Halloween

We make love you say?
What difference does it make
Anyway?

I flap my wings
Naked in my bloodbath
I scream to be heard
A bat

I bump against a tree
Its daylight
Again

I have raped myself.

Those tin drum bones
Each time
They’d rearrange themselves
To form a new face
Skulls without flesh
And as I rushed
To the attic
To find the body
The dream would break.
Each time.

Soot

Your sweat freezes
My brown sheet
Bleeds.

Wrapped in wool
I see
Your feet.

Your fire chastens me.

But my dreams
Lie burnt
In empty earthen stoves.

_ _. _ _. _ _ _ _

You stop for a brief moment.
Yesterday’s urge, petered-out, jaded
Returns.
You’ve done everything—
Showered, smiled, wiped
The newest filament of dust off your reading table.
Your theories are as sound as ever.
They only shudder at the tiniest tremor in your groin.
So you plug in your earphones
You pretend to wish people well
And effortlessly you regress to your perfect world
With a faceless shin, a nameless mouth, a shapeless tongue

Again.

Somnolence

The first time I refused
You should have pressed on.
Maybe I fell asleep then, and woke up
To the sound of blood
Flowing from consciousness
To consciousness.

But guess what?
I have refused again
This time I am wide awake
And there is just
The mirror and me.

B

On a night like this
She came on a holiday
From her land of frozen shoes.
“My little brown B” she called me.
In the far south
Where babies go to sleep in summer
And wake up as men
With toe marks on their chest,
I promised to build her a hive.
......


I knew you were born without a toe mark
The first time I licked your honey skin.
Words froze in the south
The day I stopped making shoes.
Though babies still hibernate here
They do not grow up any more.
I remember your promise
And wish you were born in a hive
I could have saved you then
From dying of a human heart.

Entr’ackte

I cross vistas
Hurriedly... butter anxious to melt.
A waiting tree scares me.
Maybe you waited
Somewhere... and I left.
Yes, maybe I was
An empty saucepan
And you really were tired
Of frozen foods.

Newer yous shag.
Some decrepit, some
Fresh from the oven.
Yes, that’s one gift
You did leave me.

Even if my groins leak
Ill still be running
With my cake
Across new vistas
Remembering you
Each time I see
A waiting tree.

Burial

Through torn strands I whisper
To battling shadows.
In their horses’ breath they utter
My name
Calling me back
To the onset of dreams.

I recall
The tunnel and its warmth
Gushing forth
In gulps of sinewy agony.
I was embalmed within its walls.

Thoughts are avalanches
Sealing tunnels.
Only shadows speak
My fossils remain...

I invoked you in all your plurality
When you volunteered your sighs
And I forsook my memories
On the frozen myth of your religion.

Believe me, your never were gone
Even in those briefest moments
When fulfilment threatened to overpower,
Or what I perceived as happiness
Shadowed your caresses.

Yes, Ive loved you
With all my virgin naivete
With all my lost tenacity.
And now at last
I know your touch.

An Other Life

Death doesn't love me anymore,
But once it did
When I stood at the threshold of the bolted door.
Were the groans of toads louder than Id imagined?
Or was my soul too full of dead flies?

Death will love me again,
Again soon.
When bleeding stories have drenched themselves
In the swamp's waters,
Full of toads' groans.

Ill unlock the door at last
And be greeted by dead flies.

Falling

Your promise
Of an unbearded moon,
My demographer’s map...
Pock marks in your soul
And love in my fist.

The lamp’s golden gate, the sky
Weeping prisoner’s tears
Smeared with dead men’s bones.

I look into your eyes
I curse myself yet again.

The rector finished quoting his psalms...
In the midst of gray stones
Shadow man, you stood kissing my palm
And killing religiosity.

Quests are dead
Seekers are ghosts
And love’s a stranger in shadow lands.

Silence raped me once
When it jarred me into speech.

Synecdoche

I.
One stroke of pastel
Numbing heartbeats
The bees came in great numbers
Bearing pastels in their stings.
The numbness overwhelms...
The bees don’t judge, only sting.
Probably they too love me.
I could discern in their drones
The sound of breaking glass.


II.
The hubbub spoke of sirens
And of Althusserian strangers
One danced the hula
Another stood on tiptoe on the ledge
And a third flew away with the bees.

Naked swords
Alice’s quest for her lost dream......
The soldiers knew the familiar stories
They had once crawled through rabbit holes.

On what basis should you lay down your naked swords?
Or put your vagina on display?
Poor Alice has only been raped thrice—
Her wonderland isn’t far away.

Pic: Courtesy of Insiya

Cardboard Boxes,
Stories trapped within,
I beat carpets clean.
Dust from the boxes
Residues of rides flown,
Each a ghost.

