26 March 2017
Paper/Person
Last night
I'm replacing you with paper
It'll keep me saner
I will imagine
As I once wished
To touch
Your skin
Like paper
Little inscriptions
on your face
I thought
I'd leave one of my own
But here you are
Replaced by paper
Forevermore
You are on paper
And the paper becomes you
Pulp and process
My heart into bits of mush
And pull sheets from it
And I'll write you
I have replaced you with paper
And beat my heart into it
Thin sheets of you, and you and you
In short words and long
words and ones which
don't make sense
and they're unearthly
but mine.
And you aren't.
You have been replaced by paper.
7 October 2016
23 August 2016
A Hystory Of Ovaries.
11 August 2016
Damn it.
3 June 2016
Poem for a Cliché in Full Costume
When did you stop wanting to kiss me in elevators
When did you stop wanting to unsee the crowd of watchers, at inner circle roundabouts
When did you stop knowing which words make my breath take inroads to my trembling heart
When did you stop thinking butterfly blues shaped the maps to the stars
When did you stop demanding fingertips as fingerfood to your hungry needy love - never full, never enough
When did you stop seeing through words that meant something else, hell meant my lovely heart and go, to stay forever
When did you give up, let me slip to distant places in your mind, where you don't step in fear of looking back
Now, the waits are not so weighty
The suns are stars,
Not hot ticking time keepers to goodbyes
I cross the streets
I climb the stairs
That meld into each other
Dusty step by dusty step
A dog on ever corner 'case
Rumagging through imaginary bones
Buried in his heart
Looks through garbage
I bark a sudden tune to soothe
My worried mind
Am I an animal without a cave,
Without a street
Water is bland
The desert is sand
The forest is one tree after another
Tables and chairs and pencil sketches
On newspapers wet in unseasonal rain
Pouring on my heart like warm tepid realisations
Feet in murky depths of meaningless monsoons
I am like a bird without a song
A temple without a gong
Been away,
Far too long, far too long
I have forgotten the verses to my name
The letters to my poem
Coordinates to my frame of thought
I forgot. I stopped.
To be myself, the same the same
The blind spot
The sweet spot
Spots to be cleaned and kept that way
Nice and sweet and blind
To me
A spot unseen, behind a screen
Careen careen
Forget about it
Now we've meandered back
To our daily routine
To think, to dream
To feel too much
To wonder about
When
Did you stop doing that.
18 February 2015
After Nap.
After nap is a timeless space. Where you sleep 22 and wake up 12. In a few invisible hours. A precious time travelness, peopleless and thingless which is then populated with memories and feelings too large for feeling. As long as you lie in twilit darkenss, unlived moments and ones as if from dreams will fly by, slowly like migratory birds across a painted sky of remembering and non remembering. Regrets will caw, and doubly forgotten instances will scratch little claw marks in the bark of ancient tree branches dotted across the landscape of a terrible, quiet, grey mind.
As if aloneness bears heavy and natural and wanted, yet not. Like something would come and wipe the slate clean, yet under and against the window with the blue raincloud light, slivers of wet words beneath chalkdust will chide into longknown, silent, uncharted territories simmering with promise.
It starts to fade like a bad but wise dream, but now it's in words and it'll come back, looking for a haunting, ten years into the now furiously busy, moving, black and white static of things and images, not finding a crack to escape from. One day it will step across the threshold of an old house when the mind is fertile and the rain falls in sheets of mist and nostalgia, yet in nothing at all.
The garden behind it will be abuzz with tiny winged insects burrowing their bodies out of wet earth, silvery blurs of life, in a hurricane of an excited flurry pattering of rising up into the sky melding into life, out of hard grassy wombs of parched earth, now muddy and rich and cold.
