When Time falls like crystals

Love poem, not again

2012-01-01T02:14:00.002+05:30

Travelling with your soul in a suitcase

at 4 am in the morning.

You know,

the winter sun can be such a bitch in the closet

moving through the mist of the red garment.

The train has arrived,

there is blood in your kingdom of love;

women move in and out through doors

and Raphael stares like a beast from the clouds,

on the ceiling there are faces of angels

you lust for in sleep.

So you’re in your room,

with junk, weed and coffee

with lovely eyes and breaths of grass.

Polish the face of the sun

with lizard’s claws in a black shoe-case

and the mirror that blackened your soul

Travelling in a blue car across sunset,

you remember women with Nazi lips

who carried bombs inside their pink ribbons,

you fill the suitcase with mutilated women,

their breasts, thighs and lips jostling for air

and send them in trains through the blue sunset.

Naked American stripper on the highway,

her limbs chopped off, her voice glassed

like dried grapes in the sun;

pack her fingers with the moon

and spice up the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,

feed her bones to the cannibals in the woods

and honour her as the last saint of modern art.

Preserve her breasts in vinegar and salt

as the last example of colonial peace.

You know,

I’m travelling with my soul in a suitcase

at 4 am in the morning

but you’re still unafraid to confess

that you love me,

can’t you see that every bitch with nuclear power

is trying to bomb us left and right?

Even my neighbour’s dog seems to be complaining;

Poems?

Right, it has come down to sentences,

even words,

your letters have been flushed down the toilet.

So I’m in your room

growing my hair long,

tattooing every inch of my dark skin

and living on wine and Radiohead.

This country seems to have lost it

(just like me, must I say)

fighting for a bill in the parliament

like babies fight over broken toys.

I wasn’t complaining,

riding to the market on Sundays,

you’re with your mom and turned away,

really girls can be such bitches when their moms are nearby.

I could have puked, I tell you

back from Criticism class on Wednesdays

and imagining you in my arms naked all these years.

The room was dark

and I had put on the Ninth Symphony,

my lungs felt heavy and full of shit.

Outside there was a man selling ice-cream

like corporates ferrying a degree,

For some hours, I lost track of time.

-2-

Thomas, Thomas

the telephone is ringing,

it’s been quite a while;

it’s 1945

and Annie has passed away,

she has swallowed pills, you tell me

no, no, I believe she was killed.

The Jews are praying for a sun

inside their blue chambers,

I fancy being Satan at times, it’s fun.

After breakfast, it’s 2010,

it’s always 2010 after breakfast

and 1945 after lunch and dinner.

What is Ophelia doing behind the leaves

playing with radioactive waste,

posing nude for Picasso in haste?

Ophelia, isn’t it?

Going round and round in sleep

with sex toys and…

So, the street-lamp spluttered,

So, the street-lamp gnawed,

Ah, you’re back again, scream.

“Yes”, the street-lamp cried,

“Yes”, the dark sky cried,

“Because you are back thinking in circles,

nth time and Zeroth time,

inseminated time and test-tube time,

dilated time and inflated time,

Alice’s dream and…”

Yes, Alice it is, Alice it will be,

going down the time hole

in a TV commercial,

I was watching a Tarantino film

and with closed eyes could picture

a beer can on the white sands amidst the swaying coconut trees,

Time can be an androgynous, self-copulating beast,

sterile, deprecating, having endless periods.

Somebody nailed the clock to the moon.

-3-

Bitch on the wall,

you’re provoking me again,

this is my last joint, I assure you

(as if you are ever watching me)

I’m so fucked up that I can’t help it.

And after this, I promise

I will try to write a nice, polite poem,

try to resurrect your letters

and dial your number.

Please, pick up the phone.

Prufrock

2011-08-26T03:11:00.000+05:30

Prologue

We were seated on the wrong side of the room. You could stare through him like glass and see the streets and women flow like arguments. He had the breath of chalk and soul of the yellow fog that rubs its tail in the sunlit breeze. You could feel him wound up like the soul of a bird in the yellow fog and slither out of smokeless chimneys into the city. He was at motion and rest as he filled the room like music...women with braceleted arms and bare breasts in lamplight, had golden hair and spoke like dust. The music flowed through trees, through empty streets and teaspoons of vanishing breath.

The universe panted...

the universe rubbed her breasts and arms

on the naked body of time,

the universe spat out a symphony

with golden hair and panting lips

across the slender, white fingers of the sea.

And then I measured time in teacups

as the universe, pinned to her dress

wriggled in pain.

Mon amour

Footmen with porcelain lust

lay sprawled along the body of the universe

squeezing it into the voice of time.

