Tigermoms

Mother
what is this half-food rage
and half-girl , thick ploughing anger
that i feel?


what is this sadness in my fingers when i try to touch you
while you speak into a nonchalant part of the universe?

mother,
why does it hurt to remember anything about you
even when you are alive?

mother,
you kill and sing lullabies with the same obese grace
and stones in your acid voice

mother,
you drip in dreams with monstrous crying
and the un-scalping of my sane self
always, keening like a middle-aged trauma
to the daughter's soul.

mother, you were a child once
where did she go?

mother,
I have no one, but you
and I am alone I know
and even so
this day-death and night ritual of story-telling to myself
never aches less.

mother,
i need to protect myself from me
and you.
and father's blows
and his silent violence
now, serrated by diabetes and suicidal fantasies


mother,
i am dying and so are you
but there will be no heaven for us
not in this world or yours.


mother,
you should have killed me fast,
instead of this slow death
with your fast-speaking phone contacts
and late-night pounding on my door
to feed me some inconsistent fear

mother, you are an angel of Hindu myth
and the woman that the child in my mind fears
despite those degrees in psychology and
your immense youth that never prepared you
for the invasion of my soul upon your world.

mother, this weight i carry is so large and
vast with disease


mother, i'm afraid there is no cure
for my luck or birthmark or life
that you gave me
with the best of intentions
on my days wrapped in fevers
without you to smell and hold.

mother,
if i was garbage,
you should have named me so.

Eres

(dedicated to the object of a famous, unrequited obsession from L.A.)

Who are you?
made of sadness and animus.

a drug-induced desire
to be real and beautiful.
To be heard and touched
and felt and spoken through?
Like the screen apocalypses
of this century.

Who are you?
but a figment of image and sound
and deadly love on tumblr.
a public object of anonymous ardor
and suicidal sentiments of the gut

Who are you, really?
A dirty story with all your
limbs fitting sad girls in the right places?
A paper knight with the cure to
teenage death and body dysmorphia?

Who are you?
but small, trembling emails
and lesser known hands
wanting to touch your chest
or a memory

who are you?
Twin god
formed within Goddess Internet
and her womb of a tomb.

Who are you, my beloved?
But I, in another lifetime.
A creature without memory
but for your lips
that speak soft fire
across the numbers of time.

Salesmen

You open yourself
to the unkind,
(until you bleed,
legs wide apart)
the tapestries and
cathedrals of color,
of nausea and taste;
simultaneous Gods
eating the moon
from the phalanx of the living.

The living never accorded
beauty- only fruits and
costumes of mediocre clowns.

Punched together in a darkroom
of ribbons-
red, nervous,black handed,
bleeding daguerreotype and
Cleopatra's imagined ass.

Kneeling in Parisian boots and
Hollywood bibles upside down,
when their own throats are
injured with cigarettes
bought for cheap in a stolen
car (from a middle class
nightmare), from a middle-aged salesman
inside a television,
barking.

Kelam

The universe lay wet at your feet
Bleeding like hanging teeth
And red fire

You woke up.
Screamed.
Sighed
And dreamed of another day
Walking into yourself
Into the sun
Into the pavement


Jumping into other people
And each place that moved about
You,
Making you
Into you.


Balletic, you
Faint into the life
That is this.


Lips open
And eyes dying
Into a labyrinth of
Gazes


You fumed
And tasted
Yourself
Or something
Else
Elemental, pulsing
And cursing
Your mind
Into a quasar.


Into
The gospel of
An Unending
Organism,
That fights
And rips and eats and licks
Into the skin
Of an anonymous beast


Burnt into
Your pill,
Into your headless
Routine.
Into a soft, lucid death
That is slower than
the gaps between you
and that planet of reality.

You wake up.
You scream.
You dream.
And you die again
Into the womb
Late at night
Under your eyes.


dark mines
holding you by the throat
and your stomach
so still
with curious crying.

Black Current Grl

I've eaten pulsars 

for breakfast, Sir. 

I like being alive. 

I'm not the best girl,

But I've been called worse.

