There Are No Gods to fabricate

There are sins we teach each other
Only to squash them to oblivion at our own free will.
At certain hours of the day 
when we are back to that little memory 
of wounded morals
To wear the magic of breeze and feet;
To rise,
To begin,
To be wise, 
To humanise.
One has to run into light
to Darwin,Sappho and Eleanor
Unbuttoning oblivion to slip into ecstasy
Perhaps ignorance and you have been habits I claimed 
And dusting you despoiled me of the possessed 

By the window I stand
and converse to the blue that hangs by the railing 
Past the mansions and its lofty beliefs 
is a no man's land 
Where there are no gods to fabricate 
And no devils to maintain.

I wanted to write this love song

I wanted to write this love song 

That will last in music 

I unravelled all that I had written 

All that I was meaning to send 

All that I wrapped in silks and touches 

All that had remained wrapped in some solstice

All that had walked 

Hand in hand, together into that mist behind memory 

I wanted to go back and feed on those feelings 

Just to write about 

the wet walls behind my back

The exploding taste of the strawberry Popsicle

 that melted in mouth and lungs

Planting memories to rain that rivered the city and bodies 

The cats fell into invisible corners

The dogs had crowded the patio 

The city was washing its dirty corners 

And you were language to my new found limbs

The room must have held silence and clusters of being 

I still hunt words and gather the other side of lamentation and dry heartbeats 

the fissures open 

And I scatter to wet racing and rankling 

Never ever finding the words that would heap and fill it to an ever weeping lagoon 

Hidden love stories have a perpetual weight 

Time escapes enchaining it to appearances 

Seen and Unheard

That never makes it to a love song  

Words whirl and still dance 

devoid of shadows and presences

I wanted to write this love song

That will last in longing

Pregnant

She kept getting pregnant 

And She heard her babies thrashing

kicking and gallivanting in his mind 

They were eager bodies 

Trying to break out into light and meals 

Like that unbroken chain of life parading into history 

To throw light at screams and spills 

Deep kohl eyes

Life never reaches its destination 

There is always that little 

That cups its face on its two hands 

And ponders 

Often peering into the glass 

From one mirror to the other 

As it walks

Rushing glances obstinate and stormy 

Leaps between windows, doors, faces, eyes, quietude 

the baker's glasses, the florist's windows, the book seller's warm greetings.

It run back home to the everyday eyes on the dressing tables 

transparent lapel 

When I stone the reflections 

and try to climb in with solutions and verdicts

Life denies me the smoothness of swollen coffee 

I find a woman deep within verses and chapters 

Unrehearsed 

Decked with the unassuming 

Life says,' I offer you no chains.

You are free to knife your ties.'

I wonder if it is just to cease with the unexplored

The self preserving roots, and breeds

To enormous love

the sacrificial

The magnificent and lasting!

Mornings when papers talk about suicides and disappearances 

And the festivals amass happiness and move on 

I wonder why chew onto the apparition of what could have been and what will be?

Life has got no columns 

No construct 

No victories 

No eternities 

It's only got its knowing 

With its two deep kohl eyes 

of insomnia and sleep.

Once I was a woman full of house and curtains

Once I was a woman full of house and curtains
In those islands of wallpaper and kitchens
Where one bakes cakes,
uses clarified butter for nutrition and more
Thinks of health and gives flavour to the gelatinous pieces of life
And fills up the containers with Kashmiri shallots, pumpkin and melon seeds and coffee beans.
And then one stormy afternoon she finds the rose petals she sun dried has gone ...wet in the rain
And everything was saturated in that thick music and tender smell that enriches the unformed mind and eyes
Invading melancholy she awakens to the roof too gone with the flowers and occupied darkness of her garden where there stood trunks full of pretty clothes, curtains and jar full of herbs
Where grief hugged the lovely colours
And catastrophe moans and fumes
But the invincible shadow of belongings lives

Lives tied onto those discharged confrontations that constantly try to reconquer lost and spent
One fine day one has to conquer hope and elbows
And doorways that enter nowhere
I don't know if I am the same woman anymore
Now I am a woman of autumn and flying leaves

And you come again with your offer of House and curtains?

The chanteuse's lover

The chanteuse's lover died last Friday

With no past, they say

And now with no future.

I miss him.

No,I miss the flowers he often send her 

And she often shared with me.

When days in my flat were identical.

Flowers bought motion to the wind,the 

hues added to the ecstatic vision. 

Flowers can be so kind. 

Gerbera,Anthurium, Calla,Heliconia,Poinsettia 

They wear masks of names and colourful thoughts.

My neighbour is this lovely young woman.

She fastens around her glances and necklaces her lovers bring.

Flowers were like summers they would come and go in promiscuous faces

and eyes. But he lies in my spongy memories 

Closing around the bed post and cover.

