A nightmare
Wrapped in golden ribbons
For a child
Realizing
Music is a window
Has two sides to it
Each side darker than the other
And choosing sides is an option
You cannot choose
Not to repeat
Until
A maddening music of the mist
Stops
And you realize
That you were the nightmare
Wrapped in golden ribbons
Dreamt by the solemn clown
Invited
In your birthday bash
Celebrated annually
Every day or so
And you’ve just turned hundred
There.

Here.

Children stare inside my window.
Children stare outside my heart.
Children stare, some mornings,
At each other.
They do.
Stare.

Stair
The place she sat with ‘em
Telling them stories. The unfinished folklore
The moral not quite in place; the smile always.
She rushed down as I came and I said “don’t”. Always.
And yes, she went down dancing
To the tunes of a fall. Enchanted, as ever.
No one tells the kids their unfinished folklore
No one tells me why kids were drawn to her
Like children to their mothers.
And yes, “we don’t cry” they said.
“We never cry.”

And yes, she goes down dancing
Dancing to the silence of my violin
She goes down, every time, these days
And I pick her in my arms
And I pick her in my heart. In our hearts
We go down dancing.
And yes, “we don’t cry” we say
“We can’t cry”

The third hand grew
As he spread his original hands
To pick his bloodstains
From the dusts and floors.
The third hand grew
Picking up invisible times
Sprinkled onto the places
He’d placed his back to.

Sweat. As his fingers darkened,
Moistened the flute holes. Loop-holes.
He created the music of sweats.
Sweats that dripped upon claustrophobic spaces
From his first ten fingers
And on a passed-away time
From his other five.

Time
Like curtains on his windows
Danced with the winding notes.
Revolutions. Creeping on it
His third hand grew into his past
It brought back a broken wing,
The second pillow, colorful lights and him.

One night, once again,
He found his second him
Sleeping on the second pillow
Not letting go, for once, of his third hand
Secured in his nightmares
Filtered of the future he had found.

And as his hand stretched
Further and further
Into the times left behind
He trembled
Thinking, just how many hands
He’d lost till he found the third;
Fearing, just how many hands
Must his third arm retrieve
To give an arm to their third arms
On everyone’s back
Where their wings should have been.

One day, he dropped his arms.

]]> http://otherclown.wordpress.com/2007/01/13/surrender/feed/ 1 Clownscape http://otherclown.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/love-hymns-2/ http://otherclown.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/love-hymns-2/#comments Mon, 25 Sep 2006 23:50:00 +0000 Clownscape http://otherclown.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/love-hymns-2/ ]]> He Who Fell

His fall was complete
The day he tumbled down the cocoon
And found himself running
For the door. He imagined
Inside. Outside. Crossings.
The possibilities of a door.
He covered.

He was led to a world
Of tangled bodies. Criss-crossed.
Clinging onto the unknown other
Like abandoned copulations.
Like the corpse of the child
Left somewhere in the womb
Left somewhere, in their heart, too
Criss-crossed.

He was led into the world
Of a thousand children
Lying in all their tangled wombs.
As cocoons.

He, too, was a dead child
Lying in the comfort of the tangled wombs
Playing with his dead brethrens
Making balls of their dead flesh,
Throwing at each other
And on being hit, they turned red
In blood and shame, alike.

Then, on a very special night
Destiny wished
He tumbled down the cocoon
And was led into the world
Of tangled bodies. Criss-crossed.
And as his angst grew
He decided to take a stand
Against the rotting of his dead brethrens;
Against the world of tangled bodies;
Against the order of the world;
Against the fire engraved on their skins.

On a very special night
When destiny wished
And he tumbled down the cocoon,
On the other side of the tangled world
In a dusty barn, full of hay
A divine light was sprinkled
And a child was reaped out of no seeds.
Its mother took him in her arms and said –
“Babe, you’re so bright
My eyes might just burn staring at you.”

She whispered her evanescence into me.
She claimed
That the bubble would burst one day
Taking the lives of valley dwellers
Breaking their huts and dreams and pains
Making a realm of anesthesia
Where they’d sleep through their killings
Feeling yet not realizing their pain.
And they shall become evanescent.

She whispered her evanescence into me.
She claimed
She’d meet me in the valley, too
When she would be passing by
On the day of the bursting bubble
She’d sleep upon my heart
Sing songs of melancholia to me
Taking me to a dance in silent violins.
And when all of it would end
She’d whisper her evanescence into me
She’d claim
In her days of effervescence
She had left a bubble inside me.

I picked her down the river bed
Where she lay among flowers
Among dewdrops, amongst bloodstains
Of her own.
Her soul laid asleep
In the white comfort of a swarm of wasps, butterflies
And the forgettings of ‘had-beens’.
The forgettings of time, eternity and screams.
Dreams
Marched across her foreheads along with ants.
She was living on sounds.
Sounds outside her body
Sounds inside
Sounds in the distant no-where
She was sleeping on sounds
When I picked her from the muds.
I gave her my only moist room
Where I lived alone.
Unsleeping.

My home was in the center of the river
Where I stayed watching
The strange life of waters
And weaving blankets out of dreams.
I covered her with one of them
I tried to sing a lullaby
So that, she never wakes up.
She never did.

Our worlds never met
Mine insomnia, her sleep
Our worlds never changed
Mine insomnia, her sleep
But we told each other our stories
Mine insomnia, her sleep
And we each owned the others world
Her insomnia, mine sleep.
Gradually, I found that she melted in the water
The river was taking her home
I took her hands in mine for the last time.
She slept.

I took her hands now
Just as I had taken her life once
Down the river-bed.
I set her free from the constant world of our insomnias
After which ants took her over
They went in through her earlobes
They came out through her nostril
They played with her body
Made love to her.

