Disorder

He believes salts, are monolithic
testaments of grape culture, and crushing grapes
is a form of harassment. His schizophrenia aside,
everything he feels, he feels
very strongly; music he remembers by
the heart; light he gathers in flat spoons;
his frontiers are long erased, and his
fears are always learning to express themselves

- like there is dirt in the dog's eyes,
but does the dog know?
There are no harsh deaths, and there is no longer
an interest in evil. To his sea, he is the man who
bends boats without even touching. Cloudy or not, he
believes the sky is full of stars, and he just wants to be in place
to watch one of them fall.

Somewhere beneath an arc

  We sped through these arcs
    that had lined up in the fields,
  waiting for us to hold hands.
       Arc after arc, our grips
unfastened, as if the eyes we
had ever opened were mirrors,
waiting to be broken.
      Those arcs, under them
the fields so wet, and the promise
  of a grain of rice still floating,
waiting to be stolen.

Old man's foot

Old timer sat at the table,
scratching his teacup
with a counting-down expression;
a demonstration having
lifted itself above the
plain of narrative.
Sort of like counting
down to an explosion,
but doing it with a
serious seriousness.
With more substance
in his face, than in
his gaze - unlocking human
maps - as if from the depth
of a deep well, he saw himself
inside his own shadow,
trailing eternally, to
existence, trying hard enough
to be, where he was.
Old man, who I
did not know, made me sad,
made me want to subtract
my age from his; his regressions
from mine, and arrive
at a convenient supposition:
like his foot, slept just
as much as mine.

Deconstructing public text

Effeminate Dearies,
   fill gap here.
Turn on the mobility.
     Watch shadows purge.
Experience a little
   senseless friction.
Wait for floods
   to change direction.
Wear skin on
   the inside.

Be basic, always.
   Avoid inspection,
 into realms of pleasure.
    About pleasure, do not say.
Smile, when asked to do so.
   Be not the pillow, but
the softness that makes it.
  Build on self-measures.
   
Be invisible, to the latent
   and latent to the existing.
     
Laugh only, at
  opportunities taken.

Be sure, about the
  depths of uncertainty.
Plan, ahead of sight.
  Reflect, only
on liabilities.
   Say something, but
about nothing.

An Ordinary day

It's an ordinary day
  and men with scythes
for tongues, move from room to room;
  poets, they call themselves,
     and with imprecision
  they stare and stalk each breath.
      There are arguments between those
who write, and those who mean it
    to death, and those who plainly suffer.
But eventually - as if their
histories hold them for ransom - they
   lock themselves up, separately, without
    ever confessing to each other that, they suffer
               because life, for everyone else
        seems like an easy nothing.

Setup

Under the arbour
  we sit, two of everything;
    her the wings.I the one clipped.

Lethargy

A butterball belly, nearly
 makes me feel responsible
for all of humankind.
 I keep punching the air
   with what I will call soft coins.
And they keep returning
 as if to ask what will it be? then
drop back into the waist-basket
 where others keep on living -
whole, of everything left of them.
Rivers rise and fall,
  destinations, turn into clouds
as windows continue to sweep.

Blacks are experts, only on blacks

Luke 10:25-37

Parable of the Good Samaritan

Jesus: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”


White experts

Underneath black coats

Are not, your neighbors.

White experts

Underneath white coats

Are doctors.

A summit of sorts

when only,
         the bubble gum endorses
your grist on life -
          a life that makes you shift rocks
next to each other
       to make them seem like leftovers
of a mountain,
          a mountain that can breathe above all the filth.

Postscript

  Though consciousness parades
before you a tilted, skewed, abstracted reality  
there are equalizers like there are
     flags for every piece of land, an oath
for every taker, a corpse for every name.
Take for example, the night;
   its blade, rich, and pointy.
Light and everything it fills,
         swoon at the sight of it. Freckled faces
revel in the subtraction.Lungs and trees breathe at the same pace.
  Reapers partially choke, in midway alleys.
       Birth becomes a right until the gleam of dawn. And like to everyone else,
it seems better to take away blood than hope.

Jeopardy

The rug skips from underneath
my mind, as night wakes
to the concrete's gnashing of the teeth
either side of the window.
Their coloured afterlives,
a knuckled-in feeling of
grandiose, unstained
because stains are only black
and grey. I look far, and the farthest
I could: until I note the solitary hill,
or the swanning blackbird, the moon tied
to my shoe-string or some random reduction.
Life then moves to the street, to the
cornor-slicing offices, and somewhere
in the middle,I look back twice because
men usually die
on their way home.Because on your way
home, you assume that jeopardy is insincere,
that the invisible are so, because their
work is done.No.A lot more has
to be done, tomorrow and the
day after that.The road travelled
and the one left behind do not match.
But work has to be done - a lot
more than yesterday. Yesterday
when the blackbird unsparingly
rose, the hill threw back its head
to the sun, reduction totalled
to an additive and shoe-strings came not
undone.Work, though, has to
be done, where the stage is set,
and comeuppance is targeted, where
hustlers and doctors do not meet
except in their dreams.