The days must be just metal and music for my young neighbour.

I brought her some flowers today 

I thought I would share her kindness 

While walking back I thought 

How can a sweet man like him die so young? 

No wine bottles will now come

No prompt invitation for hours of laughter will follow...

Today while I was unlocking myself in 

I smelt flowers and perfume

The smell had vanished behind the opposite door

I thought I would knock

and give her what I bought.

Then I heard laughter and music 

The gloom has lifted.

I took my flowers back with me, perhaps I need them more than she...

Love collects

I remember the look in your eyes 

When you take me along for that little togetherness and love

Love, where your thoughts are changing and mine dress each clothesline 

That hangs from buildings 

And you find me reconciled to memories and names 

I see you ebb away to posters and people around

I realised the mistake each time and bit my lips within 

Why do I do this to you?

When you love me like no one ever loved me 

When you loved me with pronouns and epithets 

With so much patience 

With the impenetrable and unseen 

With clove eyes and gumption 

I know you love me to outcomes and unsaid

Our language has touched in laughter and impalpable sighs

Our bodies don't speak

They have lost their voice 

Or perhaps you want me to ask you to split and join my other half?

Like spilled memories across my pillow 

You have been absorbing all that I inhabit 

All that is unpolished 

All that has forgotten grace and dance.

I once wanted you to hold the words 

To hold us together in faith and grace 

I realise I ask too much of you 

You too have me in unchained loving 

So last night when you called and 

Butterflies gushed over my mouth and cleavage 

You stared and withheld

I wanted to draw you to vision and the irrefutable 

Love is obscene 

Of you not so hesitant and planting commandments

And me riding over memories and insisting 

Spring and shadows serene

Under your eyes 

The muscles flexed 

And You let go of butterflies to aquatic hues

In an insomniac night 

Love collects in blushes and denials.

Painting by Lynn Noelle Rushton 

Pink throats

Some late evenings

When I sleep by my thoughts 

The noisy

The enthralling 

The one with symphonies

I watch them inhabiting and pulling Khair Un Nissa

And women of romances 

On Quiet beds 

In beliefs of wars and violence 

The pearls unstring and possesses the floor

Thoughts bob

Thoughts fall 

And thoughts roll

I keep remembering the darkness, the moonlight 

And the pearls that retained the wilful shimmer 

Of brilliant listening 

Empathising  with pink throats

Love seems boredom and calligraphy

I took some lovers 

when you took your own

Lovers who come and paint sunshine with soft paint brushes

On glasses that reflect the outside tree that smokes 

Lovers encamped under my windows on rain softened pavements

for a glimpse of me, foreseen 

waiting with syllables that came with their shadows 

Lovers  dead and living sustained in wills and pages

full of awakened men, tattooed children, night lights and endangered  silence

In all of them I found unfastened women and trapezes of kindness and desire.

Lovers creeping on me with marigold, tuber flowers, Sanskrit syllables and chants 

Peaceful, incensed like holy hermitage and white veined life.

Lovers with built in towers, commencements and moral sanctuaries 

walking in boxes of law and never erasing boundaries.

They protected me 

from them and me.

I am grateful to my lovers who beseeched and inspired living.

I allowed myself lovers and friends

healing and antibiotics

Reading and reverberations 

Journey and shipwrecks 

Water and bobbing 

Running off and coming back 

Last few years 

Saw me through exile and  a congregation of well meaning verses.

It wasn't like I missed you much

It wasn't like I was dying for you 

It wasn't like you were a necessity 

but I missed you and needed you like death.

Now that you wish our coming together and coupling 

And take us on with undoing and motion

I fear I will miss my lovers and not having you for whom I mourned. 

Love seems boredom and calligraphy.

Feathers stashed in the attic

I thought we were like the rest 

Men & women who fall in love 

Who beget little children

Go for holidays 

To beaches to pick seashells 

And postcards 

I thought I was reared in boxes and birthmarks

That grow eyesores and fit in with mediocrity that comforts

I had shared space with virgin births and messianic specials on TV

Packed and pierced to fit in with decorums 

Where God and blizzards existed.

Then you happened 

I saw your amazing limbs, of Apollo 

Like mist we floated over hills and grazed nights 

With nowhere to go but to my birthmarks and makeup 

You must have known dreams gallop and then betray one in the morning

You keep roaming the day with that one thought that refuses to surface.

I would see the lions eating up happy women and underwear

And the children are fragrances and remorse

The cat in my neighbourhood stalked the pretty pigeons 

and the feathers got stuck at times on those office-goers clothes.

