Tuesday 25 February 2014

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?

Thursday 20 February 2014

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...

Tuesday 18 February 2014

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

Friday 14 February 2014

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.

Thursday 13 February 2014

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

Tuesday 11 February 2014

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.