Not among the roses

Instinct curates hypothesis
 as and when I feel the liveliness
of a bloodied rock I sit upon.
 The questions are windward,
and so is an irrationally warm
 November. The harshness may
be warranting, and life a belated
 apology, but still it doesn't
have to be about rocks, does it?

Defining sequence

And if like a cloud
   you are caught between
the drift, or bursting open

into scant consideration.
   Off your limits, contemplating
death - slow and quick

like a shipwrecked sailor.
  And if like the abandoned
lie, you are someone's greatest

memory, the unworn rope
  around the sea - one that
always finishes in someone's

 hands. There is silence to look
  forward to, and look back upon
 like there is water, at the
 
middle of the ocean - an ocean
 incapable of curbing its appetite
for the deserted, and the loved alike.

It's me, not you

Breakwater types 

 that men like to hold on to,

dress in envelopes

 and send to whosoever will read them,

thoughts are like 

 lacerating muscles

unveiled to look 

  their nightly best

but because night rises

 and dusts itself 

after it falls, and not

 because their is the relative

evil, as there is poetry

 in a lot of unspecified space

because it simply allows

 it, to be me rather than you.

Before people were born

I lived inside the clock,
threw my head, back into

the penal jar, like the
apostrophe following

a learning, that with time
on the outside, I could die young
    and not know about it at all.

Want

Let me not walk to him
when he looks to the sea

Let us not find together, his
fists in the sand

Let me not hear him say again -
someone please get it

Potatoes

Wishlist -
Death working
its way up

Winter, her face
translates everything

No birds in the sky
I came and went
as told

Parched throat
Half of every life
spent screaming

Coughing blood
into the sink
the ocean rises

Not enough wind
comes this way
Not word from her either

The moon lies still
a spider in my head
weaves the rest

Benzylhidrinithium !
try guessing chemistry

The brewery on fire
seeing her
in a new light

Unexpected deaths
I would do better
I think

Clouds close to water
slurrpp slurrpp slurrpp

Grazing-
touched by warmth
in the grave

Old silence
  snow breaks
on the nonliving

Sunday noon
a firecrest unlikely
to slow it down

the four seasons
     only autumn with two
languages to learn

  Water in the dog's ears
  A thing so uninterrupted

Grandma's old watch
Cancer ticks first

And the river turns

Disdain, had its eye on fire.
Shadows of dandelions used to fall
across my feet - where I now stand -
as did my children. Renting
life in each other's arms, under
that little pride we chose not to weep.
They raped, but left my wife only cut,
and me from the inside, forever lit

as I began to hear more in the dark.
About the menstrual sickness,
the turning of the book shelf,
boiling of the antelope's horns
in a town far, far from here,
where a feast prepared - they
called it the holocaust - of her
body as soup, and my brain as the bone.

Yellow gloves of contentment

Mid-July, we sat, with our
hands inside yellow gloves
as I tried not to look through
every blasted hole .
We were henchmen, of
seeking-the-white-in-smoke
Trees, even the ones
I visualized, burned down.
Grandma now, stood alone
in front of the Taj Mahal.

How the fish would have
contemplated swimming in
boiling water, or how the
neighbour dog would have
tucked in, the tongue that so loosely
hangs, a little while after it started -
these were softening glances, Maa said,
of eyes that had now opened
inside of us - but need not speak now.
Father, she said, needed
the quietness - it was worse enough
his food tasted like ash
even in office.

Do you have something for me to read ?

There may not come a day
when we no longer count
our fingertips,as peaks
we feel all better for life on,
he wised,and I could tell
he knew what he
was saying.I had to try
and confront him, because
I never quite belonged;
and I thought I knew my
mountains from the unpoetic
apparatus.I had theories about
recreation, while he likened
to the kind of man with
something he'd want to have
and someone he'd like
to be. A rush of cold-blooded
city breath turning over inside
his chest could be heard
whenever he spoke.It hurt me
immensely, that he referred to
poetry as whiskers-but-no-teeth.
They are like watchmen,
fond of wishing - Poets that is
he said.The poems,
and these were his last words
before he left for ever,
are their apologies to themselves
for wishing for someone else's
sleep.I stayed back for an
hour or so, after which I told
myself - I have stayed back an hour
or so, there is no point in leaving now