Maman

Mother,
I'm an intercity w(rec)k,
A currency of anger.
Lazy poet
Slave-girl to my own prison
Which you made with your late night interviews
And television jobs.
Mother,
Im a blood-red book destroyed by father,
his deadly-snake-psuedonymed plays.
And his salary from a young dream
Mother, I'm an ice-berg of thyroid neurosis.
Mother, you unholy icon,
I am like you in every nightmare,
Even awake.

Mother,
I'm a bitch because I was born.
Of you. Of you. Of you.

Homme

On your wrist
is this old, scarring fever
from a dream
and your sweat like a mad perfume.

lover, you were made from hair, sex and blood
but you are now a part of my cool afternoon, my bed, my mouth
Which fits perfectly into yours

you are only mortal,
but not, in this poem.
Not with my every lick fastened to your soul.

That Poem

Do you witness?

the warm, close knit thing?

The periphery of wrath? 

All heads and knee-deep doom
in bloom

the fate of 

a windmill

tied to their arms
Hard ciphers 

coagulating in rhythm 
as the flamingos 

herd to 
Siberia


if i ever live my death
dont bury my stars under the water of sorrow
or any nostalgia
that was found in my skirt

bury me insane
and
fluttering
with my indignation
written underneath the eyelids
taking gasps of immortality in
the hells of God's gardens

The 4th Rib

Scheherazade

Your chest

holds flowers and tattoos

near the skin.

Bold long feet

and ascetic hands

that were made to

cook shyly.

Eyes

that never wander

the lengths

of a woman's body

and lips

of a Botticelli

smoker saint.


Your clothes

never smelt

like any other man.

Not like lovers

or fathers

or brothers.

The last time

I folded them,

they blossomed

in my hands

as if your own threads

rubbed their scent

onto these palms.

Neither are you sex.

Nor a wild slash of the wrist.


You are a quiet sweat.

Between my breasts.

A way of silent

bedside goodbyes

each time we meet.

I always did want to answer

the question

on your calf

with my tongue,

But then I was grieving.


A mad widow takes no former lovers.


You were meant

to be hung

by those lips

on my wall to touch.

But

I never told you

how you were

an earlier lover

and will always be.

Découpage

While men lay like
Serpents in Hera's
Kingdom,
The sky remains blue.
And tooth-aches still
come to children

What omens did you see last night?
What language in its bloom?
Some untruth
or the mad woman's
run across the temple
with her small lover?

In some of the holy nooks,
erections rise like magnets and yeast
while in your own hair, lies air,
and the fragments of a strange place.

Now
Then
What do you do
with yourself and
this man's breath?
Except spreading it like a prism
over your body.
Each ray-
poet,
filth,
monkey,
ringworm,
television,
deity,
equus.

When the sun has left the eyelids
only in the cadavers
of these tides
that flutter swallows deep inside you
will you find them.

Like
answers that were 

strangled young.

Spit

Always left the streets with poets
no wait
there was a dancer too

but love
never finds its way
In these names

Always we sit
you
me
her
that one over there 

with her fifth smoke
screaming break up and blood
at anyone who cares to fuck

there is a sad way of things
deception 

in the breadth and lengths of history
a hospitality 

in our beds
as if we could
shut ourselves
to the horror of regrets

For 

this is what happens
when you hang words
on the window,
in the closet
between you and space
on some God-forsaken drunk night
or non-drunk night 

(for those of us who cannot afford it)

between the woman
and the pockets of the boy. 
my boy
yours
ours

does it matter
if we run our fingers over his
body?
If we moan like all the others
or bite like all the others
but never cum the same
or NOT AT ALL

does it matter
if i kiss you kiss him he kisses her she kisses me to kiss her?

***

A circle
of lovers
a halo,
a wreath,
a cuff,
an altar 

of beds,
laughter,
faces,
shirts, (with buttons)
to merge into each other like bad stories
never to be seen with my eyes open

or to fall into accidents of the anatomically correct heart.

To let a clam spread over your back,
like the wings of an angel, dead to the world
is a wonderful thing.
To sit without floods in your eyes,
and soft soft lips,
is too.

I wasn't calm 

as the words 
died in my palms - 

my mouth shut softly.

The taste will fade eventually.
So will the face.

I wish I was raised differently,





and taught to spit.

Legend of a Suicide

Sun pools of light
under the eyes
noses for beaks 
made from untruth
yes you are human
Yes you are flesh
but no ordinary man?
Poet.

