in the voice of the other,

As if damage were not yours but only the pain. 

Strike my name from your doom, I still try

To piece together a life away from the shadows

That have scattered at the feet of my childhood

Fallen from the follies of your words and bullets. 

I cannot know, I cannot answer:

I cannot question nor seek solace

In solution; I cannot I cannot I can

Not be bothered anymore by you. 

My Construct of Love

What is love? Questions to wake to every morning,
Just as I lift, thinner than air out of the cobwebs of sleep.
With clearer eyes, and clearer light, the answer is still unclear:
And the question is now an ornament, hanging onto my train of thought.

Love is what I have constructed of it; by my own design,
It is fickle and fleeting, deep and dark, harrowing and heavy,
Yet it is free, as light as dust it settles on me sparkling in the daylight.
That is when you appear and it is no longer a vision but fine tuned reality.

Our construct of love as I have known it is amusing to you,
I see the twinkle in your blue-grey eyes when I sing it and you smile,
I turn my back to your face on purpose, part of design, meant to engage
In a manner suited to engagement, knowing full well the roles we are to play.

As if I were some crystal ornate, clear to you, transparent,
You spin me around on my axis, and I will spin and spin to eternity,
So you might catch glimpses of the reflections of me I will throw at you,
Little flashes of light, meant to be random, diverse and begging the same question:

What is love? I will scream at you, you will not know it,
Soon you shall tire of the pettiness of this charade, constructed or not,
It is beyond the limits of the games you've agreed to play, no longer amusing;
The sun sets and takes with it all lustre: a hollow stone spinning sounds to the dark.

You cannot invest neither affectation nor affection here,
While content with the complacency this architecture had offered you,
The same ideas were meant to collapse into themselves, satiety its undoing,
This pre-determined dissolution is slow and paralysing to my soul, yet unanaesthetic.

Eventually you will exit, and leave behind more questions.
I will construct more answers, reprimand logic when it does not comply.
Eventually these thoughts will dye themselves in other colours, blending you in;
Your pigments have added substance to the question of what is love, but created another:

What is not?

The Fall of Body(the Fall of Art)

They say a pen to prose, and a heart to poetry,

But then why beget consciousness from consciousness, I ask

Uncertain. I am sure though that were the coroner to plunge his arm

Deep into the viscous fluid of my thoughts, he would grope about at nothing,

As one does in dark, deep waters, where the light does not reach,

And molecule on molecule begets an ocean, alone in its own right.

It is in this semblance of thought that I exist,

Like many others. I reach into my gullet and pull out of me my guts,

Spew blood on a canvas, and call it ‘art’. Then I hang it out my window,

And call to passers-by to ignore it, consider it part of the façade that makes,

This building worth calling my home. Yet I will peer down through

The slit in the curtains to see if any man will stop to critique my misgivings.

The pluripotency of this self-analysis is all,

That I have to offer meagrely to this world. As the icons of mad girls,

Stare down at me and whisper in forlorn amnesty, that I too shall fall

And the streets will watch me fall, applaud as I hit the ground smashed into pieces,

Then proceed to sift through my remains holding up fragments to light,

In an attempt to colour their psychoses in a shade more appealing to wear.

What of my life then, do I create or cease?

Do I create silently but cease in a loud flourish only to hold their stares briefly?

Or do I do just the opposite and weave webs of words around my own enigmas,

And throw the papers onto the avenue, so a few pedestrians can disregard with certainty,

These pamphlets attempting to be ‘art’? What then if I do not drop to the ground,

My ‘art’ or my body, or that if falling is a given, neither makes a noticeable sound?

If these are the necrotic mutations of left-over thought, I will let them be.

They serve their purpose, beget consciousness from consciousness.

And in such goal I find no discrepancy,

Between the fall of my body or my ‘art’.

I see painters and singers, dancers and musicians. I see art, I see poetry, I see the words of prose in every footstep of some pensive nomad in a khadi kurta, rubber chappals and a jute jhola as he traverses the distance between here and nowhere. I go online and am attacked by the hundred, no, thousands (because what is insecurity if not acquired in abundance?) of peers, seniors and younger hopefuls with their own brands of creation. It makes me envious. Amidst the seemingly turbulent, glamorous  lives of these individuals I feel inadequate and lost. As if I were simply audience to this mass chaos and confusion, the eye of a cyclone if you will, to the howling winds on whose screen occasionally a flash of art appears for mere seconds and then recedes to be replaced by some swirling debris of human failure. Powerlessly I am only witness to the lives of these people, brave enough to be sucked into this torrid whirlpool of self-expression on the off chance that chaos might turn to harmony; that the occasional obedience of passion would spit out some disproportional output. I think I understand this paradigm, I think creation is as simplistic as creating. To simply will something to existence is merely enough to merit the label of art. I admire these individuals and I fear for them, for though I am young, I too have tasted the poison of passion. I think I understand madness in the way that I understand it's volatility. I do not judge madness because it exists in vacuum. It is the loudest of orchestras and the crescendo of aggressive percussions in your head when your lips tremble but silently. I am wary of my own sentience constantly afraid of the shadows that I cannot seem to outrun to the realisation that they are stitched to my feet. Yet I yearn, and I pine for this freedom certain only of uncertainty. I teeter on the edge of this abyss wringing my hands and wiping my wet brow, hovering one foot over the edge. The blackness if threatening but at it's heart I see a glow, soft like the last ember of the morning fireplace. This restlessness has encapsulated my being, homoeostasis is incomplete without it. It is in my morning coffee, in the words I read, in the unusual flutter of the bird across my window, it is my sleep molesting my dreams and caressing my nightmares. Were that I could jump and be doomed or divine. Were that I could turn away to a mechanical existence. Were that I could choose. Were, that I could.

