Saturday, 28 December 2013

Old Man Parkstreet.

Music wafted out to the thoughts on the street,
wandered down the noisy alley

Full of old ballads etching each arch;
Staring whimsically at the crowded eateries
Through puffs of smoke and memories.
Firm and young were those days
Still the acrobat jigs within with each visit.

Books littering the street got some unfastened stories.
Of love and liquid women
Of coming and never leaving.
Perhaps so many of them got carried away to different shelves
Some limping and some martyred.

There were musicians and lovers, dancers and bards
'This street throbbed with live bands at night,
serving perennial morning coffee'
I saw nostalgia creeping up her warm eyes.
'We visited Mag’s when I had little money
She loved the tea in there as I loved the smile '
He sighed
I live in the nostalgia of wandering times
Years I sat enthralled, a bride,
little more than a child on a new street,
with thirsty eyes to live some golden mornings and pink nights.
sharing brewing cups of yesterday and today
with an old man and his beautiful memories
so full of 'The Street' beneath.

An ensemble of mansions stood hemming my fairy tales ,
corralling an expansive sky
Roofing within my right to fiction.
Of changing leaves and bleached views
Of changing vignettes and different tongues -
Of sweaty dance floors and of flesh(l)y cravings.

Spirits and the Spiritual in cassocks both walked these streets.

The white sahiba with their Derby hats left much in the brown in me.
Love came clutching
when my old man's bright shiny eyes
lived with his memories of his Armenian girlfriend
in a sixties town across the road.
And when the chanteuse locked herself out to work
the blues danced and glances devoured.

The Armenian and the French both lived in pieces
Smooth and on the rocks  
So did the emerald flowers and the red hammers on the wall.
Each saw its day,
arrive and loosen its way
in a spacious gigantic history
of apolitical warm croissants.

Shared with a long gone husband
left like those generous tips on the tables
and the conditioned air smells stale.
choosing between  now and then
full and devoid of remains.
A strange city aches within,

The sap-green moss clings to the neighbouring cemetery walls
as monsoon submerges all and death
and some unkempt story lies,
enclosing a tale untold.

Each has to travel to timely and untimely deaths
Many years had to begin here and had to end.

The cuisine sends its aroma afloat
of grilled ducks and buttery lamb chops
then came the American burgers and intervened
They came, they conquered and they remained.
Enjoyed with two little hands and delight
Each story has different times.

My old man planted the flowery trees
that grew outside our window.
Did he know I would arrive some day
and see the flowered boughs?

Behind the flowers the street still lives
with inconsistent humans and consistent memories.
And all the sins have found its way to churches.

So they renamed it after a saint.

But Old Man Parkstreet will remain in you and me
Tucked in my eyes and its nostalgic other side.

Parkstreet (Photo from the net)

There were holidays in the bend of your lips

There were holidays in the bend of your lips
Shivering in the shimmer of your lipstick mark
You left on the coffee mug

standing solemn on the kitchen sink
There were holidays in the kohl of your laughing eyes
Flowering the debris of love and despair
Spiralling into the deliberate erotic of bound and vacillating
There were holidays in your arms
Which drew me to journeys of gardens and terraces
The analogy of carnations and blue sky
There were holidays in the touch of your fingers along the artefact
I cherished
They strolled from your fingers,crossed the origin
and met the feasible arterial of aesthetics
My holidays travel with you like day
And devour you like night
I have been on this holiday ever since we met
Ever since you came close
Ever since you touched
Ever since you hung on the ambarella tree outside
With moonlight and dark hair


On this lazy Saturday afternoon
I am sitting with my coveted pickle jar from mum's pantry
she left for days,

when I don't feel like cooking and there is only bread.
These remind me of holidays of origin and ripeness
These remind me of moist you and slithering jellyfish
There were holidays in the sadness of your eyes
You turn away and all the holidays leave me, go out of my life.








