Rendering

If I could render space and time,

I would duplicate you in two:

One for when I’m feeling happy,

The other for when I’m blue.

But really,

If I could render space and time:

And build us from scratch, anew

I would be still be broken,

And you would still be you.

Untitled

It’s difficult to write about love,

When you’ve forgotten what it means to feel it:                  

I still possess all the superficiality of love,

I see your body and desire to touch it,

But I cannot feel your heart beating,

And I cannot feel my soul; I only float

In the distance between them.

We can make love, and I will shout like it

But when we’re done turn me over to my side,

Like a living, breathing corpse, exhaling

My conscience and inhaling guilty regret.

When we’re done put your arms around me,

My body will accommodate by perfunctory design,

I’ll even sigh contentment and sink into you, life-like

But make no mistake, my eyes are wide open.

I will stare into nothing wrapped in dissonance,

That you mistake for harmony, you poor soul

Pouring your love down my skin, it permeates nothing,

Like grey rain on a windshield, you only make me colder.

I was fluent in love, but I lost my tongue,

So I begged my flesh to react and remind me

What are the qualities of love, its corporeal affiliations?

But my blood is silent and my heart is an amnesiac.

I feel for you, I do, in the nature of affection,

But it is not love were it so I would not pity you

And drown myself in disaffection; this is only

The nervous rambling of a privileged apology.

I desire you to desire me, of that my ego is sure,

But I can only let you wander in the dark for so long,

Until you’re lost and forget why you came here at all,

And I remain hollow: a cave in a hill made from guilt.

I have words too many for emotions too few,

But for love I have none; they are gone:

Their spirits severed from their skeleton semantic,

They are translucent letters of a phantom vocabulary.

Forgive me love, I have tried so hard to wake you,

I have tried so hard to want you, need you, feel you.

You remain ignorant or indifferent and yet you rage,

Sleeping silver on the ashes of my frigid ruin.

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.