i will persist in recounting every tale i have told to myself--every lie that has stung my lips like acerbic ice candy in forty degree heat, stories in the shape of a neighbourhood named gulshan-- and a childhood that was, sadly, devoid of many flowers. 'they stopped growing around the same time my unbridled faith in the world did, you see,' i say, and you nod if only to spare my heart the dereliction summer has borne upon it-- 'because flowers do not grow in forty degree heat. and if they do, they die. bruised lips, knuckle-punched, nic nac paddywhacked by a sun that doesn't really care to see flowers standing.'
[my grandmother's favourite flower is raat ki raani-- her next favourite, the bougainvillea, because it refuses to die easy.]
until we meet, i will remain half-lies sponged in twilight ambiguity, in the coolness of eyes drawn shut in mid-morning haze, grassroot-knotted lips and celtic knot twisted tongue--i will lie on the front porch and imagine you are with me now. you see:
palm trees hunched close to the ground-- like i am--but unwilling to prostrate for fear the tarmac will burn them. you see:
television jingles melting slowly under the sun, my brain a torpid mass heat clenches its fist on--the sound of crickets in the front porch, like iron rods cracking their bones against cement--the sound, the strain, the silence of rain, toads in July, my heart throbbing in the memory of a neighbourhood that now seems far, far away--a garden where i lost all my dreams and lack the courage to orchestrate a retrieval. like rain-washed toads sliding from under iron doors i go where the world carries me.
[my mother tells me that when she was a child, they would grow black roses in the shade of mango trees, each rose--the size of a curled-up fist. black as though containing something lost.
they don't grow that way anymore.]
but until we meet again, i will dream of days of melancholia. i will grow, until we meet, like bougainvillea: haywire, directionless, and without a foot to stand on. i will grow, smaller than the black rose, curled-up fists, the sun ricocheting against blood-spattered skin
if i were to take a brewing silence and upend my cup so that it spills out of me in monsoon likeness, will you hold the small action against me?
i am tea gone cold, Griffith's lonely villa in crushed ice, snowball disguised as marble: poet's blood, an ace of hearts, teeth clenched and eyes pierced open wide by sunstriking javelin fervour. cradled beneath my tongue--the bitterness of mint lemonade, and shallow resuscitations that mind practices on memory when without words to choose from.
i am composed of nothing but silences stacked, cup by cup, atop each other: a stack so high that it has begun to droop beneath its own weight. like a skewed smile, or half a cheshire, or a crumbling elevator moonsill.
i wouldn't hold it against you, if you don't see it. i couldn't. not for the longest time.
but i chanced to look in the mirror today, at the condors that rest in the canyons below my eyes. their tongues perfect circles, beginning and ending in a place unbenownst to me. although i thought i knew it best, these days i know nothing at all. and i am tired of trying to listen to my own voice.
i wonder if you would listen to it for me.
if i were to take a brewing silence and upend my cup--when it spills, would you draw my empty notes into coherent rhapsody?
EXTRA: 21st century Rumpelstiltskin battles systemic oppression in broad daylight
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the dollarmound and the spendthrift are in cahoots with one another, the spacezoids say, 'and we are intellectual mayhem--an existence funded, legitimated by an unknown law, but validated by you!' so please hold your doorknockers to your heart, count in threes, listen to the whistles of your teapot that remind you of nuclear alarms-- a dislocation that comes from years of studying a history without ever understanding the implications. listen to the rabble, paper scrunched noses thrust beneath the door, and the cry of your own heart screaming.
a dollarmound. a spacethrift. some alien force that persists beneath the pavement, that dances and slides between doorbells and subways and trams and trains-- that solders its mettle on every pawnshop entryway, and lies in the thicket of our skins. an unsettling fog spreads over us, like veins being webbed out to demarcate the territories of our divisive DNA.
industrial mills sprawling lanky arms in dollar aesthetic--tell me, do you hear it? dollarmound? spendthrift? Rumpelstiltskin in blue jeans, with a different pair to hold each passport? the caw of the steam engine, crowds in mezzanine muzzles, a gospel choir that sings to cover the crackophony. tell me! do you hear it? do you hear the nameless vibrato? the thrum? the crescendo? the downpour? the cry
There's so MUCH to each of your LINES, they alone could be poems in and of themselves.
I'm still drooling over "upend my cup" I'm so serious. The explosive "up" repetition feels itself a contributing element in the motion of the upending image. It's like each of your poems feel as vast as a continent, and all the little details are breathing in their own life. I'm in awe of it and how much you must be putting into all of it -- emotion, words, voice, and all ~ They're brilliant!
“Did we force ourselves on you, or you on us?” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
winter settles in an opaque coat, windows brushed in silver linings spewed from some distant soap operatic star my mother watched; i recycle the same words as her to sustain myself-- 'this is just how it is, this is the world, this is you and i, and all of us in its cloister, making a pilgrimage to the same hefty societal concerns that bind us.' winter settles on the map, cold and hard, like a strong, unasked for force that grips my elbow, that sits me down the proper way, that paints me in socially-acceptable hues, and slathers my wrists in liquid frostbite.
my shoulders are weighed down by invisible metaphors i will never understand. i am told i am not supposed to understand, that winter is meant to settle, that i cannot be the summer, or spring, or the dead leaves in fall of my own choosing.
my ethnicity has become my religion has become my sexuality has become my cranial capacity has become my vernacular has become
the name i 'choose' to attach to myself, free bird mid-migration frozen in winter solstice. my mother says,
'take it, love, take the silver lining. it is all winter has left to offer your soul. and your soul is all it has left.'
i cannot feel past the walls of myself. firepits in the base of my stomach, noonday cataclysm joggling the sensation out of my chest-- i have learned what it feels like when you are too tired to breathe. you can never breathe hard enough. it's like you never tried.
i can hear the ocean rushing inside my head, i can hear you shuffle and dive, snorkeling in the morass that is me, that is my hands slipping on the silk-sheen insides of a shell with all its flesh being scooped out. call it the ninth, tenth, eleventh wonder of the world-- call it a museum, a maze, a labyrinthine episodic trial of significantly insignificant proportions--something exotic but lowly, call it what it is. call it a shell, an empty shell, a morass i cannot glut my way out of.
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