“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”

I am not silence, I am not time, I just pretend. But then, I am almost you.

His speech came from hollowness and non-being. That he lived and loved,

that he sat across the table was enough. I and you can be you and I or just I.

A letter. A mask.

We shall wait, we shall wait

Phantom of motion,

Phantom of time.

We hide, I hide inside the mask of the universe. Soft, cold nothing. The

universe weeps.

Mask

-1-

Sunshine spilled like cold laughter on deserted streets,

black rain on the last fragment of song,

People walking in the lilac soul of rain, transparent.

Escape the salt and mist of rooms

built or imagined in after-thoughts,

and the ecstatic murmur of women

vanishing in clock and sunshine.

For the evening in a thin musk of sweat

between your breasts, smells like grass

and you are the child of sunsets.

We shall wait, we shall wait

like empty time on sand and slate

for our last July morning.

Splash the oil and paint across the windows,

where old men sit and dream in rain,

across the dust and breath of twisted sunsets,

the last empty mask of purple recompense.

-2-

And again, you sacrifice horses in glass

to smear their blood on window panes.

You draw curtains on cities on the shore of magic,

Memory of smoke fills the room with alienation,

the loneliness of the ninth symphony by the sea.

A few more words and it’s November almost,

what does silence mean?

-3-

Infinite, my love

infinite my lust for silence

as flesh penetrates flesh,

and metal penetrates the soft belly of light,

on that baked afternoon in Algiers.

We met by chance and kissed by accident,

our fate had the passivity of lover’s limbs.

-4-

She had salt in her eyes and silence on her lips.

Her soul was hyacinth, crumpled and wet

like forgotten paper.

She sliced the evenings with her convex lust

and smeared the petals on organs of the city.

She played Brahms and I read Brecht in the afternoons.

Her white body and breasts had the colour of silence,

like hot sun on the ocean at broken sunsets.

We shall wait, we shall wait

like empty time on sand and slate

for our last July morning.

Soft re-birth of the July sun, our palms are pressed;

do I have friends or enemies?

-5-

A lonely R by memory and sunset,

amongst the power and silence of the dying universe.

You are the eye, of motions and reflections,

the orange pulse of silent galaxies.

Do I lie, do I faint and collapse

if I doubt the silence and motion of your lips?

Gravity, women and traffic will lure

for mechanical points of harmony.

We shall wait, we shall wait

like empty time on sand and slate

for our last July morning.

-5-

Salt tang of tobacco sky

and principles of motion.

Two-thirds of time is time

and the rest is nothingness.

Love-song to a stranger

2011-06-09T18:17:00.004+05:30

Because this song has influenced my life so much and also the title of this poem.

-I-

Blue sunlight on lotus leaves,

leaves and prayer,

someone flits across the hyacinth door of sleep.

Rub out the poison from your eyelashes,

and watch the doorways turn into infinite mirrors,

pluck out the images,

the silken lust of poison in breath

and the slow decay of the empire beneath the gown.

A million conquests won or lost in bed,

as you hide your soul of bells

beneath the blue umbrella of sleep.

Like the wild autumnal fantasies in your eyes

or the rainbows spilled on the liquid walls of time,

a stranger flows like the wild river at sunset,

beneath the street-lamp.

-II-

The street-lamp travels through sand and glass.

The street-lamp yawns and falls like time

from Naera’s hair,

across the cosmic music of the stranger’s lips.

Her lips conceal a violet prayer

for the earth,

her eyes like a Grecian stalk conceals

the unsaid spectrum of lust.

Cars of sand triumph through constellations,

lyre of the scorpion rose in the glass,

a smudged factory of dreams.

The house beneath the blue dress

falsifies salvation,

an endless portal of desire.

If you could sing to me in sleep,

like the street-lamp engaged in the shameful act,

trembling beneath its innocent horror of thwarted escape.

If you could welcome me beneath the fancy lights

and show me your eyes are also the mirrors of dancers,

and if you only knew that my eyes are also blades

whose tendrils can grasp like infant claws

and fracture the quiet solitude of the evening.

Beyond this partial horror and ecstasy

of this enormous, soft lucidity,

we descend.

Like the soul of sparrows in twilight,

we descend.

For the unmanageable weakness of our body,

we descend.

Across that enigmatic horror of that smile in Louvre,

we descend.

Across the smokefall of future,

the embrace of salt and germanium laughters,

the shrieking voices and slow rotation of the stars,

our speech borrowed from frozen savages

and the soundless withering of daily time,

our descension has the flavour of an untamed prayer.