Dirt

I have grown tired, of this Augustan beauty,

One that is infused in all touch, word and speak.

Must we embellish on our lives, gold stars and silver,

Decorate ourselves with pity and the chamki of deceit?

I am not only the high-rise of cement and iron, tall & complete;

Nor just the clear cut of glass and neon street signs, blue & white.

I am the dirt caked on the crumbling walls of cramped houses, more

Than this unpaved road can accommodate, yet less than what is necessary.

I am the dirt. And I am born of it, and I shall die of it,

In the meanwhile I will crawl back and forth from cement to earth,

I shall celebrate and curse it in the same breath. A dichotomy of twin culture,

A symphony of one. In this dirt I will resume my existence, dust it into the arid air.

Easily misunderstood is misunderstanding the vernacular thoughts in my head,

Given way to by mine own tongue, created I know not how, except that they carry,

A peculiar feeling of familiarity, as if a childhood memory suddenly restored in vivid colour.

These are the colours that I am made of, unapologetic and vigorous, oscillating constantly.

So I clutch this dirt, and I writhe in it. I grab fistfuls of it and smear it on my soul,

To restore its colour, but retain its polish. I have no grief to spare over my mutated identity,

Only pleasure in the revelation of its duality, its richness and splendour in ambiguous clarity.

This dirt I smell, and feel and touch speaks more to me than all the lustre of these two worlds.

Narcissism.

There is a narcissism that I have learnt to internalize of late, to demonize to the extent that I've suppressed it. It used to be the fuel for my existence and for it I felt a deep guilt embellished by remorse. The dramatisation of my day-to-existence had become redundant, or so I sought to believe. I seek to believe too much. I compete with myself to attain the most perfect image of the idea I have most recently come to be enchanted by. It is wearing a different dress everyday and changing the facets of my personality to match it. It is the process of deliberate moulding to fit an intellect that I am so taken by.  I have been told that I am far too conscious of myself, that it is a simpler to shake a leaf by breathing upon it than to somehow slip into the cracks of my mind an insecurity. Perhaps I exhibit symptoms of only the human condition, particularly generic and classifiable. Again I speak from under the vistas of a persona I aim to please, one where madness is a glamour every pedestrian wishes to achieve. Yet the one constant is a bitter struggle to constantly change myself, to deter my existence from just being and navigate it to some semblance of greatness. A fleeting semblance at best, it is a short-term achievement that soothes my soul. Of late I have become concerned that my wrote is less romantic and technical, yet foundationally derivative. It is another persona that has sprung in me, an inclination to imitate, to imbibe without realizing that the inspiration I have thus extracted borders on plagiarism. I have discussed this fear, though not openly, for fear of being branded a fake (the personas I wear often co-exist and intermingle). I was handed with the realisation that perhaps all art is plagiarised and that all creation is preceded by some genetic mother and father. Does that in itself dismiss the notion of some seminal pioneer, the first of its breed? To me, therein lies the pursuit for the unique; therein lies the heart of greatness. My narcissism is situated upon an ego, much larger than is visible yet peeking out constantly from under the covers of my skin. It does not satisfy me to simply create, I must create so as to in-still wonder and amazement. Perhaps not the purest motive for creation I admit, and I concede that it is not the sole purpose, but it is an honest purpose if honesty is to be trusted and for that I am grateful. 

I have learned that passion alone can awaken you, but passion alone will not keep you awake. I have learned that there is a discipline to creation, lest your fire burn out and you are lulled back to sleep. Where creation is concerned, a corporal discipline is neither sufficient nor necessary but that your soul must become a vessel to creation. It must be malleable enough to receive it yet be conditioned with a steely resolve to contain it, to channel it. It almost seems as if I have stumbled onto the Buddhist truth of things and now all I must do now is to proceed to create. I wish it were that mechanical, so that I might be spared the mental agony of scrutiny and analysis and of the deficiencies thereby laid bare. Yet it is part of the process, or so urges my new-found sense of maturity. All my creation is a function of my existence and to extricate myself of it is the goal it seems. In this I find a dichotomy that has become the undercurrent of my listlessness, how do I proceed to create objectively when the source my source of creation is subjective? How do I create until I am actively incited, until my spirit is so vibrant that it can do nought but speak? My body is human, and prone to distractions and to the waxing and the waning of inspiration. I find no guarantee in methods nor lifestyles that ensure that my self-expression is both a function of me and yet a standard of greatness. With no formula available, my life has become a series of permutations and combinations and my actions perpetrators of trials and errors. 

This lends justification to my iridescent narcissism perhaps, to the extent that I will justify all forms I take because I am convinced that rationality lends substance to my beliefs. It is in this thunderstorm of calm atmosphere that I watch myself sleeping. I would be a great sight to behold to myself, were I not wrought with infractions that vitiate my existence.

"Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody."

"Every time I sit in a daydream, I'm not actually imagining a future;
I'm reconstructing the past to leads me to a different present."


"Isn't that just futile though dear? Like attempting to wake a dead person."

"Perhaps, but its the only way I know how to dream."