Regret

Don’t get me wrong –

I’m happy I’m here, drifting in your arms-chest-neck as we whisper our love (for fear of overzealous adults); I am happy, yet somehow it seems that I was happier still months back, when I was lost in wistful contemplation of this very summer afternoon; then, when outside it had raged anemic, and Desire had not known where to exhaust herself.  Your

Phantasm then had seemed yet more vigorously alive, real, stirring with animation, and your lips had been heavily pregnant. And

I had been happier still, lying with you on the silver screen of my feverish famished imagination, than I am now, with the merely-satisfied present: where the minutes fall heavy and mute from totalitarian clocks. I

Had been convinced, then, that I should explode on meeting you – thus released convulsively from the thrusting, expanding tension straining against the confines of my skull; that my eyes should melt from the heat of your presence, from seeing you in a place other than the marshes of my facile dreams; and yet:

Here I am, and here you are, and

I am adrift in impotent poetry.

Impoverished senses of mine; incompetent! Incapable of keeping up with the battering-ram of your presence, choose this virile hour to turn dull and philistine. Oh, that I shall peer upon this day down the looking-glass of Idle Recollection, seated upon the stale and mildly uncomfortable armchair of Nostalgia, and berate myself bitterly for not:

Pressing you harder to my breast, that a sliver of you

May diffuse into me, and for not

Entwining inextricably with your

Arms-legs-neck, that

A solitary flutter of your

Eyelashes against my right cheek

Forever beats

As a butterfly against the confines of

My stomach, and for not

Losing my fingers and resolve in your Tagore-scented hair.

Chrysopoeia

My love is pewter.

Given to base grunting, and rude
And crude
Expressions of vulgar desire.
Bite the stannic apple.

Part your
Hair and whisper in your creamy ear
Forbidden nothings.
Watch you squirm and undulate
Under the influence
Of Scandal™ (that mutable aphrodisiac).

Laying the slushy foundation for the
Oncoming bloom of
Flowers of consummated passion.

Nurture with a caressing word.

Until the ancient madness that courses through
Our veins comes to a head:
Waters the lakegarden, exhausts itself.

And out of the dirt, beauty.
Out of the mud, a quivering lotus.

Almost immediately despising its roots --
A saint rising on verdure nobility of birth above
the condescended huddled filthy masses.

Pure, friable, innocent, prodigal.

The urgency eases cataclysmically into a benign, golden mood, and
The alchemy is complete. 

Crystals

This sweet agony that stems from my
Nucleus accumbens -
Down my spine
Down the veins of my right arm
Down to you.

This touch -
A feather tickling a hole into a corner of my
Brain;
Oh.
Oh would it that I could
Capture one or two of these tumbling, fumbling 
Pleasure crystals and save them for
A moonless day,
When the lack of a person streams in through
The blind-ed windows, and
When my midnight coffee foxtrots
With my restless tongue,
And the smell of wetness just won't go away.

Back Home

The sun is violent.
He splays corpses of your fingers across
My lips;
Blurry gray scars spear across
My face
And the furrows grow deeper

As the day ages.

We are drawn in graphite,
And time is smudging Us.

Your kohl’d brown eyes have
Cold, mischievous tiger-tints to them

That I have never seen before;

What defining, independent memories are they

In possession of, that they hint of such

Depth?

Your tresses still fall on tip-toes

On my chest, my neck, my face;

Curling, burning tongs that tease!

Yet if I look closely enough

I can just make out the flecks of maturing

White, where there was earlier only stubborn

Solidity.

We are drawn in graphite,
And time is smudging Us.

I am caught in the rainbow-strings that

Are woven in-between your refracting spectacles.

I used to shimmer effervescent in

The levity of the twin mirrors they shield:

Now I can drown myself

In the liquid complexity of my rendered reflection.

I can see myself, and

Then you again, and then me again;

We’re locked in the infinity

Of a shared look.

The sunlight finds relief in

Depressions that weren’t there before;

Ridges that were full;

Confident laughter where there was unsure timidity;

A measured step where there was puerile unboundedness;

Layered inflections of speech compete on your tongue; speech

That was earlier unhewn, and now bounces

On polished wheels.

Wrapped in the cocoon of our minds, we

Are changing.

I gaze in wonder at this woman

Who is the living image of the gurgling girl

I fell in love with, so many sunsets ago.

We are drawn in graphite,

And time is smudging us

And is adding new squiggles

And shifting colour and definitive

Lines; we are changing

And it shall take time to learn how

To love this new person – maybe a

Day or two.