Traffic noise will seep from grids of iron windows, expensive curtains, children will still shout unknown at the fact that the shout will carry to their distant futures, changing characters, as if postincarnation, postnap, post as if moments have passed in a blur of scared time running away from things that didn't happen and the scratchy slivery memory of things that did, but only jump into wrong numbers on hopscotch tables and the feet land too perfectly to be wonderingly laughed at for long.
And when the hands land on land, slowly peeling itself away from afternoon sun, emanating a heat into little palms, it almost feels as if something dirty, some bodily sensate feelings have latched on to soft skin, now chalk and dust and sunshine from hours ago, as if a nap has put decade old train rides across forests with lone little huts in the middle of nowhere, now occupied by nobody's words, staring into railway tracks where a child just crossed, staring into thatched roof, wondering about existence, its and its. Understanding neither.
13 February 2015
Deja Vu
My heart does a blackflip, my mind a turnaround. One shrug, one smile.. That laugh, some sound. Peculiar likeness to a time.
Like a jolt, a current of realisations running through my skin, buzzing through my thighs, my arms, my insides. Some particular high.
Like the moment before a kiss, endless wait. Too soon, too late.
Is there a purpose to madness? Some sickness, some sadness. Ethereal gladness, a heart full of hadness.
Haveness, hapless.
Lose a poem, choose a poem.
9 September 2014
Slink.
Words about nothing.
Then it's a moment in time of perfection to be put down. The multiple meanings of being put down. On paper. Or just put down. Of deliberate forgetfulness and deliberate fecundity. Of words coming in and going out. In an endless stream of tireless tirades of feelings and thoughts and findings and leanings and deliberations.
Sitting pretty. Sitting tight. Sitting down. Sitting up. Sitting straight. Sitting silent. Sitting speaking.
On paper. In small time machines, across epochs of small night time deliberations, across smells of songs and silent slinking.
With the music and the muse and the moon. An extended aberration of still lives and live stills.
Life grows longer and nostalgia grows shorter with a disappearing wick, smaller and smaller in the distance.
Up to finito
Flinging fire, observing softly settling dust on long ended moments of passing doubts.
Slipping up into a normal, stepping down to surfaces of surety and singing lispy lullabies, of mundane privations, pertinent, pleading porous boundaries of need and unneed.
Lighting lamps across a lake, on a window, on a stage. Of the painfully plain and elaborate truthing of the matter at hand, like sand on a windy morning. Admiring varnished little corners of a made up mind.
13 July 2014
Stilty.
24 May 2014
Singe.
Where do I live? That place where sleep hasn't left. It clings to me like a shadow of you sent along phone lines, across years, jumping through quietness, shouting through roads, tumbling through skies, it falls on the small of my back and pulls me closer.
Shadowy, silent, soft. And so binding, so blinding. So biting. Breathless boundless.
Rustles my hair, calls forgotten names, lives in the past of the future and the future of the past. Cries hot love and singes my eyelashes. There weren't much to start with. I'll do with yours for the meanwhile.
11 April 2014
Anyone Else But You.
The monkey on your back is the latest trend
I kiss you all starry eyed, my body's swinging from side to side
We're using art as life. We use lies to tell lies. We want some coke with those fries.
We sure are cute for two ugly people
We don't know who we talk about anymore. Or if there is to be anyone at all. Or we squish in moulds strangers to turn them tiresome. Sometimes soon, sometime late. Sometimes never at all. Sometimes always. We fool ourselves with familiarity. And fadedness. We put some glue and stick new faces.
So why can't you forgive me?
With my MP3, DVD, rumple-packed guitar
The roads are blacker wet. Only parents have cars and we walk along with crabs sideways against whitewashed walls. We walk along pavements, look down, stare up, avoid faces, listen to dreams.
Just because we use cheats doesn't mean we're not smart
I'm in love with how you feel
We knew there was a real. Because that's just what exists. We talk nonsense, we talk genius. We are unforgettably brilliant, we are painfully inane.
You want more fans, I want more stage
We were the same people. We were one. We were nothing. We were I. The other wakes up from tiring cold from the future and walks back to the iron gate, swings it to the center and leans ahead, face cupped in palms, stare at gravel ants.