After her body melted away into the river
I lived on the sounds
Of her silent orgasms.

The forgettings of time, eternity and screams.

Skin

“Have you seen the Christ made of animal skin at Burgos? There’s a very curious book, Monsieur, about those statues made of animal skin and even human skin.”

-Jean Paul Sartre

The shepherds returned in dusts,
On dunes of Prophet, a forgotten town.
A premonition of past, their present
A recurrence of future, their reflection.
Dreaming, they smiled to disappearance.
And into their fading skins
Dissolved their bones, hearts and bloodstains.

Once again, we remembered
Our gods of skin, our skinless deities,
Our colorful gods and transparent.
We saw religion, chameleon, Satan,
Sin – tearing away our skin,
Cutting them to pieces, scattering
Where plants were born.

We created Cactus, gave life.
We learnt to make branches into leaves;
We made thirst our eternal nourishment
And we slept on the dunes of Prophet
Breaking into the dream of gods:
Colorful and transparent. Their united dream
- The Carnival Cannibalistique.

Its been raining needles on children,
Petals have been covering their parents,
Distance has left lovers, uncovered.
Yet poets live in poets’ dreams,
Awakened, awaiting Judgment Day.
One of us to be The Chosen One.

The gods bestow him
In their carnival town, untamed;
In their innocent dream of Noah:
Never realized, not completed.
The deluge – never quite over,
We all yet to meet our chances in dying
Save the Chosen One who shall not die:
One Poet as a specimen of midwives,
Watching with glad, glittering eyes –
Dreaming, baby Jesus giggle in our sleep.

Three Paces

One day, in passing
I invaded the valley of her dreams,
And found
Her absence in the realm,
And found
Her lost in her absence,
And found
Her searching all that’s lost.
I found all three of her
Sitting separately
Three paces away from each other.

I found all three of her
Sitting separately
In the corpse garden of her dreams.
Amidst her collection of confused corpses, unsleeping
Three paces away from each other.

One day, in passing
I invaded her dream of three paces.
Fresh spaces were being made for
a new-born corpse in refurbished petals
Of grey – A baby Jesus.
For him we shifted our only bench
Three paces away from us.
We sacrificed our sacred space,
Our point-of-view. I heard
A lullaby. She was putting him to sleep.

Later, when his eyelids found rest,
From opposite corners of the bench
We tried to mend the distance
But for each step we took,
Every pace betwixt, receded
Three paces away from each other.

Dreaming, baby Jesus giggled in his sleep.
Dreaming, baby Jesus giggled in her sleep.
Dreaming, baby Jesus giggled.

Euthanasia

“You
Glimpsed soldier of fortune
Sweeping their footprints
With branches of mistletoe.
You showed them the corpse garden
————————————-
Madness, you brought it home.”
– Yusef Komunyakaa

The dusk stood leaning by my balcony,
About to fall, onto the streets,
Shattereing into a sleep on a soft, cosy bed
Of rotten petals. Leftovers. Age-old.

A plot of preoccupied dreams
Claimed this empty garden.
The flowers, perhaps, have been stolen
Or maybe they have run away
From the breeze, and from themselves.
I had once run away from myself …
I don’t remember clearly,
Perhaps, I was too, Stolen with the flowers.

Forgetting. A chant for the unforgiven.
An eternity of fireless smoke
Where I disolved, uncomplicated.
People came searching for my corpse.
They found none but claimed my heartbeat.
Later they realized – I was their first dream;
That I had rented their fantasy;
That they have inherited me, created me.
So, they returned home one night, realizing
That threy have become gods;
That Jesus too, lived in their fantasy.

I forgot how long I slept on the petals,
But woke up last dusk
Hearing heavy breathing of tiring souls.
I recognized my poems in their depths:
As if all my infinite characters;
All my innumerable faces
And even, my faceless masks have converged
For an oath we shall share in common -

“Reality is the hurting light. Untamed.
Death shall end reality, rendering us imaginary.
And then we live on a soft, cosy bed
Of other’s memory of ourselves. Liberated.
For its not our heartbeat that keeps us alive
But our memories. We breathe as history does.
So, let’s take an oath, for paranoia of pains,
And fashion euthanasia before we slay.”

The Return

It rained petals last night
On these streets, dew-worn.
It rained petals in the dark
Of flowers all yet unknown.
And they covered the pain of a lonesome lane,
And they heaped by the broken window panes,
And they exuded the fragrance of a new-born world:
Jubilating; beautified; giggling; silent,
All in the dark, last night.

Then, the morning they had all waited for, came
When the light and smell over-brimmed their waking senses.
Some long closed doors were opened,
They screeched in music, they sang
The song of homecoming, of distant dreams
When they saw petals lying on their street-bed:
Red, yellow, white, blue.

Slowly, timidly, they stepped out in naked feet
And they met their neighbours
Whom they had long believed to be dead.
They felt each others heartbeat. They sang.
Once, taking different palms they danced;
They danced with the petals beneath their feet.
They danced ’cause them that they loved
Shall never return.

It had been long, very long
Since they built their house
Behind the closed doors. Hinged.
They had spent their nights in darkness,
They had spent their mornings in darkness,
They had spent their chunk of sunshine, in darkness.
The chunk of sunshine that poured in
Through their broken window panes:
Dead; moist; untempered; blue.

Then, it rained petals last night
In the out, on the streets
And the fragrance has brought them out
From their dreams; also, in their dreams.
The longest dream. An eternal sleep. Nightmares.

So, they mourned for them they loved
Then, picked a handful of fallen petals
And flung them in the sky above
They flung them in the sky beneath
And they faded into surging petals
Like a dream of a poet.