Saturday 11 January 2014

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 

Friday 10 January 2014

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 

Wednesday 8 January 2014

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 




Monday 6 January 2014

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 

Friday 3 January 2014

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