sapna ho to bhoora

The flame on your skin leaves burnt hair brown and grey — ash-like, remnants of a doused forest fire by explorers in search for some resplendant treasure hidden in the bosom of a ragged soul, whose chuckles keep me awake in sombre daylights…

not belong

Belonging is an implicit act of dispossession. Only illusions of belonging exist — in pleasure and pain, purely existential and antidotal to existence.

I’m dismembered and will leave the world just like that, like dust.

This marriage is over, this going to a place is over. Where does one go after all? When one goes to inhabit, there is only a toilet to shit, a bathroom to bathe, fuel to cook, and sleep or not sleep with a man.

Everything else is in my eyes, hardly falling over the skin beneath it. This is what experience can give. And loving can be only this much.

You are lovely, disparate, dissolving  like a silhoutte. You’ll remain a lovely memorabilia on the wall. Like a shadow in the morning. Horny, is n’t it?

Needle, bloody pest

Why should I bloody marry? My head is splitting like giving birth to dead babies. Birthing itself is cataclysmic. I’ve lost my agility and my head is tossing with the loss of my fundamental spirit.

But what to do with this mad guy, who is mad, mad and mad…where will I find a needle like him that pricks and hems edges like a crisp horizon? Oh, the crevice of falling into decision-making!

Loving my shadow

Perhaps, I’ve swallowed some wind.

That the guzzling wind pipe is inflated

With vaporous ambivalence.

– so much can I take for falling in love 

Only that my puncturous obesity

Has descended on the mount

Clasping the chasm of masculine virility –

A hip bone

In the threshold of continuity

Holds my twitching shoulders and feet

In hours of seizure

And fatigue

Like a whisper

Clouding and gagging my shadow

Where a silhoutte

Shrinks in despair

In humiliation

Which only the benevolence

Of the mount

Can tranquilise

And put me to sleep

Between the sea and sand

I don’t know what I’m getting into by bringing another person into the scheme of running my life. Is separateness so important to choosing the dilations of existence or will mingling — so much mingling — stir the wax of imbalance in my ears and weigh down the inertia of a rotting ship in the docks?

Some ship-breaking exercise, this, it seems like. I’ll move more wayward like splinters of cast-away metal in potty workshops. A lot of dishevelling for industry — body and mind.

Perhaps the craftman is deft and has a nimble approach to scratch at flakes of scrap, so that there will be some buoyancy added to the stuff that I’m made of.

Will this set me adrift like a postmodern metal of patchwork craft on some cryptic shaft?

There’s good folklore that beckons the making of self. Perhaps, it needs the dichotomy, where the ‘twain’ works — where the present will accommodate the past, where a fish can be reborn in the same old vessel of regeneration — a timid sea. And some scrap in the dock will tease its shallow waters.

Turn, twist and hop

Strange things happen in this rush of time. While I run down the alley away from you, after pushing you to the wall, some conveyor belt bellows metallic in the dark.

The wall crumbles as you fall, with me weighing over you.

Breasts are titillating and change the gyration in a whirlpooling madness of decision-making.

Like how!

Small talk on a roof

You weigh upon my thoughts like a swollen nipple. Even a slight wind can set the open pea pod  wriggling, and make the breast feel ashamed that a beautiful, pulverised endowment on it, can’t grapple with this much exposure.

Who said the wind left me behind?

The wind had stopped beating at the door. A seasonal motif brings to closure an irate sense of urgency towards dealing with the times.

Early January mornings used to have a somersault-way of keeping things in the room at tandem. While my nose and temple twitched with sinus, the hair would size up upwards and sideways as if it were harvesting, in all its dryness, what with pongal blues.

The towel slung on the door kept at bay the noise left by the bang that bitch in my room would leave. Her feet mopped the floor with adamant flaps of a kid in a hurry. Her bloody pampered feet and rapid Malayalam for most part of the day and night over her mobile, “Aaa, chechi, I love you two, three, four…poda patti! Nyaan…manaslaiyum…,” she would mewl like a sick duck. As a cringing reflex, I would pull the towel over my head for the steam…the fumes had the ability to rarify the clouds of persistence and escape.

Somehow.

It had the same calling of foreboding in Puducherry. The fumes rose in the thickets of margazhi pani (mist) as I looked out of the hotel room. Iron rods  wilting their crucifying necks as cement dust shoved up its base to cajole it into scaling up its garrison look for the unbecoming city of Puducherry. I was mortified to watch a young labourer from behind the under-construction pillar gaze at us, tossing swiftly with the swing of the rumpling bedspreads of the hotel.

I had arrived in a sleeper bus that had a large window bringing me the moon alongside, like a pimping voyeur that filmed me half-asleep across shifting landscapes that smelled of dung and finally, some camphor and tinkling sound of margazhi rising in Tamizhnad.

Waking up in this month comes with an audacious riot of sounds from everywhere. Never seen Madurai in this calamitous reckoning when bulls would fume from their bellies and udders would get numb and agile, days before bells would toss in the air with festive glee. The mist, the dust, the wind would rake the first rays of the sun, and get tickled — how impish — and the flare up in the sky would turn its neck. A season would end with a doused-down whimper over the sand, and a loud chatter in the sky.

Margazhi is like a deafening shot in wilderness; its remoteness can radicalise the spirit or fold one’s  knees into submission.

And what a colonial tapestry in Puducherry on which I had stepped foot, on such a calling from the mist! The day had hardly seized itself. January was still young here and not paraded itself in soothe like in Bangalore. Thirupavai over the speaker skimmed the damp roads with austerity. French wine and aapam; malligai and perfume from Paris. The Union Territory was cuddled up in history, struggling for its own sky, borrowing fidelity from the neighbouring state for some Dravidian residues. Musing over Gandhi in Auroville over herbs, soiling Reebock shoes over organic farming, the town bore a cheeky resemblance to gaping revivalism.

I huddled in my jacket, uncertain of this strange mix  — bipolar slaps even now? And then after a convulsive break, a hiff-haff silhoutte came through the mist. He came unbriddled, whiskers dropping over his lips, smelling of cigarette, liquor and grass. The street of contradictions seemed to take to its feet.

With Puducherry, the wind took a turn and I braced with marghazhi, burying my convictions like a bull.

January ignites, ha ha!

Parking time…for so long, ha ha. (while Suleri gives me orgasmic delights)

Our engagement has existed on recollections. We are like relics. You evoke a past of incidents of significance and I, of fluid nothingness.

Did you have to say this?

In all, “we are good friends, but never did we gel on…” — on the swathes of desire that happens when the sky has lost its agility and left it to those who live beneath it to hold together passionately the day’s fragmented imagination.

Shall I hold these fragments in suspended desire?