And when June is a hot baked moon

swelling through the dried semen on the street-lamp,

renunciation is only soft retaliation in bed.

The smell of the afternoon bursts like an elegy,

in the calamitous purple mask of women

dressed with futureless laughter and etiquette,

only to drop their masks with their gowns in bed.

Your beauty is dangerous in the voice of the street-lamp,

your fragile lips calculating wreckage of history

is a partial fallacy in your notion of existence.

Fulfillment comes like a naked shriek of the Ganges,

and across Seine, Thames or the Nile,

your halogen grin electric under the street-lamp

is a destroyer of primitive fancy.

Lady, on a drummer’s voyage,

at the shrine of orange ships that sail for future,

light the harpsichord with omens

at the half union of the womb.

This semi-automatic dream shall wreck you

across the temporal illusion of music

and the wild incantation of lust.

Yet heedless my soul,

heedless the fleet of eyes.

The rhythm fallen from her sleeve,

her enchantment inching towards liberation;

her bosom expanding like an empire,

the hollow pail of her voice receiving inwards,

the liquid spiral of her breath like a henchman’s reins.

These are the streets I visit and re-visit in sleep

for re-incarnation.

Children playing in golden breeze on pavements

while the asphalt tongue of time licks up the dust

of the uncertain hour,

the dark caverns of her breast

evaporate language from the eyes

as the dead tongue of time is suspended in un-belief,

green pastures of your mother’s voice,

the metal cries of women washing clothes,

the spectral honking along un-existing streets

are all like rehearsed fragments of horror.

What exists can’t always be real…

And then her bosom falls

with the soundless finality of a death-knell.

Three contradictions of sorrow:

between the scarecrow and the sky,

between the language and final motion

(commotion, motion and disdain)

and between the lip and the lip.

All is silent,

As Beethoven comes to the ear

like a wisp of fantasy.

Between the dead choir of memory

and painful aftermath of speech,

the girl is stranded at the hyacinth door,

naked beneath the glance of the street-lamp,

and the endless flowering of eyes

as a witness to the lust of her existence,

frozen symbol of ice,

the onslaught of aqueous eyes

like a train at the door of sleep,

Scorching glance of the sky,

scorching glance of the street-lamp,

my eyes leave my body.

A million weapons of vision exalted at the death of time,

incandescent tongue of time defeated in fire,

caresses along the soft, suffering epitaph,

noiseless wars beneath the gown,

along the soft corners of sleep,

the faint tremor that runs

along her body.

“Yet stop”,

cries the street-lamp,

“Stop”

echoes the sky.

My eyes blinded by the language of rock,

shakes and falls like an ageing leaf.

To begin at the beginning

is to end without ending.

The street-lamp travels through sand and glass.

-III-

Awake. Arise.

Yet this is not sleep,

this is not the pain of birth or death,

this is not the supernatural destination of the mind.

This is the fear of consummation

falling through the dark throat of time.

“You shall not touch the wind,”

the street-lamp cried.

“Your body will shield our fortunes

at the funeral of water and life

before we pawn your body to the devil

who builds a flute with soul of murdered cats.”

The stranger I met that violet afternoon

is a distant chord of ash,

violins burnt on the walls of sleep

echo the chorus of the winds:

“Dove on the horizon of memory

Whirl now in a vortex of motion and emotion

The first panther that died at dawn

Will purge you beyond the dancer’s body.”

My arms tied from pole to pole,

as long as the music lasts (or the lust in bed),

the lamp-post, the sky and the earth

will torture me with strange history of my genesis.

Zero-th façade, Zero-th time, Zero-th lust,

let’s start again.

Let’s play a game, just you and me.

Imagine for a start you love me,

you might think that May comes after December,

or we eat with broomsticks if you want,

but it’s important you imagine.

Now imagine the cellophane song of spring,

(it’s just a memory game, mind you

so why bother;

(yes, straighten your hair a bit

and loosen your dress if it’s too hot,

for it’s really summer you know

and I am not staring)

(Not that I won’t like to kiss you

(even though I don’t love you

but after an entire evening together

and a kiss, who knows)

(I’d like to actually stare while you’re undressing

and imagine my body pressed against yours,

my palms sliding like water across your breasts,

my thighs pressed against your vagina)

No, I never said that, I was just thinking

and even if I did, it’s none of your business,

you indolent slut, stop intruding)

just stare at me and think)

and yes, where were we?

Ah, yes, the cellophane song of spring,

and…

“Stop wandering away” commanded the street-lamp,

“You’ll think what we want you to.”

Oh! The endless loops,

and the tragedy of being lost in them,

makes me wonder what is real.

