what seemed an impregnable cache, immune to theft
was stolen, it was my rhythm, not your poetry,
my exegesis of symphonic life, in that parallel music,
shall we speak of universals and eternals?
I lost my way during several attempts to find it
the world is composed of sins, ruled by instincts
deeper than lethargy, virtue is vapor, more perplexing
you are all around me in its bodily reminders,
the heaps of notes, cramped odors of obsession,
in the intimate intrusion of the massive bed,
where I'd lain with harmony in a hot drive
to dissent, to subvert, to fly like the gypsy
from what had passed for usual wisdom,
denying tedium, deny the given, the received,
the begotten, the whole solicitous silliness;
behold how these strings, wan and magical
flood the sinews of our melody, it was then
I'd caught, vibrating under your cajoling words,
an unsaid, electric burr that seemed to echo;
I had served my purpose: good-bye.
Life, that meager cache; I can get back to it,
unsympathetic, it appeals to some perverse streak
to seek out the very site that aroused bitterness,
an irony you can not fathom, no matter if I explained.
This intoxication is brief - a seduction, an illusion,
never lasting; then to be engulfed by oceanic rhythm of
denial and rebellion, volume upon esoteric volume,
the limitless kingdom of beats - not one of which
I wish to penetrate. I am a reckless poet,
I can be a woman of caprice, attachment to
a chimerical life is an explanation I was,
for all my mistrust of it, willing to accept.
I supposed it took me in fleetingly, like
optical illusions, where an image metamorphoses
into a different image, you cannot hold both images
in your mind simultaneously. So why run at all?
why run ever again? when you have no destination,
there is but a finish line. When you come to the end,
you”d find only yourself. The same unchanged.
The more you move on, the more you arrive at self.
I am not running any more, I am not hiding from life,
I believe I am waiting for it .
between passages of
subterranean calamities
sits a sibyl,
her voice,
a large cascading thing,
every inch of you
in her swelling voice
she reverts to harmony
usurping your words
to invent rhymes and stories
the tune is thin,
unclear and strange,
of unrecognizable scales,
there is no orderliness
it wounds and wounds,
a wire spiraling into abyss,
this is what she wishes,
to be formless
like this tune, wayward
no one to predict her;
no one to form her
the author of the duet
is grafted on her lace
the moment she is free
she would tear it off
from then on
she is all impulse.
torrent; rivulets collide on panes,
within, two wayward tributaries
coalesce into one decisive stream,
words we wonderingly recite,
ornate, now and then boldly archaic;
have a lingering stately pace,
on occasion halting altogether,
like a turn in dance, or rest in a march
it's not the July torch spilling sweat -
it's our conflagration, invading,
heaping up a pyre of love
in this room with the shut door,
out of which stutters the unsteady
nightly tappings of a duet,
spiteful mutterings and garbles
replace the coarse lovemaking;
we invoke secret spells, maledictions;
when the guttural tardy thunder
miles away, throws us into a daze
we leave; as numb as
a walk away from the funeral of
someone we dearly loved -
bereft and spent.
You would never stray
from the path we had both started on
leaving me to rub smudges
from a name we share
for I am a storm
when I hadn't been crashing
I had been brewing
inside you
this interlude we see
is a natural corollary of analogy
the logical ghost which follows impulse
if it can be shredded and scattered
lightening meteors are everywhere
corpuscles are both causes and effects
nothing has chassis or stasis
reason itself is merely a flux
passion seeps and seeps and never sleeps
and you, even you can be spurred
it isn't love that has wronged us
we had run away from love
and my love
my silhouette is at all cost
guaranteed to linger
it is a force not a thing
a function that extends through the space
and therefore,
even if not wholly understood
it could be after a fashion,
trusted.
This feeling, it came to me one afternoon,
I was caught in, the manacles of language
there was no theater but our ingrown proscenium
my ears secret labyrinths, your eyes secretive,
your velvety touch weightless, lit by
a tiny jewel in my annualry, treading phantomlike,
leaping from its tender perch
into the dusky corridor of my lips
tunneling deeper and deeper
until I sank into the darkness of your mind
I wasn't watchful. I wasn't suspicious.
I wanted your hands to keep close to me
the soft translucent web-skin between your fingers
to fondle . I wouldn't name what.
Aptly naming, is knowing what it is
exorcising and possessing, all at once.
All masks sunder or else all sport masks
In a bristling of remembrance and representations,
the past was the present, the present was past,
the meaning of one thing, was the meaning of other,
all meanings were one and into this cauldron of all-ness
a recognized evil burst, wearing the mask of you
behind it a cavalcade of upheavals unmasked,
a torn scarlet dress, dead dreams, soot
the lover who was not a lover.
And you; always you.
Invader usurper thief. All one.
An odorless odor, a fume adrift aslant
inside me, fiercely rotating lost runaways,
swallowed by oblivion like whiskey in the throat.
Merely another bruise in the house of bruises
This is even better…..
I don”t understand.
All my posts have disappeared.
I did not delete them, this time around.
They have all vanished on their own.
Disgusting.
Rediffiland sucks big time.
I don”t have time for its eccentricity
To Hell with iLand and rediff.
Duh!