My name is Adam, I'm your biggest fan
Open windows were green and there was no one. Perfectly timed stairs and bald patches in the garden. We didn't know us. We still don't. We look for mirrors in screens. We dig up and cover up and throw away and reclaim without knowing why. We cherish and dismiss, we don't care. Never did.
In anyone else but you
Du, du, du
Du, du, du
But you.
And I never met a Toby that I didn't like
Scotty liked all of the books that I recommended
Even if he didn't I wouldn't be offended.
12 March 2014
Sore dreamspot.
Close eyes again, try to decide on one reason why one was taking this nap at all.
Shift to another dream. What was good, what was bad. Do day sleepdreams come true.
Why does someone I hardly know have to figure so prominently in such a dream. What about the important people. But what makes them important. I didn't want them to be, pre-sleep. They weren't during sleep. Post sleep why do I have to question what I wanted and got.
Because dreams aren't real? There was a lot of things I did. With previously unimportant people. Now they are someone else. Fall in love with a near stranger, get up to worse things. What's stranger. What's okay?
What's not? It was hardly bizarre. There was an exhibition. A basement. Textiles? Hats? There were parents. There was barefoot me off a school bus. A wrong school bus with the right person.
But there were shifts. And there was filtered sunlight. There was quiet talking. There were faces borrowed from life. Feelings pumped in from some secret little fountain of cruelty. Uneasy feelings replace chokedupness. I think that is nice.
Possibility of scratching a scab lightly as it creates this alien desire is better than flying headfirst to be hurt again.
I can just not scratch at all like a good girl and smile because I know it's healing.
But what was I feeling? Oh it was just a dream. I didn't mean to. But I did. Maybe I want to. I am not but I might and I like the sound of that.
8:36 pm
There's the mild, rainy winds of a drizzle day's end. When air carries around life and doesn't just exist to be breathed in, but felt and loved. Now there are fragments floating around, of an absurd dream, with unimportant people. But the illusion of importance looms in large, crashing into my side, crushing my sense of balance, of this farce sense of understanding that there is some one person that was supposed to be dreamt about. In quite the opposite way, there is no feeling of mad wrongness after the dream.
The various criteria of phasing out people probably vanished from the dream version of love. Maybe it's the new dream version, maybe the strange part of strangeness is being defined and it is not what it was. Maybe it is for good reason that dreams are forgotten and are supposed to be. Everyone is a stranger until they're not.
Maybe the dreams are better at picking out perfectness, or a near perfect wantingness that must exist but won't, because the controllable dreaming is insistent on having to do with unattainability. Maybe one is supposed to have it easy. Maybe dreams aren't that cracked up to be, or they see through a person with much clarity, unclouded with awake feelings. Maybe awake feelings are as absurd as life itself.
And day-long naps have time enough to reach a universe where things are done and not thought. Where one soft love-center candy of life is not covered by concrete textured layer of insecurity and what-ifs. There is no plastic wrapper of 'why the hell at all' and 'that's just not me' and a dozen cellotape layers of 'I don't knows'.
Or the dream just was. And there was happiness. And now there is thought.
8 March 2014
Love.
In throes. Blows low, it slows.
And gushes out.
Now. On the brow. Corner of the eye.
Toe curling, soul stirring, bony.
Hard, simmering soft, brushes against, purring past.
Like the song that played last.
Unanswering, hidden sneeze fills up invisible room.
Dances in disguise.
Releases. Relocates. Recites.
Unheard. Speaks in black and blue.
Exists. Slowly simpers, learns, lingers..
Mirrors the night. One hair at a time.
It listens quietly. It rhymes.
It settles in the corner. Of my sight.
Middle of the unmade mind.
Leans against a quiet heart, it knows.
The history of a sigh, the life of a lie.
By drums, by bells, by blowing shells.