“Of course, we’re real”, cried the street-lamp.

“Of course, we’re real”, cried the earth, the sea and the sky,

“And we are glad to use this light,

to light your soul,

now spread out in arms in crucifixion.”

(Only if it were so, as they think,

but I’m deluded, so let’s give it a try)

“Now Zero-th time. Zero-th space,

Stare at me”, cried the street-lamp,

“What do you see?”

Soft fibrils of pre-natal night,

mixed dread of comfort and alienation.

A dark room furnished with the language of love,

water, blood and fluid guard the solitude

and the fear of language ebbing through synapses.

“Re-wind, drift like a speck of dust and anamnesis,

what do you see?”

Speech breaks down here, at the holy moment

through the music of throbbing body and falling stars,

the star, shrouded in white mist, comes like a sacrifice;

the star travels worlds in sleep through time

and the intersection of endless spaces

where the Oedipal streets crumble to dust,

it transcends and merges like faith

into another world.

Sunlight chokes on hidden laughter,

Word moves word, thought moves thought.

“These are then sins of the air”, the street-lamp cried.

“I wheel with the slow burden of sin,

the slow and rotting burden of flesh,” cried the earth

my efforts are a cyclic failure.”

“Like Sisyphus’ arm, you are cursed forever,

and I, like the nonchalant stranger in sleep

shall shoot till death.”

The cellophane song of spring,

(let us imagine)

my palms sliding like water across your breasts

(let us imagine)

melting banks in the wreckage of the violin

(let us…

In the last failed effort of resuscitation,

the street-lamp, the sky and the earth surround me.

“Last chariot of peace, curse thee.”

“Last fantasy of soul, desert thee

“First chariot of love, heal thee.”

Words sting me

like a spirit stung by holy water.

“And you will be Demogorgon”,

the sky said to the street-lamp.

“And I shall be love, while you

freed of your daily burden, can hope.”

My eyes blinded forever, collapses

like the fallen star.

The epilepsy of sleepless nights,

the narcotic pleasure of vision,

and the soft rustle of hallucinatory motions all lost.

With my eyes, we all fall through memory.

The safety of the phantom mind is guarded by seals,

on the rock on the sea protected by the hyacinth oars.

While we all drown in the tendency of conscious art

and mystery of vision,

hymns of the lamp-post soothe the mind.

Incense stick, candles and holy water,

prayers written to the lamp-post

for healing the ghosts of vision.

To heal is also to kill

(The cellophane song,

Your thighs against my…

Ah well!

Hallowed be thy name!

-IV-

June evening. 4 p.m.

The stranger flows like the wild river at sunset,

beneath the street-lamps.

Rest in peace.

The Death of Margaret- the water's curse

2011-04-10T22:38:00.006+05:30

The death of Margaret- the water’s curse

-I-

Beneath the shadow of the moon,

beneath the fracture of cries,

the dreams of the solitary stone.

Because you did not cry,

because you forgot to bow before the winds’ prophecies,

there lies the skull of God on your coffee table.

Lonely millionaire who played with rainbows,

your voice falls on the floor like dry bones.

Open the door in moonlight,

think twice before you turn the key

before the wild hands across the clock

trigger a spasm in your soul.

Because we have seen the night

fall and hide inside an old brown basket in an empty room,

because we have bleached our souls with lightening,

because we have died in a violet taxi at sunset,

I find it queer to hope.

Your hair tanned violet in rocks,

your gaze automatic like lust and music

across the sunlit pavements of silence,

The Ganges seeps into the naked body of the city

like the fat, cold monster of your rhymes.

Count the diadems, the blue dresses and the smiles,

count the smells of strange feet across the cobbled streets,

count the cigarettes, the lamp-posts and the naked bodies

throbbing with passion at sunsets,

count the orange lights change across the Ganges

like the dying squeals of animals under the butcher’s knife.

-II-

Because you hardly remember me,

(or you hardly pretend)

we shall settle the matter in whispers

like the coy ant across a lovely woman’s thighs.

Because your soul cried for Jews

when the faint strains of the mandolin lit up Park Street,

I shall tuck up my sleeves in the rain,

check into a hotel, have a shower and read Dante.

We might even kiss if you want,

(not that it matters much to me anymore)

but we might hide inside the faint mirror of the soul

and play a game of guesses.

No words spoken, no thoughts shared,

no disguises revealed, no gazes exchanged,

but just colour and shapes stripped naked

and smeared like paint across the walls and floors

like the liquid opera at dinner.

What is the evening hiding in its sleep

deep in her thoughts of an uncommon maternity?

