Memento Mori

Belly and breasts
And thighs spread around
Cunt, want-wet and clamped
Around your flesh in my flesh
Red from your teeth in my flesh
Clamped down and suckling:
This is how we come together
In hollow darkness, switched off,
And the gaps of clothes rearranged.

I have your marks still,
Crescent moons of blood pale
Against my surging flesh
As your flesh pale against mine
Dark as the bruises purpling
Beneath your hands on my flesh:
This is how I remember you
In blood beneath and on my skin
In enfleshed traceries of ownership.

498-A

My torso is a drum

Reverberating under your closed fist and open hand

My back the mat

You wipe your feet on, careless, forceful.

And my breast the pillow

On which you rest your head and try your teeth.

You have taken and turned me

From human

Into furniture/instrument/tool.

You have dissected me,

Separated me into my component parts.

Tossed away every superficial thing,

Save(d) only the bare essentials.

The hands that bring you food.

The mouth that brings you love.

The throat on which you test the tenacity of your grip.

Cards

Folly to trust in a house of cards,
It tumbled so fast,
That even the ones I caught
Crumpled in my hands.
Folly, and worse, to trust in you.

Roses

I waken into reality,
Rose-tinted glasses crushed
Into bloody dust in my hands.
How many times
Have you almost killed me,
That I'm this strong?

To Errant Knights

Why did you believe this lie,
No different from all the others,
And leave, and leave me,
Mouth twisted in a snarl
To hold back sobs,
My back against the wall,
Facing, again, the world alone?

Surely you know me well enough,
Why didn't you laugh in my face
And fold me in your arms,
And let me spend all my anger,
Till I faded and let it turn to tears.
You've done it often enough.
Were you tired of being my shield?

Poor double-sided shield,
Battered at from inside and out.
I shan't blame you for growing impatient,
And leaving to find those
Who are content to be solely
Damsels in distress and
Never try on your armour for size.

Sappho

Sappho rules. Ladies, I point you to this:

Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot
and some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight
on this dark earth; but I say it is what-
ever you desire:

and this:

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

*Goes away to try and hunt up more verses*

Has one:

The night is half done,
The moon and Pleiadis have risen,
And I lie in my bed,
Alone...

*is in deep adoration of the woman*

Pome.

I am not here to ruin you.
I am already in you.
I am the work you don't do.
I am what you understand best and wordless.
I am with you in your chair and your song.
I am what you avoid and what you stop avoiding.
I am what's left when there's nothing left.
Love me hard, pilgrim.
--Sarah Manguso.

This was the poem we had to write a critical appreciation of in our Rhetoric & Composition exam. yesterday. Dunno whether what I wrote was remotely the right thing, but I love the poem. Thank you, Rimidi.

Recycling

The last of the lot.

Recycling

Tonnes of paper,
Blank, written on, scratched out,
Leaves of some literary autumn,
Letters of business and love,
Notes passed in class,
Pages torn from a diary,
Ripped from a pirated novel,
Shredded ribbons of flawed numbers,
A riot of colours spilling over margins,
Folded and cut and pasted,
Enfolding warm telebhaja.

Regurgitation

Still bored. This is all stuff I've written over the last week.

Regurgitation

Macabre clash of sword and skin,
Rose-petal fragility of carved marble,
Swirl of ethereal, beautiful chemical loccha,
Eternal perfection of a “Eureka” moment,
Blood and sweat and a life spent
Hunched over a microscope,
Chasing a dream,
Building a civilisation,
Piping with Pan
And singing with Apollo,
Drawing life into art
More human than life,
Watching blood stain the sands
At a soft-spoken word,
Millennia of effort on hundreds of pages.
“Julius Caesar invaded India in 344 B.C.”,
“Akbar built the Red Fort”,
“Leonardo di Caprio painted the Mona Lisa”,
43/100 on a History test.

Reflections

Like I said, bored.

Reflections

Gilt-edged mirrors
And broken shards,
A hundred lives
In inky words.
If the mirror pleases
And the shards wound,
Must they be swept away
Into stinking garbage bins,
And half-a-hundred lives forgotten?

Reinvention

I'm bored. And exhausted. The latter more than the former. Bear with me.

Reinvention

Uneven, weaving lines
Of hastily-scribbled letters—
Large and overly small;
Disconnected ‘e’s, ‘g’s with dangling tails;
An ink-blot drowning half-a-word;
The paper torn by the violent scratching out
Of some unsatisfactory phrase;
Faces in the margins,
Bulging eyes and bee-stung lips;
Flourishing signature at the bottom of the page.
Taken, read and typed out—
Neat and orderly,
So many soldiers marching together;
Coolly impersonal,
Artistry strangled for the sake of art.

