Of Smells...And Stenches...

Till when
Shall heaven,
Decay
Within mass graves,
Under the drunken smell
Of apples and blood?
How many
Shall remain,
To form a people,
To dream in fetters,
To die in letters, 
To bear the brunt
Of our cartographic lust?
How long
Shall we fool our reflection?
How often
Must we wash our hands?
Will ablution chip away
At this rusted sanctum,
And cleanse us
From the stench
Of a charred identity?
For my veins,
And thine,
Have enmeshed like vines...
Frozen. Still.
Through the travesty
Of time...
And when we tend
To the clots...
Sit down,
Take a pause,
We shall trip over
The undulating bed
Of coalesced bodies...
And the riddled milestone
Shall finally ask
Is it this?
Is it this?
Is it this?

[Title of the poem inspired by a Children's book written by Sara Joseph and illustrated by Koonal Duggal]

Of Interstices...

I'm unspoken.
Caught in the crossfire,
Of unruly songs
Broken free from the strings
Of an ill-tuned guitar....
Coming together, bonding
And a din.
I'm a doubt
In a half-gulped murmur...
Held back
From being let out loud...
Even when you sense
Me, throbbing within...
I peep through the leaves
At the sun-kissed chatter,
And ponder
A surreptitious emergence...
But the stars relish
Their gravity,
On my disquiet....
And I'm shackled
Like a breath under water,
Grappling
For an unstrung gasp....

The Remnants....

Untended,
I laze
In your backyard...
Watching the world light up,
As the day switches off...
And that's when I smell the night.
Stealthy, young
Relieving...
I never realize
How long I've waited,
For this juncture
To arrive,
Until the crickets greet me
Again.
The conches and the muezzin
Are just wrapping up
Their daily differences...
The clattering of vessels,
A beckon
For the last meal...
Each so invested,
In doing away
With the quotidian,
For a listless shut-eye...
But the hues
Have only just begun,
To transform
My encapsulation...
Into a riotous palette,
Speckled by a game of hide n' seek,
That the fireflies
Never seem to lose...
I'm basking in the conversations
Of branches and the breeze...
Hooked
To the tales of their travails...
And as the night begins to speak,
My chaos falls asleep...
And the day becomes a spectre
At the doorstep of darkness...
While I thrive,
Like a sigh
At the lips of peace,
Flirting with the remnants
Of madness....

From The Lair...

I'm dry.
The ink has seeped
Through the loopholes of sanity,
From the fabric
Of my rusty imaginaire...
I eat dust
At the forlorn windowsill,
Where the dawn once sat
For a solaced chat,
Over a cup of ginger tea....
I shrivel
In the unraveling
Of the summer's rage,
Quietly wishing away
The moist token
Of last rites,
That the Earth pushes my way...
And all I long
As a solitary respite,
Is to be a song
In your head...
One that you shall hum,
Despite yourself,
And resuscitate
For a day...
Only then, shall I lie
With uncensored peace....
In the musty grave
Of your last page....

Of Language...

Let us write
Onto this vagrant night
Songs, that ran through your hair...
Arm in arm with the wind...
While your eyes
Blistered the fields,
Dousing their drunken gambol
On the nape of my neck...
Let me lace your fingertips
With promising letters,
So poetry slithers
Off my waist,
When you trace your whimpers
Across the arch of my back...
Let us break into
This stoic thunderstorm...
And seduce the bolts
Into manic euphoria,
While I litter your breath
With tastes of tales,
That skidded down our beings
Into the drain of desire...
And undo the abyss
Of language
To feed
Our festered silences....

Sometimes...

Sometimes, you're left...
On your own
To be strong,
To hold on...
To catch the glass in times,
When it tips off the edge...
Just before it shatters
Into a million little pieces...
And then sometimes,
It grows
On you, and within...
Like unruly weeds
In a postcard garden,
That you never managed
To uproot.
Like vines of the wildflower,
The branches of which you tugged
But which seeped,
Into your walls...
You thought you could cut them
And throw them off to burn...
But you knew
You'd meet them again,
After the next autumn...
'Cause sometimes
You know,
You have to let it go....
You have to let it grow,
In your not so perfect garden...

Teetering....

I cracked them open
Before they could hatch...
And now they drizzle,
Around my waking hours...
Like an angry wasp,
Lured
By halogen hallucinations...
Claustrophobic,
With no window in sight...
As I become 
The wandering spirit of a star,
That is haunted
Even in death,
With a heap of faith
On its own role
In fairy tales...
I'm the wisps of lightning
That sunk her teeth
Into quicksand...
And never returned...
I'm the forsaken moisture
Trapped in asbestos roofs...
While they ran ahead
And danced with the sea...
I'm your bottled butterfly,
Waiting to smell
The only three days
I shall live...
Release me
Before I teeter,
And fall without "forevers"...