What mortal creature
created you
My man, 

for you no longer stand tall. 
Taller than the rose-bushes in your mystic domes
Taller than see-sickness
Taller than the red hills
at night
scattered with pots of ghosts
taller than your father's Kashmiri village

In the long snow... 
Dewey with
guns

I saw you
fish
I saw you
soldier
army boots
dancing
in a poultry farm
singing

coloured
beams

I wanted to touch you -
innocence

(Even in my dream, i run,
to hide from a poem or two)

and wipe on my
stomach, 
the snarl of an angry lip,
curling 

My lover is
not mine -
none will be.
I lost you,
I lost all...

and have
since only wanted more loss.
someone says, 
i fear too many things
And I lie and say yes, I do.


***


Come back in flash floods
in Tsunamis
let me tremble 
inside your words  
And long-dead letters
let me be lonely 

as I always was
a saint, a holy grail, a lost moonless light with soft blood.
a tired tree with five thousand nights

All that i am not anymore.
Why?

Let me be
let me be
let me be
let me be
let me beletmebe let me be
let me be

please leave me

I cannot be awakened
with your demons

I want to die
before I see you
again.


I was a hero.

My man,

Will always be
a coward.

Knives

Too much history has been sewn into these
skins

fucking human leather

lovers, abortions, murders, suicides,
vomit, death, laughter, guns

I thought of being raped last night
wanted it with a morbid fascination
that made me think something is not
right with me

I haven't understood rape
Just like that lucky bystander at the back
who imagines life in parallel universes.

Hell

I think i'm a bored
girl
with deep deep tunnels of ennui in her
body

because the relief brought a soft disappointment with it
the disappointment of being alive
so easily

what kind of world do i live in that
makes me want to wash my hands
and touch things
compulsively
and want to remember the smile
of my ex-lover
on his bed

I
feel like
I
will
explode
one
day
unless i just melt away into some
gutter puddle across the road
and die
enormously
under some truck at the crossing
one truck
two truck
three truck
love struck
that is what it felt
i think
to love

to be raped and
then left to die
in the shame and guilt
of some one else's crime
like melodrama

hahahahaha
A fate tune
this
Melodrama
though God knows i deny it
and try to be cool
even though
im too suspended
for those kind of beliefs

i deny it.
why i do,

Let me tell you how-
a) with the full thrusts of my lips
b) with the smell of saliva on my wrists
c) with the way i rub my self all over the house
so the walls have a human odour
d) all of the above

***
i like being alone
with possibilities of someone watching
so that i can piss them off while i put on a show for them
even titillate maybe
show a little flesh here
and there
lick the mirror
crouch and dig my nose
maybe piss
and splash the room.
the sink
tiles
so that i feel alive

Meek Fantasies R US

Fuck I ask
Why don't I feel alive?
I must not remain
just this human girl
without her analities.
The artist needs a flux
i am no artist
but i am the flux
so some artist
come tell me
that you need me

extract this
bottle rim
out of me
the one that bargains with a cork
for space

Also,
Some afternoons
when swimming in nonchalance
I feel like
our words
have been
washed with the acid
of encoded love
so that butter and knives drip
fromthemallthetime
coming out like empty boxes
when you
walk past the door
to work
and
quick conversation tumbles out
from your dear nuances of horror

WORDS:
the ones that don't touch you anywhere
but your brain
turning into spools
of repetition
in a meat packing factory

Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.
Baby I love you.

See?
Perfect symmetry
The kind tombstones have
in mass graves.

Maybe I
what I
I what?
I really want to do
is to live no walk
(living is what I do)
in a world
where no one will ever tell me this
but just quietly suffer it
like me.

Suffering
is beautiful.

***

Im brain
brain
brain
brain
brain
brain
and
life
dead

See?
Perfect cemetery
The kind where people live
in mass numbers

Please tell this
to
those who come to
see me through
the glass
that
my eyes have juggled
too much hunger
in their dreams
and that I am
not the animal
I once was.


***

I knew this girl once
he said later.
"She wanted to be raped
and kissed.
often"

Punches to Self.

No I cannot reveal tonight
my stings.

You will not know of my sigh, the pinch in my cheek.
Or the man in my latent dreams.