Lost— ancient tribes
Made of stone.
The sea’s ripped heart
The sargasso’s groans
The tribes chant within the boxes.

Should I, Could I let them out?
Drown the box in the sea’s blood?

The stories have no end
The dust settles right back
My hands are tired
The groans are louder.
I know— I must have let them out
Long, long ago.

For Maximo

And it goes on...
The axis tilted to the right—
Muscles sagging
The blind cop trying to see,
The scars on his face
Hushed like lenses.

The urine never smelled so strong before
Now it bloats the drainpipes of the mind,
As arteries desiccate with each heartbeat.

Gone are words,
Only bones remain
And skin that barely contains them.

It goes on...
The dance of the vagabond adolescent
His name was pity.

(this was inspired by Auraeus Solito's film The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros)
Pic: Nathan Lopez as Maximo

Inertia

It’s a performance. And we perform— love, lust, hate— the repetitive, recurring cycle of it all. The first time one is never so conscious. Somehow things feel natural. And a part of the mind successfully manages to convince itself the ‘genuine’ness of the performance. Yes, maybe one does feel ‘genuine’. When one kisses for the first time, one does manage to think that somewhere ‘emotion’ was involved.

But things change— one learns, or rather, unlearns. And suddenly, one even knows. One has been performing all along. Denying it any longer is hypocrisy with the self. So, one accepts it and things fall into place once more. One can perform each emotion with ruthless precision— so precise that it threatens, only briefly, by seeming ‘almost’ real..... The ‘almost’ remains. Yes, one learns...

Jouissance

Perverse, you! Spooj bath...pain, you. Teeth that chew...and teach—joy? Groans, drones...you knew! Eroded, you. Sanguine monologues— we don’t bleed on the virgin bed. We, not you!...we don’t pray, we preach. We, not you!...we can’t love. Yes we, not you!

Pic: Joe D'Alessandro, Andy Warhol's friend (1973)

Play

They keep coming
Four…three…two…one…

Four—
Slimer

Ready to slobber and slurp
All fed and bloated
You hear him fart.

Three—
The pointed heels
Have travelled from sepia to colour
Back to sepia again.

Two—
The hour of drag
Sunsign chains, good coffee, bad fucks.

One—
No one
The sound of brush

Whitewashing.

Wicker chairs, little flies,
So many stories, so many lies,
Little flies—tell me where you’ve been
Tell me what you’ve seen,
Of those straw-hat dollies
On the wicker chairs, unwither’d.

Or the little blue umbrellas
On which sit the black-feather’d pigeons.
Cruel pigeons, who refuse to tell me stories
Only mutter in their gibberish tongues.

I was scared of your groans
Scared also of the flies (who visit the dead)
Scared that someone would steal my dollies
Or they would get up and walk away.

Until I realized
That the bamboos too were dead
Dead yet waiting
They couldn't get up and go,
Like my dollies, like me.

Frozen Overture

It was three then—
You nestled your nightmares into my lap and crooned.
With fingers of frozen mist I stroked your hair
And pried open your clenched fists.
I sang to your closed eyes
Anchored in my tune
I thought I was safe.

It was three when—
I had wanted you to show me the vacant moon
In the only way I knew how.

Its three now—
You know mist thaws
Once your fingers have warmed.

And mine weren’t even human.

Were you hungry tonight?
If they had words
They could have painted your tears.
When was it you last saw
That pyramid of skulls,
Where moonlight shines thru the slits
That were once your eyes?

Ill take you to her
She’ll turn you into raindrops
And sing you the lullaby the leaves sang
When they lusted for autumn.
She’ll show you the door to the pyramid’s heart

And youll be hungry no more.

Skulls ramble
Wolves wag their tails when they hear the familiar voice.
Scratch, Scratch— dried leaves on marble
Sound of tears...
The specter weeps? below?
Little Bo-Peep will find his sheep
A carcass now, after the wolves have done with it.
Do skulls laugh too?
Yesterday was again a Sunday
They found him beneath the marble.

He must have let his wolves loose upon himself.

A decade ago…
When I began my journey from the wolf’s skull,
I didn’t know Id end up—
Following its howl.
Now Ive seen myself in the moon
Walked the lines on my palm
Until they met at a crossroads
Where the moonman dances his naked dance
And howls the wolf’s howl.

A decade hence…
Im leaving the crossroads
Where the wolf was shot dead by the silver bullet.
The paths have bled and drowned in red—
The moon’s shadow in my eyes.
My palms were too small to hold it.
Ive skinned the dead wolf
And from my severed skull begins his journey—
The stranger wearing the moon.