A poem sits by the door.
Leaves cover a wild garden. An old tree silently grows.
Unhurried feet. Absent feet. Imaginary feet.
A welcome mat seat. An irregular beat.
3 March 2014
A-muse-douche.
I think Doge would be a good listener. Those eyes.
Complexity derives a certain life from unfiltered feelings. Ego in absentia, superego and id throwing punches at 4 in the night (morning?). There's a part which feels authentic to touch. A soft feather or a sharp knife point. Such delirium, much rollercoaster. While we think deferring gratification/ pleasure in small things exercises the will, 4 o' clock nonfood food is flying around one's head, with broken wings and a Cumberbatchy voice. Saying things which it is not saying.
The next morning at 11:28 it rests on the roof, in the sun, happy with wrecking. Eaten up, it grows on the back of the mind. Sun-soaked and dripping with amusement. It'll settle on the soon to be choked up part of the throat. The part which is happily married to tear ducts for the past almost 22 years. The brain is adamant on infallible reason and dictates severe hard conclusive thoughts to be thingificated.
When the little whispering fairy wafts around, as midnight flies past with amazing rapidity and settles in a nook in the ear, makes itself comfortable, sends along feels of a certain kind. Be amused. Be a muse. See one. See more? See one and feel one. Be it. Be affected, be broken, be yourself.
Muses are imperatively slick with wrongness. A dully sharp wrongness, shifting in the sunlight, pastel shimmery, dark glimmery something right underneath the surface of a placid lake with smooth pebbles, resting with the sun glinting off, reflected in the receding waves, moving about as if writhing in sleep. Flips around in the afternoon sun. Muses are amphibious. They recline against a tree, they don't look at you. You look at the existence of it and write a poem with your nails on a tree bark on the other side of the lake.
Dusty earth whips up tiny storms which cloud up the mind, settle with surprising rapidity, bring the world one little cloud at a time, transferring, transporting, tranforming the mindscape, bringing in the dust of a certain one. Recesses of the mind are not open to brooms or soap or a rough, rough washcloth. Dust settles for eternity, that certain kind, one layer after another, sedimentises.
One often digs up old broken pieces from a hundred years ago but a sudden sandstorm topples over mountains of soft earth, makes it level, makes one see the top layer. It rains and there are roses and they wilt under the strong suspicious, atrocious sun the next day and the mind lays barren until it rains one night at 4 (morning?).
Thinner layers, fewer roses. Much manure, many flowers, lush grass, a gazebo and a lemonade in the dying sun of late evening. Sprinklers are put in place for when there is no rain. It's green and sometimes insects with golden brown wings sprout from the earth and fly off into the distance.
Muses are stranded at different parts of the city, they walk towards an unlit corner and disappear.
6 February 2014
The sky is a photograph.
The kite flew loose
Suddenly
It fell away
Unresisting
Featherly, fartherly
Plink, unlinked
It said its byes
Hid its lies
You cut it loose
It flew. Away.
Unnoosed.
Wastingly, witheringly
You run to it
Or you don't
Stay. Sky. See.
Stare. Wondering.
Undone, it flew.
You cut it loose
And stayed. Wondering.
Stuck in a treebranch
Hidden in shadows
On a tin roof
Catneighbour
On sunny afternoon
Faded, dry
Torn, forlorn
An empty string
Fell to the floor
Footsteps
Fell over the door
You went to sleep
Unwondering.
Darkness
Cold darkness
Cut off night
A story, a kite.
Out of sight
Light.
26 January 2014
The Inner Beast
Soft light, familiar sounds, dogbarks from far away, road traffic but so much lesser than daynoise, keyboard tiptaps, router blinkings, familiar curtains, famliar other cloths, familiar shawls, even new familiar shawls, outofreach blankets, a waiting phone, a waited phone, slightly long don'tneedtocutthemyet nails, background noise music, elbows on thighs, cracking knuckles, blowable hairstrand, bitable lip, scratchable back, needless fireworks, senseless celebration, why.