And then we shall frolic in each other’s

Minds, as we did before.

…

I kiss your concerned lips as they ask

Why I look so thoughtful, and grasp you in a hug;

Maybe if I hold you close enough, for

Long enough,

We shall diffuse into each other

And fate shall grant Us amnesty.

…

Your house catches fire,

As the sun gloriously climaxes

And orange juice spills all over the linen of

The sky, staining,

And the world burns in frenzied animation

For a few minutes, until the night

Douses everything in cool darkness.

why not

the lack of a person storms in through the blinded windows like a moonless night or a jar of unrhyming cello notes sprinkled upon the ground and stared at or a tear drop given birth to and abandoned or a child stabbing an electric socket with a fork over and over and over again until the socket keels over and dies or an old man who exists only in my head or me sitting and trying to justify and rationalize the mundanity of this post-sadness day as an event to be built upon, the foundations of what the adult world calls maturity maybe i wish i could just stay enveloped in a hazy daydream

Guilty Nothings ('Happy Birthday')

...

These
Girls
And boys are
Ghosts. They meet me every day
And go home and die and reanimate
Before they meet me again, tomorrow. 

They whisper in my right ear
Drunken soliloquies, and
We pretend that each is another
And satisfy ourselves.

...

The sunlight on your leafy
Veranda was real. It burned a tattoo on

My right forearm as I lay with you, down
On your veranda, as
We scandalized your neighbours.

The broken metal chair on that
Veranda was real. I used to look
At it while you undressed
Your fears for me, sometimes; sometimes
You'd undress your ears and naked,
They were so shy. They
Used to surface, and peek out at me (sometimes)
From underneath
The sea of your hair.

Your childhood clock
That hung from your bedroom wall was real.
I took the broken chair, and
Flung it against your
Bedroom wall, and it hit your clock and
Time burst
Into a million pieces of
Old plastic.
And we smiled and held hands
And later, on your bed, measured out the rest of the day
In each other's heartbeats. 

Your glass-walled eyes were as large as
Cigarettes, as
They watched me roll a tube of herbal
forgetfulness;
And soon it was done, and we 'borrowed'
Your father's lighter, but the flame
Was inside us.

And I would steal
Coloured bottles from
The glass cupboard, and
Dilute my blood to the
Soundtrack of your nervous laughter,
As you delighted in vicarious
Guilt.

And naked you were the day
We smoked the drowsy stars on the
Quilt of your parents' bed.
And we both exploded.

The quilt caught the charred feathers;
They floated on the quilt before
They dissolved into nothingness
And we dissolved into nothingness
And nothingness dissolved with us.

And for an infinite second,
The mind stopped. The pale

Fear that like fire feeds

Off the crosses of our lives

Died like Christ, and was replaced

By a benign vacuum (nought).
We only
Heard the ticking of the
Bedside clock, and
The snores of your dog, as she slept, and
Each other's ventricles as they
Pumped away dully; like an ancient
Beast who has forgotten why she
Exists.

A damp scent lay heavy, as a reminder
Of the fate of requited love.
You wore the quilt like a bridal gown
And we galloped away into an all-forgiving slumber.

...

How can this much happiness be immoral?

...

I remember your 18th birthday. I remember looking at you from across an over-priced-pasta laden table, while you laughed like a demented penguin at some joke our friends made. I smiled and mouthed sweet nothings at you, and you giggled and darkened to the colour of your dress. I remember how afterwards at your house I reclined on your bed as you washed up in the little washroom adjacent your little room and your mother cooked biryani for us and your father played with your overweight Labrador retriever. I remember thinking that right in this moment--within the span of this infinite second--I was safe inside the bubble of my happiness. I was happy.

I am happy. 

Happy birthday, Dani. I hope you like your gift.

Dadaist

I just realized. I can do anything. Anything. Anything. 

I start with this blog post. I have never posted anything except poems/stories which on re-reading sound like someone put honey powder in a glass of water and swirled it all around. That changes now.

I wish you could feel me. It's so... liberating.

I could make up a metaphor-like simile which makes no sense, and claim that it makes sense to me. And then you would think hard, and realize with a whooshy sigh that it indeed does make sense, and that I'm right. Except that I'm not.

Why does this blog exist? 

Hi, you. You, who are reading this. Why aren't you talking to me instead? Send me an email. Call me, definitely. Discuss the span of your mind until the day wakes up. Are your thoughts linearly independent? Do our basis vectors match? We should be friends. Hi.

Cat.