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 

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