Edited by Dr Ampat Koshy
 

BLUE=GREEN JAR WITH BACK-LIT FLOWERS -- Elizabeth Blaylock

Monday, 23 December 2013

When last Autumn I visited your house

There were lilies in your garden,
when last Autumn I visited your house
They were so large, fragrant and proud
and we stood so full of everything and sunshine.
Outside, your white walls
amidst their pink warmth,
as if sharing secrets I longed to tell you.
Amidst their numerous
And my disbelief, we discussed love
and spring.
I suppose they never told you
We talked about flower men and crushes,
How I blushed
as they swayed in laughter with the breeze
I suppose they never told you
How they felt
when you left footmarks by their side
How they missed you
And ached for your tender, warm fingers
I suppose they never told you
I too left my footmarks that morning,
I wanted yours to cover mine.
I wanted them to kiss your feet
like a dying man kisses his would be widow
for that one last time.

Sitting years later in a december afternoon
I want to go back to your autumn Lilies
Just to ask, 'Did the footprints meet?'
and leave it unspoken "Do you still grow lilies?"

Picture from the net 

Lilium Candidum by Svetlan Stefanov







    Sunday, 22 December 2013

    I will write you letters this winter


    I will write you letters this winter
    When the snow falls and the fire crackles
    I will race over those alphabets
    Lingering on ones I felt
    When I stood under the warm sluicing water
    and you were mist across the shower of rain
    I caught a glimpse of you in the golden sunlight
    outside the deep green curtains.
    I will hold you in coherent coincidences
    And I will refuse to turn the page
    I will sit with mulled words and live in exuberant summers
    When the ascending spirals of smoke groan wet
    Ebbing away the sensation that leaped up the chimney
    I will know you were hanging on to the soot.
    You were holding on and clinging to my roof.
    I will look at you as tenderly as the moon
    Looks at the frozen icicles that remain on the branches
    When every living room will be swarming with unions and laughter
    This Christmas
    I will write you letters under the mistletoe
    I will not proliferate or pluck my history from yours
    I will let my now and then merge in yours
    I will not let the distance long or throb
    I will let us squeeze and snuggle into a poem
    When passion will river on my soft swollen syllables
    I will unfasten the violet from my ink
    and spill all over you,on and again

    I will write you letters till the winter ends.


    Friday, 20 December 2013

    Poor,yours and defined

    I want to meet you over heartbreaks
    When your eyes will caress the purple rings under mine,
    I want to meet you across closed doors
    When we just have memories spilled across the sides,  
    I want to meet you over your crumbling years
    We won't have our passionate denials,
    I want to meet you over some  infidelities
    I will dissolve myself in contained deities with my religion traversed.
    I want to meet you over fun, frolic and picnics 
    I can be wary of your eyes following  me in weightless love
    I want to meet you in insomnia 
    In silent darkness, on a pink bedspread, in timeless connival of moist cocoa butter
    seething restless on my misty skin
    I want to meet you when you walk away
    When I go prophetic to deny my blinding fears
    I want to meet you in a cemetery, exhausted over bodiless souls
    Who knows, you may descend to the memoirs on the pungent smell
    You may return to the madness of love and life 
    I want to meet you in hospital beds
    My last wounds will birth you in healing. 
    I want to meet at the church then 
    To belong and to be your bride. 
    Dressed in all that finery of convictions 
    Rich, poor, yours and defined.

    Sunday, 1 December 2013

    Sometimes I Confuse You, Don't I?


    Sometimes I confuse you, don't I?
    Then again I love our confusion
    You are like that enormous scar on my mind
    Visible silence of timeless exile 
    Hanging between clean and soiled
    Forever hanging to unhurried seasons 
    Spread out on a construct of society 
    You are like that sunlight who caress the virgin snow
    I sought your splendour 
    To win my battles 
    Your silence bristling within
    Made me limp, even when I lost my strength to walk.
    I love our confusion
    Travelling over the crumbling, threatening clouds 
    Often when dusk descended to my street and your hair 
    I opened my eyes to your day sweating all over me.

    I Was Living In Fragments

    I was living in fragments
    As I meandered in the illumined
    I was living in seasons
    As I wafted up the steps of time
    Perhaps I found a country
    coiled in your eyes
    And I stood a nomad at your journeys end. 

    Saturday, 6 July 2013

    Certain Monsoon Smell

    Brown skinned men walk the street
    Dark rain clouds adrift 
    Deep in their travelling hair
    I see a garden of pilgrim towns
    Seen and Unseen. 
    Lament must have been born 
    Each time it promised to rain. 
    As they travel this hymen of stillness 
    Clung to them certain monsoon smell.