Shit.
Stars were carved out of my throat.
Pulled out, spinning mercury in the kitchen.

No you will not reveal
your hands to me.
Because their misery makes me sad.

My eyes cannot burn for you,
Toska.
t
t
t
t
t
osk
a
who was sold at the meat market.

I've always put the finger on my lips.
Have I not?
I can become
moist
for you
even
all hot breath and cotton panties
7 year-old innocence in my palms
and Toska written on my navel.

I had barley in my hair
when the ground grew dreams
We rode together, remember?
On afternoons that reminded us too
much of fate.

Oi,
She says she'd jump for you into hot milk.

I on the other hand, speak to wolves.
and we
we and
and we
we and
we silently scan the miles.

I've cried with proper punctuations even,
in the bathrooms of my life.

No
You cannot know me,
I was born much before language itself,
mute and deaf to planet roars.

Oi,
I have one regret
though.

I never told you
that your chest
reminded of safe places.

She can't jump into safe places,
can she?

Familiar Blades

i give you four days
and i gave myself blades

gifts
hard thin gifts
that are newer
strangers
than
my own body.

slowly, like a thought
climbing through the pores
up the spine

i saw things
i saw blood
and the calm knowability of death
or what is before it.

i made soft slices

on my legs
gifts for my mother
she needs
to cry at night
and know that her daughter is still
that she cannot move

om my arms,
where the skin
is tender
hands
for the street to finally beg some life
into my life
into my death
because of an errant bus

on my waist
the womb, kept precious
for my molesters
for those creatures who seek
solace
in a woman's body
only so that
they may destroy it.


on my breasts
coloured peaks
a mother's flesh
to the butcher
so that the meat
is mixed with all other genders
and animals
that are otherwise owned
by the world
i am owned
my breasts were pawned
in childhood
to wolves
with human teeth


on my neck
that ordinary
curve
for my lover
to know
that he can rest
his sighs
and restless hands
and pure tongue
to soothe the
poisons that
his fairies fed him
my goodbye
is in the vein
that once was like stubborn lightning
aroused,
when he came close.

on my eyes
on my nose
on my ears
on my lips
slashes
appear like
the poet's despair.
Like Walt Curtis'
hopeless love.
They appear
like lyrical erasers
delicately lacing
the shapes
that were once living
once alive
in these
places


My mirror
never could tell me
about the girl
with unknowable skin.

Ah,
freedom,
my name never was
what it used to be.

Instead

My words
were always
familiar blades.

Soul For Sahib

Poets, what do they know?
they know nothing of the world.
They can only cry.

Sometimes,
they write in small places.
Tear paper and
their skin.
Talk to themselves in trains.
Cry in front of strangers.
And take your name.

Sahib
Sahib
Sahib

In small places they
stare at walls.
and wish to lose their voice.
Want to run away
and have no memory
of your hands.

***

Tell me Sahib,
How have we forgotten each other?
Do you remember my name?
The Levi's paper bag
is the only
evidence of your
smell.
Have i forgotten you?

I no longer know.
Because
There is no grave
that i can go to
for you.
Because you remain here
inside other cages
that are like the bones
in my body.
Because I have imagined all these stories
Sahib.
Because we were poets once.
You and I.
But you will never know,
Because poets, what do they know?
They know
nothing of the world.
They can only cry.
So sometimes,
I cried.

But now my sorrows have gone
And nothing makes them return.
Not even the fear of forgetting your name.

In this part of the world.
Kingdoms fall.
Sahib
So have we.





Touche.

The Last One

There were wings we had
and history
you were a tragedy
and i was a nymph
you were small
and we were
regular lovers
but we loved
i loved

you
i dont know what it was
that you loved
maybe my body
or just my blood
but we loved
what is this kind of love
that is not love?

i was told tonight
carelessly
that i
have never known love
but i have i said
i have loved
the depth
of your smells
searched them in
people's clothes
their jaws
(they have never known
they are too wise
they do not know me
i am mad)
your nose-pin
i have dreamed of it
your pictures
i have cursed
i have also rubbed your
infidelities under my thighs
so that they always stay
with me
so that i never forget what love
tastes like
what love touches like
you have been salt
on nights
and catatonic gazes
on most
but you have been
these
i have loved you

i have loved only you
maybe i still do
maybe that is why
i feel empty
as if my houses
have slipped my name
as if i have no colour
in my skin
as if i have no eyes to
see the world

nothing moves me
nothing stills me
nothing reminds me
of the rains
nothing fills me with more poetry
than those words that come
back like
child Julys

