Today my fingers

Today my fingers 
smelled like Omani halwa 
after I ate halwa from Grand Sweets.
And I wanted that beautiful scent to stay on 
-forever-
because it made me remember.

But then I decided;
sweet grease on my laptop’s keyboard 
phone’s keypad 
shiny oily patches on my pen the paper 
-everywhere-
wasn’t a good idea. 

So I took the soap 
went to the bathroom 
and washed it all off,
until
there wasn’t any scent.
 
And the awful finality 
of adulthood and times past 
settled over me 
like a stifling shroud.

Quiet

 

Sometimes,

those who grieve should be left to it.

There are times

when the embraces and soothing words

are sacrilegious;

they violate. They impinge.

Let the quiet

become the crucible

to hold those tears

to still their flow

to quell their sheen

to cool their warmth

to know their need.

The Oddmoment

So many deaths.

And each leaves

A blank; a quiet roaring black hole

In our lives.

Life tumbles past without a care,

but when we’re startled

by that odd, odd moment

that the grief chooses

to darken our thoughts

-- like those clouds that pass

across the sun

and make us stop

and look skyward

with a sudden discomfort --

we remember

that the bottomless Styx flows,

not between the Worlds,

but beneath.

Musty Solace

How wonderful
that old poetry book
you dip into once in a while
--found, perhaps,
on a lazy afternoon,
when your wandering fingers
running across the spines
wedged into the bookshelf
stop before it,
almost hidden by the shadows,
in a dark corner;
or perhaps chanced upon
at an odd moment
when the unsettled mind
is in sore need
of respite.

The familiar cadence of the verses
have the same lull
as that soft blanket
you draw over yourself
before you sleep;
the words
like the warm and well-known concavity of the bed
that you settle into.

Rose

 

The very luxuriance of your petals

that tinge the air with a scent

and grace the earth with a velvety beauty

that has spurred the pens of poets

and the hearts of lovers

stifle your fecundity;

they smother your womb,

they hold your secret in a tight embrace
impervious to enamoured lovers.

And the enigma of your loneliness

beckons the moonlight

to your tears of silent grief,

and they shine

like infinitesimal stars.

Blinded by your beauty,

no one sees those thorns

born of bitterness;

the moonlight looks away.

They call it immortalisation,

but there is a sadness

in being trapped

within that pregnant word: ‘Rose’.

A rose by any other name….

no; a rose is a rose is a rose.

A note on the poem:

It all started with a surprising discovery during a random web-trawl: a rose with too many petals is often rendered infertile; they literally stifle the reproductive parts. The very appendages that are supposed to aid reproduction hinder it! Fascinated, I started writing. What started out as a means of simply exploring the poetic irony in a fact turned out to be something much larger by the time I was done.

So this is about glorifying stereotypes -- nurturing, ever-patient wife; worldly man with an answer to everything; dutiful child who always echoes parents’ wishes-- an endless list of phrases and epithets for everything we see around us. These ideals seem to be tributes to humanity and the roles we play as humans, but in reality, they blot out the individual; the real, unique, definition-defying human in each of us. A rose is, at the end of the day, just a pretty, sweet-smelling flower. But, as is epitomized by Shakespeare’s lines, it has come to gain a massive framework of meanings attached to its name. It is hard to think of a rose as merely a flower these days.

Which brings me to another, seemingly unconnected issue: how language can often trap the speaker, reader or writer. It is the same issue of the burden of intrinsic frameworks of meaning-- this idea was introduced to me by a paper on Gertrude Stein’s ‘Sacred Emily’. It was about how some poets like her sought to question the very foundation of language that imposed rigid meanings on words and restricted our emotions to strict definitions. The author theorized that through her line ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ (whose meaning is ever-debated), Stein sought to free the rose of all such associations and see it for what it truly was. The author analyzed this from a radical feminist perspective: how the feminist movement sought to subvert the very structure of language that was formed through centuries of patriarchy.

I choose to tie together all of these diverse things with this poem: let us all try to see the world without the crutches that are stereotypes. Perhaps we ought not to allow the beautifying (beatifying?) moonlight to hide the truth of the thorns, however jarring they may be to our concept of soft, aphrodisiac and luscious ‘rose’ness. Sometimes, we should look into the heart of words to see what they truly mean, and not blindly accept all that that idea or word commonly stands for (which makes me recall Arundhati Roy in one of her essays, speaking about how we tend to associate anti-Americanism with pro-terrorism--ah, the places that one is led to by rambling thoughts!)

 I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, but words are all I have; they are my sky, and my dungeon.

Forgotten Serendipity

The ending of a book is always sad;

even the fairytales that conclude

with a shimmering promise:

‘Happily ever after’.

One always lingers at the last line

as if at the door of a room

with many fond memories

-- one last time,

before closing the door forever.

And there is that strange bittersweet feeling

that chokes one up.

Perhaps it’s the knowledge

that nevermore can the story

tell itself to you
like this.

Surely one can read it over and over again?

But nevermore will each page

seem so perfectly like an oyster

prised open to discover thoughts

of a pristine pearly sheen.

Later, when one flips through the same book,

(no, not the same)
like a box of childhood trinkets,
it is cherished still, yes,

but dusty with the vagueness of an ache

as the mind tries to reach

into the past

--to remember the serendipity

of discovering each knick-knack

-- but in vain.

The ending of a book is always sad.