The soft paw of the rising sun melts into you;

the soft, unwearied hours of existence

before thoughts set in and turn your desires

into dust and incest.

Slow death in a violet taxi at sunset

while the liquid opera splashes across the walls.

-III-

When you were crying for death

across the deafening thunder and reverberation of silence,

while time and spaces morphed till they ceased to make meaning,

when existence was relative to the shapes around,

your feet on the floor like melting wax-walls of time,

the taboo flourished on ice and pain

wild like revelations when you drop your gown and blush.

The evening is a soft martyr in your breath,

the melodrama heightens like your throbbing pulse in bed,

and the soft articles like ‘a’ or ‘the’ don’t make meaning,

the evening inside your arm-pit changes directions,

your breasts brushing across my rhyme,

a blush across the scar of time.

Then we play cards or pour out our souls

like broken eggs on the kitchen floor,

the telephone grins like a cannibal in your dreams

and we stuff the grey lights of the room

inside the cracked, blue glass of memories.

Margaret, on the sand, with memories.

Wild hat, blue glasses and ashes of the soul.

Eyelashes in desire,

like soft petals of the rising moon.

Clouds, blue towers in sleep,

the rhyme of the magic woman rising on your flute,

Sweaty palms,

World-wars fought in closets

the strange tune of the nightingale from Siberia,

peal of dry bells served with onions at breakfast,

strange lights of hotel rooms

and the curse of the water dreaming.

Soft music, fountain gush,

rivers awake in pleasure of sound and touch.

Hairs dressed with yellow flowers

and the dust and yawn of ageing trams

like the battles lost in stock markets or sleep;

yet the sherbet and the animal voice,

the colour and the letters at 4 pm

bring back memories of the speech of the dead cat.

“What are you doing on the cloud,

without any sense of your impaired vision?”

the cat said to the wind.

The wind replied: “I am doing

what you did to the water’s curse.”

“You are following dream in her own kingdom,

you are following shadows across the bridges of time

until they came with machines to murder sleep.”

They came with machines

to kill the water’s curse

and the lust of crows

rose like ripples on Margaret’s lips.

Dreams fell with the sound of roses in sleep

and purgation sang inside her eyes’ nest,

blue tornadoes on library selves with French dictionaries

and Italian restaurants that served mirrors while you slept.

Meet me at 9 pm. On the bridge across the Ganges.

When the lights and the curse fade.

Hide your skin from the moonbeams in daggers of sleep

and restore to me in secrecy

(hidden deep inside the house of death)

the vanished power of a kiss.

Your hair, trees, lights decay.

And inside my memories of the violet taxi rusting at sunset,

the night is always unfinished and famished for touch.

-IV-

Margaret flows

like a soft ripple on my lips.

The soft curse on your lips

that rises like the north-west wind but refuses to die.

Margaret on a July morning beneath the charmed tree,

hair disheveled like the feather floating away from fingers,

or the pianola wildly streaming away from the fingers she loves,

her eyes foraying deep like the nimble feet of dancers

into the imagery of the morning star.

The water splashed across her blue soul

and claiming her to its bosom

raised a demonic cry of exultation.

The opera splashed across her cries

like the unsung fragments of the evening on the windscreen

of the violet taxi at sunset.

The violet taxi slithering at high tide

through the curse in your dream,

the jittery afterthoughts of the bad evening

and songs from multiplex invade you

like purple jaws of the lonely wind.

Who walks across my dream at sunset?

Who bared her bosom to the water’s curse

and walked naked into bed?

Don’t run your tongue along the fringes of the dream. It hurts.

Don’t walk the border between the blue wind and the curse.

Don’t let the eagle light up the coffee house

with a circuit to desire.

And when your flesh sings,

put the meat on the stove to roast

and turn out the light.

-V-

Because you want to spend the evening

practicing death with hollow men,

because the 6 pm movie lights up the corner of your eyes

with rebel spirit and feminism,

you play with your tortured soul in the fog.

Light of the blue flower in the petticoat;

Margaret’s grief rises like a demon cry across the Ganges,

over the waters, boats and fading orange light

and the soul of the dead cat who sang to the wind:

Dancers of heaven, dancers of light

wild inside the leopard in your armpit

and electric wires melting in snow

in the heap of a million rejected newspapers

lies your splashed opera and the face of God.

Magician of the rivers, perched on sands of time

the pianola crumbles through her hair

and makes love to evening fallacies.

Just the lazy, midnight hangover,

the language of white oyster shells

cleans the dust of yellow light from your breast,

the moon hiding inside cycles of the womb

in your little dream town of Israel.