DDMP (deep, dark, morbid poetry)

A thousand twisting desires trap me in their tangling coils,
Fill the soft darknesses of my soul with hope and hatred,
Love and despair, till I cannot think, cannot act,
Cannot stand, can barely breathe, past the tight twists
That choke my throat, crush my ribs,
And yet I must stiffen my crippled spine,
Torture my jaw into the semblance of a smile,
And do the hundred munadane duties
Of an oh-so-normal life.

Luna

Don't think I've posted these before. Sorry if I have.



Moon

I
A ghostly apparition
Wrapped in grey rags,
Flitting soundlessly
In the flickering shadows.
Wan and forlorn,
Sickly and pock-marked,
Beggar-lady of the night,
On a broken throne, the Moon.


II
Cheshire cat smile of the moon,
A ruddy sickle against a charcoal sky
Shabby in the city lights,
Robbed of regal black,
Some malevolent deity’s gleeful grin,
Cruelly amused by the shambles
Of her newly broken playground.

Scarlet

The last of that lot.

Scarlet
Pink sunbeams, falling
From a grey sky, heavy, still,
With frowning clouds,
On the unforgiving jagged rocks
Of a craggy precipice,
Uncover, with pale,
Pitiful fingers,
The fluttering of a ragged scarf,
Once bravely scarlet,
Coloured in chemical dyes,
Bought, perhaps,
From some brightly decked shop,
One of the multitudes perched on the hills,
But a little way from here,
Scarlet still,
But steeped now in natural hues,
Heavy with the life-blood
Of the twisted body,
Blown off the road by a storm,
Or tossed off it by a rock-slide,
Or maybe something as insipid
As slipping on the ever-present streams of water,
Lying in eternal rest,
Hidden between the rocks.

Charcoal

Poem no.2.

Charcoal
Large dark eyes,
Lamps of jet in an onyx world,
Stare out the broken window,
Glass shattered, grille twisted,
Encased in blackened walls
Bearing flaky paint, graffiti and spit,
At a filthy alley
Where the city’s debris
Lies in uncovered heaps.

Ash

This is the first of three that got published in the Statesman ages ago. Thought I'd share. Don't think any of you reads that paper.




Ash
Like smoke
Curling skywards from the end of a burning fag;
My thoughts heavenwards ascend.
Or mayhap, like the smoke wafting into nought,
Half-done, they die in silence
And my half-lived life
In futility continues,
Like a stamped-out, half-smoked cigarette.

The Gulmohur

Spring! *Decided to stop freaking out over PoCo. It's working. Kinda.*



The Gulmohur

The crescent branches
Bare all winter,
Wave green fans
In welcome
To the crows and sparrows,
All old, familiar friends,
Alighting on them,
Squabbling for space.
A single veiled bud unfurls,
Van-guard of the red army
Poised to invade.
The balmy breeze blows away
Winter cheer with winter blues,
And leaves me a tabula rasa,
New, untouched, hollow.

Devi

My take on PoCo. It's fairly old.

Devi

I forget who I am;
They do not talk of me
On crackling parchment rolls.
I am not preserved in vellum,
Nor handed down the ages.
The voices that sing of me,
Round the fires of the tribes,
Shall soon be silenced,
Or subdued, throats torn out.
And I shall disappear, retreat into jungles and caves.
Not die, though, for they need
Enemies to conquer and slaves to serve.
So I shall remain, scorned and spurned,
My tales warped, goddess turned maid.

A Graveyard of Leaves

Crunchy Leaf Heaven has been walled off. I got a poem out of it, though.

A Graveyard of Leaves



Russet, saffron and scarlet,
Draped ’round the protruding roots,
A rustling carpet circling the trunk,
Crisp skeletons of the summer’s leaves—
Like some gory battlefield,
Naked corpses bloodstained,
Exposed bones crushed ’neath
The shod feet of intruders,
White maggots creeping out the wounds
To creep up the visitors’ ankles—
Crunching under children’s shoes.

Somnolence

It's effing cold. It is.Really.

Somnolence

The patch of sunlight
Moving across the room
Alights on books heaped
On a table barely seen
’neath their weight,
Clothes strewn
O’er mismatched chairs,
Like kitten-battered
Balls of yarn,
A tousled head
Poking out the quilts,
Blinking, bleary-eyed.
“Please, five minutes more.
It’s too cold to move.”