The night on your side climbed and marched to my weapons 

and my faith would no longer pay heed to my ramblings

Since then we were not like the rest

I needed to wake up and nestle in my small girl syndrome 

To live in our big sprawling mansion 

With little alteration in the creases of the bodices and the attics

To witness the ordeals of promised and standing 

But you must visit our attic when you have days 

When life offers less 

There I left the table brimming with sentimental scraps and culture 

Stashed with the feathers that came floating by

I draw curtains when you visit

Now we are left with some formal civilities

One practices with the world.

Like thank you 

Like see you again 

Like come over for a cup of tea.

My neighbours are warm people

I sometimes go over with croissants and we drink coffee

They send me puddings and laughter

They keep my dogs

They often watch my health from windows

They would see you visit me and walking out of the house

Days would haunt me when you came calling truce 

And I would hope and despair

About uprooting the past 

and mental asylums of tacit and trustworthy

My neighbours are warm people

I sometimes now send over my son and we drink coffee

They warmly smile and bless me 

They too accept 

That I draw my curtains when you visit 

She came last night with him

She came last night with him

Drunk, finished and deep in nowhere

She came, diaphanous, claiming 

The last seven years, and fidelity. 

I noticed she has bobbed over the years and weathered.

Time has mingled well with incoherent sleepless thoughts

Those thoughts that watch you with arms of endless love,

And embraces that till dawn start to climb beds and ceiling

Swallowed daybreak, immolation and rain.

I have gone through them.

My ceilings then held mist and cloud.

And I begged to stumble over night and dawn

The reflections remained etched in the cracks of my dressing table mirror

The clouds sprouted in there

blossomed and jumbled 

Rooms and life.

Twittering tales

Of beginning, of ending, of loving, of betrayal,

of houses,of the unborn and spaces in between

Followed.

Compassionate and passionate 

Flattened by my walls.

She left my house in the early hours of the morning.

I took him, drunk and drugged, to bed.

I let his arms cover and crowd mine.

Outside another dawn was breaking 

The night had reached the grey roads outside

The moss in the nearby graveyard glistened in the morning light

The light that awakes laughter.

The light that drowns night.

It happens between men and women, nights and cities

I was looking down at a cityscape 

Glittering with twinkling fury and the darkened oblivion of a summer night 

Littered therein were brotherhood and sounds of darkness I was above a city scattered and vanishing 

I was above gardens, meadows, tiny, hectic and moments adrift in tunnels, boxes and bedrooms with windows. 

You were somewhere in the house 

Was wondering what if you would come and hold me from my back and demand what was due for years

 If you would make and unmake a story 

Dissonant, unheard and a little ruined? 

And next morning like rhymes the sun will return and illumine. 

The apparition, the motionless and the musk. 

Who would know we had remains and ghosts of the past? Who would know the night did split in half 

Who would think of love affairs 

Fragile and wandering? 

Who would think of lust and the tacit? 

Who would think my beliefs were different and so was your religion? 

It happens between men and women, nights and cities. 

You came up the stairs you stood behind me for long

We stood watching architecture, dried throats, reflections and towns. 

You pulled my hands and drew me to your canvases of a mother and the daughter of a Keraliite drummer and some shimmering silences you collect 

And call them Art and aesthetics. 

Things we live to return to. 

You invest only in art 

You invest in green paintings and twittering artefacts They speak to you, you talk to them when you return home at night. 

Perhaps that night you invested in restraint and art. 

When we left together I held within me some art, some games and some convergent spaces

Unfulfilled and expanding 

Perhaps that night you invested in games and circles 

And I wanted to ask you: 

Did you ever invest in love?

Edited by Dr Ampat Koshy 

You bought me shawls and potpourri.....

Each time you came back home

You bought me shawls and potpourri 

Each time you came back home

I would buy orchids and lilies

I would put them in vases and speak to the walls to behave

And I would ask the neighbour's son for that fallen frangipani 

And to get me some fresh marmalade his mum made

I would tuck behind my hair, 

flowers and years

I would light up the hall,

The wall, the eyes and 

The candles 

And let the imaginary bees buzz

They would rotate and follow over ponderous and unmade

Where I would prepare your favourite dishes

Where I would change the cover and quilts

Where I would circle in confusion of packing and undressing

Where I would patch the little undoings of spilled and scattered

And through the open window I would see the crow shit on fancy cars

Each time I would construct this thought 

To remind you to park yours on the other lane

The bees would play verbal games 

Ascending the language of my stuttering thoughts

And forgetfulness would arrive when you came

The pearl necklaces and crispy silk would stain in connivance and pits

And would seer my weight of memories and wisdom 

I would portion your eyes, scan your body,take in all that was commercial and magnetic