The wisdom of the snow in late November breeze,

your nipples hardening between my fingers

like Time in an old Indian jar,

and ancient rituals on the banks of the Galaxy;

we kiss away desire across mirror fragments of the nation-state

and lying down beside the dark lake,

kneel in prayer before the language of the dead.

Margaret, my dewdrop on the blades of time,

my sigh across the holy fires of the bones of the sky.

Don’t document your lust

or the chronic poetry of your fingers on time.

Let the island flap in her wings

in the name of unusual love or pedantic vulgarity.

Across the epitaph of the sea,

we record dream time in the fleeting soul

of an unfinished sentence.

Memories of the sphinx who died in your opera,

and our violet taxi across fringes of a dreaming city.

(Then we all collapse into the hole of time,

and the purple vision of Alice in her dream

Are you in my dream, Margaret

Or me in yours?)

Moonlight on the Yamuna,

unreal spaces change fast in sleep.

Dante, like an angel, comes to me in my dreams.

You look beautiful tonight in sleep

my little origami princess, with the paper flowers of your dreams,

as the blue smoke rises in your kingdom of music

and we melt deeper into flesh and time.

Do up your hair a bit more

(as you walk in trance like the waxworks of time),

a little bit of make-up will perhaps suit you fine.

Put on the lights, the hungry lid of the camera eyes,

and your costumes (for it’s time to dream).

We have a good cast this season;

if the stage inclines and God smiles,

we might just go on and make a name.

BIBHAS SEN'S PHOTOS

2011-01-19T11:34:00.000+05:30

To Angela (concluded)

2010-12-12T01:05:00.002+05:30

Death-song for Angela

Wind-chariots of love

white or melting beneath the skin,

stations lost in midnight peace or rebellion,

Wild storm beneath your gown

and the crazy, green silence

of lonely hospital rooms

Angela,

stay a while here with me

in this land of pink and sleep.

Violin in your sleep,

softly we stand,

our fingers quietly kissing in sand and light.

I could be your little orange town

as you summon a magi in sleep,

I could be your dream.

A town in the skies,

all the roads here lead to sleep,

and little paraffin birds spread out their wings

in water and dreams.

White eyes among nude petals

thirst for the fragile beak of the sky,

your lips carve music in the clouds.

Once again,

our lips will waltz in touch

as I hold you in me

in this city of love.

Angela,

You shall touch me again

in love or sleep,

as the piano will find a beat

along the wounded strings of your heart.

Touch and angel lust,

your voice wild across the winter night

in my blue telephone,

Won’t you touch my lips

with a song or a kiss?

Won’t you cry,

my mad rain lover?

Blue sea-horses diving in your eyes,

fortissimo in your breast,

we lie down and shiver

beneath the porcupine breath of the sky.

Your eyes in my eyes,

your kisses fractured along the liquid, orange throat

of the lemonade evening,

here we are, lying down

amidst the sound and the city

in our little, paper-boat across the skies.

Glory of harmony in your starry laughter,

wet roses in your molten copper voice,

my finger runs along the wild black waves of your hair

like Neptune’s seas.

Beauty in the piano land,

mist and lovers beside the river,

your lips travel time

and spill ancient folklore of love.

Send me the fragrance of your breath

and some quatrains hidden in snow

as we remember old men leaning out of windows

in the December sun.

Death beside the ocean

in the purple carriage of winter,

your body worn in time and beauty

will sway like a wild flower in last ecstasy.

Dear Angela, my love,

the moon in her white gown, shall not know

what it is to wan inside a lover’s last sigh;

while the trees, the wind and light

will a build an epitaph for our kiss.

Our hands entwined in love,

our clocks melting down our thighs,

the rainbow will give rise to a new time.

Our faces and naked touch returning

to the soul of brown God

in the white lanes of sleep

leading to Brahma’s feet.

White sheets, white unslept pillows, white feet

and white song of parakeets rising like war

in this afternoon air of silence and radiance.

Your letters are little holy ruins

that make monuments for the ants

in rain; your voice anoints with joy

Aurora’s glowing horses of dawn.

Last smoke in your eyes,

last smoke from the chimneys of earth,

the last song for my fingers.

Amidst this love,

this ambrosial lust for lilies

and music from the stars

the song of vultures on earth

and specimens of slow, brown decay,

Angela,

I must leave you again

amidst the poem and tower

in the clouds,

amidst the elves and white lanes of sleep,

my fingers still stroking

the wild sitar in your eyes at sunset.

Let our love run through valleys in sleep,

like bloodstreams through the harmonica.