    For My God

    All my poetry is spent in you
    Sometimes I have nothing more to offer 
    Except a day's empty cup and my conditioned belief
    You happen to me and then magic begins 
    Of this remarkable journey 
    From me to you and you to me. 

    Saturday, 25 May 2013

    I Have Finished Crying

    I have finished crying.
    I cry no more.
    I wept months for you
    Stained shadows left on the bed sheet 
    Need to be washed, dried and ironed.
    Everything's on as before 
    The tea tasting the same,
    The crows knocking on the pane,
    Morning sunlight framing the shadows.
    You and me stand buried deep in a frame
    ... Amidst monsoon symphony
    A decade since followed. You fled when all lies caught up with us.
    Every morning the smoke mounts to burning eyes
    I sit forever with the tea
    holding a habit as ancient as hope.
    Waiting for you to return from all those roads that lead you astray
    Waiting for you to keep those promises
    Waiting for you to look at our baby 
    Postponing living each day....
    Swaying days and flipping pages over
    As if today doesn't matter
    I have finished crying 
    I cry no more.

    Sunday, 12 May 2013

    I Was In Love...

    He talked of his home, his mom,
    The sandalwood forest left behind.
    He talked of those private isles with brick walls,
    where human vendettas pulverise bonds.
    Innocently he kept at it, our conversation....
    Of existence, of myth, of geometry, of an unrealised God.
    I didn't know what he was searching under a cerulean sky.
    I didn't know what had tilted in my perfectly reasoned life.
    I listened to those tangible callings that tempted him to chapels
    of deeper belongings tucked in those white cassocks and brown skin.
    He left home when he was 16
    That white bearded man who came to his house 
    Spoke of Christ and meaningful existence gracing life.
    The smoke misted my eyes
    The beckoning coffee grew dark
    I drank in that exquisite response of memories that evade one in solitude
    It had the fragrance of a known sea fish curry of his village 
    and of a diaphanous adolescence that was tucked between us.
    'Still in the abandoned compost of human roots' I thought
    The relentlessness of my poem was building 
    as his voice was kneading our evening together
    With nostalgia, with echoes, with tenderness, with the humidity of love 
    Impossible! Impossible!
    I was looking at a man 
    Who had rolled in the sheet of yesterday's to opt for powerful humanitarian tomorrows.
    How can I bind him to a home of separate times?
    There will be the hum of cicadas and our laughter mingled with summer evenings....
    There will be a red pathway to our small brick house....
    He fondly told me about those lovely nieces and their contained happiness.
    I saw him holding our child 
    Darkly compelling they cradled a little closer 
    Appreciatively I surrendered to the morsel I picked from the plate
    The flavour burst in on me 
    I surrendered to that orchestrated dangling fiction for a while,
    of different syllables and of soft indispensable yearnings.
    He asked me, 'Where are you, darling? You seem to have gone from this table and you heard nothing '
    Rinsing that image, dispensing off the words
    Red faced, I looked at him
    There was mannerly desire in his eyes
    Isn't that obvious? The human monk
    'How revered he is! God acknowledges him as his truly wedded son
    His ascetic leanings stood upon the permanence of a buried past and a coffined future.
    'His today and tomorrow ruthlessly contained in God , our dark haired dimpled babies remain unborn'
    The cool lobby of an achingly turquoise evening was turning blue
    Collecting the moorings of our cherished togetherness 
    It was time to move on. 
    I stood up to walk back to my life of a separated wife
    And he to one of a betrothed monk.
    We had our reasons, unreasonable as they come.
    Our lives mingled, did sit together enigmatic and knowing one evening.
    The sumptuous had to end. 
    Don't they all end to begin?
    Festering thoughts of love, of home, of cravings, of him snaked through me.
    An architecture of awakened longings of man and woman 
    As ancient as time.
    All that poetry felt in the memorandum of moments are unplaceable belongings of flesh.
    Soaked in flesh was I?
    I wanted him to sin, i wanted to be the event for once...
    I wanted to silence those rosary beads rolling in his heart
    I had crossed leaving him on the other end, I despairing looked back for that one glimpse
    My heart flipped...
    He stood there watching emptied of the filth of human wants
    That radiance was almost Godlike!
    I was in love, in love with a monk...

