Poetry

I woke up this morning and caught the last dregs of the juicy orange glow of the early sun.
There were buffalos marching with noses pressed high.
The smell of smoke was hanging from yesterday’s fires and the start of the day.
Whilst the train kept cadence and rhythm,
swaying and nodding to its mechanical rhythm,
composed of metal and clangs.
Cutting through the endless green,
stretched out as far as your eye could  see.
Beckoning me in  for one last swim,
jump up from my seat  and dive right in-,
to the leaves and groves and endless neem.

And so the train goes on.
Crawling across gaia’s orange navel,
slicing through its common route.
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…
and crawling…

Until the stern meets the last dregs of the setting sun.
Its juicy glow signalling the end of the day.
And the buffalo head back the way they came.

I change over time

So it’s the age-old searching for thyself story.
Another subjective conception of identity boggling my mind.
Because the ‘self’  changes over time

Yet I’m still chasing that high from the first time
I went looking for the wild,
the green,
the itching and stinging jungles.
Looking for my tribe.
I found it the first time yet the high still needs to be bigger,
A deeper trigger for the light in my soul.
Away from the darkness that plagues even the brightest stars in space.

It’s always the things that you don’t see that spill into the cracks that exist,
then over time you realise that your being is held together  by all this,
darkness.

Yet the self changes over time.

So I came to India,
to free my mind.
to gather my thoughts and let in the light that is love and life and breathing.

Again I came looking in the wild.
In the schism of my religion,
my being.
Placing myself
between cultures.
Becoming lost.

Yet I can no be lost. The lost I was before is not a lost that  I seek now.
And yet I don’t know how?
I know it is what I need,
but that path can not be seen in the pace between my head and my heart and my soul.
To be lost and lose control in love…

Yet the self changes over time.

How can anyone keep up?

Something strange happens as your growing up and growing old.
You realise more and more that you are not whole.
Nno.
You are in little pieces with your family and friends and the exchanges and memories.

All of the times that you needed to  find yourself through a journey to ‘some distant lands’,
in fact
You’re still in little pieces there too.

In those moments where you cried and screamed and you know no one heard because you didn’t want them to,
those pieces are there too.

The only thing that brings everything together between the cracks,
the memories,
the rain,
and the rain,
and the rain.
The journeys through lost and found,
the screams,
the warmth, the light and the darkness,
is time.

The self may change over time but you still have all of those pieces that still make you, you.
and me, me.
Without those pieces you would have no substance to even search for.

Kovalam

The sea meets the town in its jettisons and buttresses,
All jutting out onto the black shores of black sands and foaming water.
Our daughters of indian prints and smiles linger at shop fronts,
beckoning strangers in  with a grin and a friendly front.
How many would you like?
We have what you want!
Everyone wants to know you but who do you want to know?
A couple of days and the true friends show.
They are all harmless and warm in that little town.
Where the sea meets the streets,
and everyone greets kindly by the black sands and foaming water.

I found your old letters

I got that gut wrenching feeling that clouds your judgement after an awkward exchange.
The line is dead.
Your voice echoed today and for the same day every day and then stopped in that very moment when I said,
stop.
The spark had diminished and slowly closed like cockle shells on a salty beach
cast away from the sea,
to sit and dry and die in the bearing sun.
I know it had ended a hundred times,
but to find out that you had given yourself to somebody else held a finality,
and that spoke a thousand words more to me than those few that you’d said in the street so many times before.
It felt like someone cut my belly open, pulled out my lungs from beneath my feet and let the sinews seep and bleed,
so that you could smear them on your smiling face and glow in the shadow of my pain,
you’re the biggest asshole in the human race.
And I know now, that things will never be the same.
It’s a shame,
but I watched that ship set sail so slowly,
and yet never said a word,
even after every insult heard,
as we scratched and kicked and bit,
at the cords that bridged between us.
I always choked on the fork tongued phlegm that made me struggle more and more as time went by to say how I feel.
As if great girders of steel wrapped around my delicate little wrists.
A subtle reminder that I am bound to you,
no matter what I do.
I found your old letters wedged between the pages of an old notebook that smelled of India,
I read them thinking better of those times we spent together.
Spiritually connected.
Reflected in the pools of the love that spilled from your eyes and quenched the thirst that fed the chuckling fire in my belly that smiled when we sat.
Lost,
unafraid,
silent and strong and steadily breathing,
under sunset by the Ghats.
You sometimes left me believing that I was a goddess,
sat on a throne of an ancient wisdom that I could never understand,
that spoke through both of us simultaneously.
Sometimes I could stand next to you braying proud and bellowing love like there was nothing more beautiful.
A dancing Shiva,
adorned with our fruits,
ripe,
split,
spilling and sweet.
My feet pounding on the hot red earth
to the beat and the rhythm of the bells that rang true with the breath and sweat that I had tattooed to your body.
An archived score of song that no one else could see, or hear.
It really is a shame.
But now I can slowly see that sun rising,
and in the end all that’s left is me,
dancing alone and happy.
Rubbing red paint between my eyes and uttering a mantra of freedom and strength,
unknown to the next day that comes with the new sun setting behind it.