Let our death-song come to an end

in this land of camphor and blue.

Words to the panther lady

2010-10-16T19:02:00.006+05:30

Painting by Rimi

-1-

Lines on wet glass

drenched with cobbled laughter,

dream staircases go up in smoke

the panther lady visits the town

with a bag of pink flowers.

Inside your wet, melanin eyes

the dream changes station.

-2-

The night has a strong taste of skin.

The train melts through the mind

remembering the lips that burnt in Siberia.

Only the desert children smile

as they play with the corpse of rain.

-3-

You will watch the walls form

inside your laughter.

You will watch the leopard

kiss your dream,

as the mirror

fractured like ice poles,

will record the scent of your fingers.

Ghosts of the Ganga

2010-09-18T03:25:00.006+05:30

Ghosts of the Ganga

-I-

The Ganga is your feline ghost lover

slicing through the heart of the city

caressing and culminating existence.

The Ganga is your blood-mother,

dressed in her widowed veil.

Translucent,

transgressing,

fleeting,

transforming lives.

Ferrying tidings of the sleepy sun

dissolving his orange petals in death,

as the dots in the city murmur on her banks;

halogen evenings on clay

and the vibration of rails,

a city conjured up in the white mist,

as she protects her banks with her flapping shroud

and the lights in the city twinkle;

the mercury lamps of a ghost city,

the stadium towers, the floating noise,

the soft halo of the marble dust palace the breeze

refracting life; unreal in the movement

of the swaying bridge in the winds.

Those moments of light, life, unity,

staring at the cityscape like a speechless assassin

and watching the buildings rise and melt

like Illion’s flute,

conjugating the matter and spirit.

The river is your flowing Goddess,

stopping at the land of death,

and carrying the ashes beyond life.

The river is the metropolitan blood of the city,

purifying the crystal ghosts

and ghosts of time,

ghosts of the blood wedding,

ghosts of the violet princess,

ghosts of the orange cat,

ghosts of the sleepy sun.

Ghosts of you and me.

Driving insane through the haunted streets,

the Bypass swerves like a ghost tongue

vanishing beyond headlights;

or the little violet figure,

transparent in the wind on Dhakuria Bridge;

the little ghost-seller blowing out his oil lamp

at Gariahat Market as he walks towards Golpark,

sleep-walking almost, beyond an earthly destination;

they all feel this strange presence,

all a part of this strange dance of ghosts

that flow within a river through the city.

Strangeness her mask,

strangeness her face and flow;

the Ganga is your ghost lover

raging in her sacred tumult

through the nerves of the city.

-II-

Jelly nerves of the city

throbbing at her synapse

with nitrate grins,

post-modern, post-colonial, post-structuralist

problems of existence,

post-temporal blues,

political ghosts of killing,

wherever you look

there’s no left, right or centre;

just a ghost-land of struggle

for the crystal noose.

Red is no longer green,

Green is no longer red,

(what happened to crystal blue?)

just the elegy of crystals

with their viole(n)t descendant

to violate beauty.

Yet the metro gushes in the underworld

carrying semi-dead walkers

like a blood demon.

I can’t care less, sitting with you

in this tiny café

and staring into the ghosts,

form and un-form

in the hollow of your eyes.

-III-

The secret of Time

is to travel like crystal impulses,

transmitting the sky-ghost,

the night-car, the radio and cold pendulum ash;

the secret of time is the happiness of the walrus,

the violet smile, the orange cat, the blood wedding

and the little yellow cab at Landsdowne

beneath the dissolving sun

and the love-making of crystals

beside the Ganges;

the post-colonial ghosts of the nitrate grin

with the metro rushing in her night-dress

when you fiddle with the safety-pin in bed.

Everything then dissolves like the sun

when you dissolve into me;

arm in arm,

lips on lips,

breath in breath,

a single static reality

sans time, sans crystals, sans ghosts.

Transmission of truth,

telepathy of the ghost city.

In the name of Time, Crystals

and the Holy Ghost,

the trilogy of truth,

triangle of existence

and transcendence,

oblique madness.

To be mad is to see the truth,

when the green walls of the asylum

and the fluorescent lights

and crystal vapours dissolve

in isolation and depression,

the syringe fiddles with the blood veins of the city,

and you dream up the trinity of harmony;

the ghosts, the river, the crystals, the love-making

are then mere spectral dots of existence

like the murmuring ghost-lights over the Ganges,

twinkling, throbbing with life

in synchrony with the swaying bridge.

Even the moon sways then

and shines on the violet crystal,

the clock-desert records super-truth

The city drenched in her quinine grin

is then a secret flux of fading light,

floating in and out of your consciousness.