    All My Dreams Were Caring Women

    All my dreams were caring women with hips and generous bosoms.
    With the tender moon tucked within
    With every disenchantment in their stride
    They always walked back home 
    religiously, oh so religiously every night 
    without pleading with the closed doors
    to unafraid beds violating the nightmares seen
    They were caring women with forgiving hearts and large kind eyes
    I always knew all my dreams were Mother's within. 
    They let go of all the verses that had baubles of disdain
    I always knew all my dreams were Women within 
    They let go of every stab, every excess untold
    I always knew my dreams never trembled 
    even when nightmare played out its role
    They were compassionate women with tender smiles and loving arms.

    Sunday, 28 April 2013

    When the moon bathes you silver


    When the moon bathes you silver
    and you are a little navy blue inside
    The skin stands anchoring 
    both the sparkling silver 
    and the midnight blue. 
    They converse, 
    'You have been there before'
    Silver smiles back and says,
    'You will be there again.
    So? Who did she deny?'

    We shared flower-talks

    We shared flower-talks 
    of roots and wings
    of Iron clangs 
    And a fragrant mind
    Of broken rays
    And the breaking light
    Of perennial sins 
    And shadowed penance
    We talked deep into the violet night 
    You let the ivy climb on me
    Melting grief in your poetry I held 
    You promised 'We will soon disembark to a promising dream
    of happier times. We will both be walking free.'
    Why did you create the shadow of a night?
    That folds in memories...
    My heart stained of promise and deceit
    Wanted to wipe that long buried cold disdain.
    Too many tongues mingled to redress the lost and the stolen
    Too many houses lay reeking of moist and grandiose moments
    What was I searching in you last night 
    the reassurance of revolutions or happier times?
    The flickering candles melted to death to render me presence.
    My cold sweat smelled of lemon grass and cinnamon 
    As you talked deep into my soul of a widowed bride
    who wears vermilion to justify the false patriarchy of infidel men.
    We talked till the night bled out
    To a pale pulverized morning...
    Something you took from me last night
    the essential thread to weave again 
    the crimson marigold and the fair jasmine 
    Some mornings I sit by, rooted next to the fragrance
    In the stomach of hope and despair clutched to dissolve silence.

    Sunday, 7 April 2013

    Beside the Moss Covered Tree


    Beside the moss covered tree
    The white house lives
    With cherry red windows.
    Silently arrayed
    In curtains and solitude
    The capering stories travel.

    Untranslatable and moist.

    Sunday, 31 March 2013

    We Left Our Fingerprints and Footprints



    We left our fingerprints and footprints
    all over the sand.

    Standing at a distance,
    I find the sea stealthily stretching
    to collect the luminous.


    Yours afflicted

    And mine overturned ...

    Through the Open Window


    Through the open window moon peers in and runs
    It is a naughty child's play 
    She taps the pane of every window 
    Robbing the black night as she passes 
    I chase and lift the curtains 
    She escapes to the next pane.

    I go as far as the last arch ... 
    My sight breathless in its hunt 
    She leaves me staring at the leaving trail ...
    Poignant, I say, why then? 
    She stared back then, that smile got slivers of moon. 

    My heart can't fare the distance ... 
    I turn around
    She had jewelled the dark plant in the room.


    Saturday, 16 March 2013

    This is My New Home

    Sometimes I just want to find my way back home mom 
    To your beloved mornings of faith
    When I simply woke up to those motes of dust 
    Shining in thin air little playful with the sun.
    To patterns of expected life
    When you would pack my tiffin with all those colours
    Of everyday love of a caregiver.
    To rustic deliverance of your simple rights and wrongs
    As mundane as your archaic beliefs 
    And deep within I was besotted to the pursuit of an alchemy. 
    I want to walk back to your dreams and simple beliefs 
    of mediocrity, of stability, of unshakable love;

    My pursuit of alchemy brought me 
    To towns of psychedelic lights
    To music and laments 
    To jewels and narcissi 
    To debauchery and to towns 
    where it rains and clouds 
    And it clouds and rains again.

    When it rained then I would get drenched tossing my curls 
    The passion and plague of a teenage heart lived.
    Each drop was festive as end of it all you drew me back to your beloved toiling arms. 
    When it rains now I just look at the colourful umbrella in the corner
    I watch it rain from my window I fear going down 
    I stand protecting my own 
    I don't let the rain wash away the remnants of my home. 

    I remember you said, this is my new home.