Food for thought

Pouring over placid words of tense and verbs I linger,
Fingers quiver and mind blank,
A single sound or movement could change it all,
A secularised ritual,
A small sentence would do
But would be,
Lost in its self complexity,
I can not sleep.

The black marauder

Black blood inkjets slow as moans escape from my chest,
‘confess’ he says,
‘Lick my heart and beating bones’.
Ragged leers baying for blood
he is cold hard and singular in love
his hands as winded sandstone blocks
clambering on thighs and naval.
Tarnished rusty eye sockets burn into my head,
‘confess’ he says,
his eyes are dead and lost but for the squalid inside.
I squelch and gag in his glee,
his deep black cloud hunched over me,
crashing and plunging and raging in time
rooted in sanity and insanity,
I smile with crooked lips a seething kiss.
He was the better of two halves the other lost in his coal-black dark.
His deathly glare an endless pool of remorse

In the early hours I wake and wait.
The morning light breaths light and love.
The earth is pure and saint: she will be mine forever.
I let the sun lick at my heart and skin,
bathe in its golden shafts : my holy water pure on palms and glass.
He can not darken my sunrise, my light, he belongs to the empty night.

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Today

The wind makes me sick,
It screams of life,
A plastic perfume hiding sneers and crooked fingers
the stench lingers on passive eyes and tongues .

What I would Give to bray at they sky unashamed,
To step into the dirt and root,
Is this where I am meant to be?
With the sea or rook, I would rather.
I always look twice in the mirror
Expecting my self to be some trickery of light
A smudge in the window.
A twisted form torn between the elements
Strangled by heaven and hell and
writhing in the in-between,
in purgatory,
That, you can see .
This place was not meant for me .

We are the architects
Composed in prose and rhythm, the beat.
Everything is going to the beat.
The whistle and whisper of time, composing.
Our history and  fathers the spectators
creating cadences and call
We are small but loud
One symbiotic similarity
It is all relative
A cacophony of noise
the most beautiful of melodies.

Look deep in your soul and wonder
if you collected the deep thoughts four fold tumbling past your lips,
A blip in your mind but something beautiful.
A comment on life that you may not like but the truth nonetheless.
we are blessed to be on this earth with one another,
so brothers and sisters listen
to the words that may stay in your head but might not be said out loud,
listen to the faces of the people around you and connect
if you can.
There is no right or wrong,
only trust, love and unity,
to keep our bonds strong with positivity,
to vibrate on a higher plane and keep strong our communities.
Sometimes the world can be a lonely place,
but if you take note of the way we all struggle as one human race,
and listen to the fire in your belly that screams to share creativity and laughter,
we will find our way.
I’m still trying to find mine,
and some days are harder than others,
but hold my hand and I will love you today and tomorrow
and those days will grow longer and lighter with the love that we share in time.

Seeing words collate on a page remembering the foretold stories of my ancient forefathers
reminds me of how we all communicate freely in this tongue so easily misshapen and mistaken in tones and dialects and new news.
new feelings on one sound vibrating on tongues new and old.
Communicating with each other in a peace unknown to the tangible world.
an ethereal cry loud and soft on top of the ears of us all human.
I can see your words in the air written in your breath and falling on my open hands clear and chuckling grasping the fire in my belly.