I feel like i must know
no more
I must not love anymore
Oh but
i do not
my love has dried
it has decayed
and become
the gypsy of rust
my love will never exist
the way your
wisdoms could

you could charm a lesbian
they'd say
you could fuck men
they'd say
you didnt love me
they'd say
but what do they know
they know
nothing of unlove

you left with footsteps
and a jacket
and a fatal camera around your neck
but what do those things matter
nothing matters
like it did
when we agreed
to love

and now you say you
were sorry
you were blind?

fuck you
you have no right
to make me cry
fuck you
you have no right to
make me love
fuck you
you have no right
over me
and my sadness
fuck you
dear love


you were the last one.

I & I

Blankness-
we visit in our own ways
I pay my dues with
silences
hanging
like wet clothes
in small houses.

When I open my legs
there is only a fixed
trembling in my fingers.
My shapes have shifted
and all my moods that
have been carved in natural anger,
ask me of my doubts.
I bind carnivals of sadness
to my ankles
and touch them often to know of reality

Not only this, i have forgotten to dream
and become beautiful.
There are tragedies on my mind and a fear of blindness.
My lungs are falling apart and I will
become still
with the loneliness of this aerial land

Bury me carefully
And let me wait.

I think touching is just an evasion of the inevitable.
let us ask the wind to make us cry



soon.

The Civil Circus

My puppy.
There is sick butter
dripping down
these aisles.

Today I sat in my bell jar, and contemplated murders,
That cost the trespasser, his bi-polar
nerve.

My body negotiated the
most faithful
turns into absurd fires
while i lay in silence,
confused through mad nights
with clowns of all cities
and clowns of all clans
and clowns of all languages
and clowns from all lust-beds
wanting to rip my eyelashes 

I was a queen even then
A defeated one.
I was a courtesan of windows
I was the goddess of tongues
I am
I was

I am
Night

The thought shifts and declines
down
this very digestive tract

All my men
and clowns have receded
Only you remain puppy.
Only you will lick my wounds
when i will be slaughtered
And I will be minced
And I will be eaten
alive with the philosophy of
men and their
horrible beauty

You will wait to become
the soft angel
of my deathfulness again
You will be careful with my hair
and you will cover my nakedness
from gone head to gone toe
And you will sit with me
with your errant paws
whimpering with sadness

Oh puppy.
You are great.

Maybe
You will forget me
And that will do.

Such Goodbyes

We have been lovers
yes i have kissed you
even though, i do not know you

my words have eaten through
the gaze
my words have reached places
my words have held you
and 
my eyes have seen your bed

my hands have touched your chest
my breath has warmed your ear
and i have stood by your hips
and spoken to you of poets

in your kitchen,
you have taken my name
though you do not know it
when you walk
you think of me
when you fuck
you think of me
when you love you think of me

you have never seen me
and i have never wrapped your bedsheets upon my chest
but i have lain there
naked with you
i have dreamt with you

i have been your vision
i have been a dream
a mirror
i have been things
in your room

i have been your anger
and the salt on your chin
when you shook
on steady nights

i am your stranger
and your woman
i am your theater
of the world
and your disdain

i am  the madame
the whore
and the saint
i am desire
and a gaunt dizziness
that grips you
namelessly

i am your occurrence
when food pales
in your throat
i have gripped you
helplessly

and you have sat by me
as these events
have unfolded
you have seen me
unclothed


i have held your head,
your chest,
and your lips,
to mine

and i have taken you with me
inside me
outside me
i have moaned to you
and have soothed you


you have been several strangers
and so have i
but both of us have never moved
away or near

we will always be incomplete
you and i

so
dont talk about me
to your walls
your chest will collapse

dont think of me
in your chairs
you eyes will swell

now
my masters have changed
dear love
now
i am a secret

your postcard arrived
last evening
and i did not cry
i only placed
your words
under my bed
to never be uncovered

i must punish you
for this sort of love

Do not
take my name
again

Remember this,
you do not know it.