And then breathe in all that was bee wax, cinnamon and home

I would tell myself we are again standing over buried and past

You had arrived so many evenings till evenings got strained 

Since then I have tucked you in 

the fragrance of separate memories and shawls

And when each winter I wrap them around

You come swirling in the shawl and its confusion 

I have arrived to the convenience of sweaters and moth-balls  these days

But I still keep the potpourri in the confusion of a dark trunk, 

which encases your sacrilegious stains and shawls

And I still see the birds shitting on the fancy cars 

Each time wafts in a thought  

I forgot to tell you to park yours on the other lane

Edited by Dr Ampat Koshy 

A vintage painting by Herbert James Draper 

You are country music and cymbals

You came from within 

You with that converted eyes and 

The most tender smile 

Raised in winters

Where your home clung to summer and yellow walls

To country music and cymbals

You with that tiny waist 

Is growing up to this big beautiful woman 

Wearing in your soul the melancholy of a beautiful sky 

the moist smell of the thatched roof, 

the monsoon rain 

and the desperation of the flies and birds that took shelter in the terrace

You with a journey of childhood

and afternoon poems  

With your soul lost a bit to the gliding sea 

of earth and little dark puddles

With your face reflecting in oceans and wash basins

And the sky kissing rivers.

You saturated your soul with the music of the cliffs 

Down there, it clasped the sea and the gulls 

Submerged  in a strange singing view

You came, you went, you travelled and you changed

You happened wearing  pain though 

in crowded rooms when you hid it with your wheaten smile 

And the canopied road outside the halls were full of flocks that grazed

You came from within perching on another soul 

Naive and gullible 

Pain climbed to your dark eyes 

Time and walls had allocated a distant destiny

Searing your innocence to another arrival 

Of suffering and awareness

With struggles and conflicts

Those books you read years back and shelved 

Had gone through an evolution that followed

Holds different afflictions today.

They were closed genres in architecture of forms

You were a closed box with the history of walls where sunlight was grey

Pain holding your wrist has climbed to your shoulders

And made them strong

You came from within and everything 

And all you travelled.

Edited by Dr Ampat Koshy

Picture from the net 

Our love was an overnight bag

We never made promises

So that you never have to keep them.

We never had battles like the rest 

So no such passionate interlude ever paved

There were no edible stories, no blossomed breeze

We were in blooms within 

We had a fiction of you coming back home to me 

In tie and cufflinks 

And I had  prose of me going back to all your boundless 

caressing your inheritances 

of phobias, of fears, of nothing, 

of that little in between 

precious and sterile.

We had a surviving little nothing over dissolved and advanced

You never allowed our bodies to stain over mind

I have been safe in there, as safe

as a woman would be once hurt and in need of a haven

And I never asked you to remove our moist soil 

Unspoken, bound and betrayed within

Our love bore flowers and growth 

Each morning since then I waited for the trees adorned

and the season's been nine months 

Expecting and never pregnant

It's been so long since I have lost count of my yellow summers 

And shawl wrapped winters

They were Ruskin's seven husbands 

Loving, with rapid stubble 

But now we have our rain and betrayal

In overnight bags, packed to discretely leave rooms

Who ever said we needed spoken and shed? 

Who ever said I only believe in promises? 

Whoever said my eyelashes won't break wet when you talk of letting go.

Whoever said 

I never made you promises 

And I never have to keep them.....

Our love was an overnight bag packed to leave rooms

 

Edited by Dr Ampat Koshy 

God is grim

God is travelling through a crumbling town

Where women burn and mothers cry.

They call them insane in rich households

They call them commodity under disco lights

They call them deserving in deep dark deaths

They call them raped on wounded faces

They call them names to burn 

They kill them wearing dark coats and raucous lies

Then, they call to hide bodies and battles.

Spread over pensive and trembling, 

God is grim.

Burying their fangs and poison 

his minions twist

in polished smiles of temples layered beliefs.

There is no nation where women lived 

They lived deities, mother, wife, caretakers, 

lovers and anonymous

in honour and lineage of forced titles

With breasts, legs and desire denied.

God keeps travelling through retreating gateways

The staircase left alone had the demon climbing lifts

The bus at night travelled through invaded morals

And the village belle had a great lot of filth.

There are women and men of portraits and priorities.

They can mask you in coffins and perfumes of darkness

They can put the garland in crocodile tears

But they live like demons when god needs unleashed

They plunge their voice in unmatched god and germinated cowardice.

Exhausted, god plunged in meteors buried.

How will god happen when your blood never seek light?

God will remain mute and grim

Like an honest woman in a dishonest household

In a voice of dissent

Separated and repelled

By ones own.

God will let go in martyrdom 

In lissome bodies, in not knowing needles and pain

And infamous screams

But God needs to reclaim you and me

In an incessant spring 

In an unextinguishable light 

In our unborn beliefs. 

Photo from net