The Wedding of the Crystals

2010-06-09T12:35:00.005+05:30

-I-

Jazz of blue crystals,
jazz of blood,

cymbals, movement, colours
in the naked principle of light.

We invite you now
to the wedding of crystals.
Crystal Blue weds Crystal Red,
Crystal Red weds Crystal Blue,
(it’s the same you might think,
but it never it is, in the world of crystals)

There will be dancing among the atoms,
all the ladies dressed in jewels,
there will be food and merry-making,
all the fairies decked with clouds,
there will be music and mystery wine
all who have come will enjoy the night,
for Dream himself has come tonight
to bless the couple in their sleep.

It is the wedding of Crystal Blue,
it is our pleasure to have you here,
It is the wedding of Crystal Red,
your company with us our pleasure share.

We have a lovely bride in blue,
and a handsome bridegroom in red,
may your blessings be with them
and light up their bridal bed.

we thank you once again
for your presence here,
at the Wedding of Crystals.

-II-

Eli, Eli
kiss me more

softly with your crystal paws.

Eli,
the world turns square
in your arms

the sky turns pink
between your thighs,

in our world of crystals.

blue is red,
and red is blue,
when I’m in you.

Spring is round the corner
and the mist has cleared from Mirror Street,
the city drops her layers
like the crystals drop their garments in bed
and light echoes from glass
while the glasses shatter and merge,
blue and red with a violet tint
and a violet smile.

(virgin on the violin
with a violet smile,
violate the silence
with a violent scream)

violin screams
wool and water ,
violent silence
violet dreams,
frenzied creation
let there be life,
blue dissolves
violet wakes.

-III-

-Is there anyone there?

-Is there anyone coming
at the birth of the crystal?

my little violet princess
with eyes like weed.

You’ll find some cold veal and porridge
on the table,
if you are hungry,
and gifts to buy at crystal station:
faces, masks and dolls for a dime
if you have time to ponder and choose,
you all will choose well;
you better choose well
like you’re choosing between life and death.

To choose wrong is to die,
to choose wisely is to die,
(not much of a difference, I’m afraid)
but you must choose all the same
and better choose well.

Choose a face,
choose a smile,
choose a grimace
and choose her words,
(for you don’t have much of a choice)
and you’re condemned to choose her fate
before you choose death.

you must go on choosing
when you have a choice,
and you must go on choosing
when you don’t have a choice.

So choose a life
for our crystal princess.

-IV-

There is the silence
beneath the door,

here is the dice in the wind
spinning on the floor.

Spinning blood…spinning with the scent of atoms. Poets of fate and fall.
She travels in the wind, smoking Martian cigarettes. Your violet smile…
your violent fall, my Nazi princess … a funeral of kisses…the violin
hallucinating in opium orbit.

You think more, you mean less.
World turns into onion scales.
And all that remains,
is the naked desire of cats.

The radio in the cloud knows your secrets. The world laughs at you
like a madman. Demons of memory stir in her breast…and slice
her skin like the ghost train travelling through the woods.
The moon sheds off her ghost skin…hides her soul
in her purse and smiles. Every skin she
sheds is the skin of orange time,
skin of the radio sky,
skin of crystals,
skin of
silence.

I am the silence, she tells me.

-I am the transcendence.

I am the violet monster, she tells me.

- Myself am hell.

-V-

Now you need a guitar,

now you need the sorcerer of beauty
to create super-time,

and a madhouse for Dria .

As the crystals wither in the radio sky,
and their colours decay
into black and white.

Hearts throb colourless;
colourless in language,
colourless in love,
colourless in time.

Colour dangles like strained time
around their necks,
and strangulates in love .

What you cannot love must end,
what you love must never end,
yet it seldom happens.

We solemnly request your presence
at the funeral of the crystals.

We will all be dressed in black,
the mourning will last nine days
and after the burial
with tears in our eyes,
we shall once again remember
the happy life of the crystals.

('Madhouse for Dria' is a tribute to Inam Hussain Mullick. The Wedding of the Crystals is the second part of my poem Ghost Triangle. The other two parts are Baptism by Time and Ghosts of the Ganga. If you want to read my entire poem, then you can contact me at deepteshinflames@gmail.com or even leave your email address here.)

Leaves in the mirror: My poetry book

2010-05-10T18:18:00.004+05:30

Just published my poetry book in paperback. Click on the preview for details. I have also kept a free etext version which you can download anytime you want. Chk the link
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/leaves-in-the-mirror/8780369

Hope you will enjoy reading.

Thanks,
Deeptesh.