Familiar shawls, long shawls. "This is my Papa's shawl. He got it from when he was chief guest somewhere." "Why do you have it?" "Because I am.. his chief guest?"
Reading Freud's Dream and Delusion in Jenson's Gradiva. Pompeii. I happened to attend a talk on it at the JLF. Accidentally, largely. It felt too much to travel to another venue after beer and pasta. And there was Mary Beard, talk of normal sized bedpan thingies and spaces being markets/bars/temples. But no one said a word about a woman with an attractive gait, Bertgang. I like it though, also the idea of Wilhelm Jenson being respected, but not one of the best of any sort. Also, ruminating on JLF, quite a few things stick. Such as who are you writing for. It was said: one wants, through words, to not stroke but poke.
But even when one pokes, one had to know who it is one is packing a powerful poke for. Sometimes one doesn't know anything, and there is nothing to know. One doesn't care to care, because one is one.
Does the bricklayer imagine for the future inside a small room or a giant hall? That one built. Does the bricklayer appreciate the vastness of the sky or is that only for those who are strangers to it. After all one doesn't wonder about the paintveins on one's ceiling, was the painter thinking about.. something. Or nothing.
21 January 2014
Sweetheart.
Rain-wet earth
Darkened roads
Grey sun
The hills rise from the green
My baby lives on a screen.
Sees cross country
Big university, small room
Won't be close
Anytime soon
Not nearer than
In my pocket, next to my pillow
Carried around, kept
On buses,
Moving on railway tracks
Rain-wet earth
Darkened roads
Grey sun
Won't see me anytime soon
Tells me to have fun.
8 September 2013
Being in one.
Like a clapboard noises out, a guillotine blade falls, flash goes off, shutter comes down, sun comes up and in sometime it makes your head spin and it's hot and dreary.
As if one willfully surrenders to be in a room perpetually in the moment. Makes it their own and then every other day bang on walls, break things, write profanities, talk to oneself. One made it for two. Is left singularly solo. One doesn't realise it's made for one. Was for one. Meant to be for one.
The food will run out, and they'll eat the other's time. Crunch up words and wave sleepily to ideas that go to a distant unnamed place. The farm. Where the parents put your rabbits when you were 7.
Shot up to black, occasionally sparkly space which could be either what they tell you or someone just punched a few holes in your paperbag which you wear on your head as a necessary precaution. Not to offend.
Paint walls with a childish landscape only to realise its wallness.
Lick on a cardboard ice cream.
Step over to avoid a dry puddle.
Feel a stair where there wasn't any. You haven't reached.
Mistakenly dip a paintbrush in chocolate milk.
Write this because you want to write this.
It's thoughtmurder. Thoughtdeath. Inward terrorism. Cornsyrup utopia. Autotune. Autopilot.
Make a gash. Sing. Dry up.
2 September 2013
Unapproved Guest Post
And because it's beautiful. For the love of words, the mind and the poetry of it.
I don't like it when you write a post.
But I just have to read it.
And after reading it, I dislike it.
The reason for it is that, your writing scares me.
Its almost repulsive.
It's like my thoughts.
It's like I am telling myself about myself, if you catch my drift.
It's like you invaded my mind and extracted my thoughts and put them on paper, and not the casual thoughts, but those thoughts which make me feel very strongly about something.
And that scares me, that someone can know what I know and feel about something.
Then I find solace in the fact that it is just coincidence.
And that the things you write about are not the things which are as important to me as other issues.
I hope you never write about those things.
I might not be able to take it.
Your writing scares me.
It's like walking into a mirror show in the circus.
And the mirrors don't distort the reality here, they amplify with.
With vague familiar feelings.
Your writing comforts me.
Because I will never be able to reach into my mind and bring these thoughts out.
Ignore this message.
Thank you, Anonymous. I hear you. And I understand.



