poetry

winter comforts

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the first drops felt like invisible threads
dangling down the sky in swift, translucent
colours, wetting the epidermis of the earth,
in the pattern of an old comforting habit,
worn-out and bare, as a cold wind against
the torn paths of my seldom-used lips.

you felt like a stolen figure of hope —
a sudden departure from white noise
in a vast welcoming gesture of your open
arms, your face flushed in a lightning
roar — your voice grew distant, and yet
your luminous eyes stayed in the dark.

i shared the softness of my limbs, loose
muscles, hollow bones, all the broken scars.

.

© Anmol Arora

Also read, devirginating desire and a twilight story

Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads, where I am hosting and paying homage to Mary Oliver and David Bowie
Image source (B. Prettau – WINTER RAIN)

 

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devirginating desire

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a grey sky is like a page resting in
a solution of redundancy and restraint,

i have filed my complaints, nailed them
on the doors of my assailants, their bite
marks still fresh on my wood-picked skin,
their claws bright-white where they once
etched a mark of this impunity
that they call desire.

no one ever told me that i wielded an agency
over the brownness of my skin, or utility
of my innards, or roundness of my ass,
or the thought of my throat,
well riddled in the ecstasy of wants,

so i began to write my loss of agency without
knowing what it ever meant, so i reclused myself
to a departed space of pain when i never
knew that it is but to be salvaged.

my tiredness is my reprieve, in my restless
lies and stigmatized submission,

of a hundred torn-pieces of this tapestry.
the white falls slowly. the red fills
the myth of my own charity.

erased — i write when there is nothing
to be known, reversed to the birth
of a sky, with a broken scaffolding.

picture me when i have yielded to
this vile wantonness of freedom,
and the stubbornness of my disease.

.

© Anmol Arora 2018

For my upcoming prompt at dVerse Poetics (The Art of Confession in Poetry) later this evening, wherein I am invoking the likes of Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and Das to understand the nature of confessional poetry. Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at WTR.
Image source (Charles Francois Mouthon, Academic Study, 1892)

screwed

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pink-sky-abstract-nancy-merkle

the pastel-pink wall looks
slyly

at the degradation of a colourless face,
somewhat shaken

before the rapture of satisfaction.

it is being brandished in this cold
that isn’t cold anymore,
not even in a half-witted lie
of tomorrow’s promise.

who wrote the fate of this hollow face
that it doesn’t fall off
after the eruption?

.

© Anmol Arora

A title with multiple connotations — a short 55-worded verse for Just One Word: Hollow at WTR.
Image source (Pink Sky Abstract by Nancy Merkle)

a twilight story

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twilight-time-ellen-henneke

a necessary conclusion —

the lined-shadows of a wing,
falling apart in full-flight,

the sky opens its peach-lips
for a kiss, too far, not enough
in the erection of this exigency
to reach out for a nude name
of belonging.

when your comforting arms
become stifling, intimacy runs out
the door, before it gets too late.

.
© Anmol Arora

A 55-word verse for Art FLASH/ 55 at With Real Toads, where Kerry prompts us to write a short-verse, taking inspiration from a piece called Moth-Woman by @luke.ink.
Image source (Twilight Time by Ellen Henneke)

this newness

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what is with this newness that
doesn’t change anything?

the air still pricks like a year-old
thought, the water still burns and
scars the remnants of a shed-skin,
the blue stays a blue and warmth
only comes in intervals of counted
breaths, and all is fine, as fine as
it can be, on a fragile winter-sun,
still uncanny in its resemblance
with oldness and frailty, and yet
a pithy belief for rest and peace.

i pick moments from this stagnancy,
and venture for an apathetic re-
conciliation with my old selves,
drinking from the same pool of
aging and forgetting, and in mind’s
eyes, i can see that it is but the same,
the angles and frames have dearly
changed for a different, if not a better
perspective, of the dipping sky, going
beneath my window, into my words,
and quenching the need for change,
which is not in the coming today.

© Anmol Arora

Image source (Year of change at Wildwood by Andy Reisdorph)
Linking it up with this year’s first Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

in the wake of a life’s end

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a kind of gloom sets in the body,
that you can feel lying underneath
your breath,

your words careful, so that they do not
harm the light, your silence loud
enough to make your presence known,

not to counter the void left behind
but to embellish it with your steps
as you move here and there, and
speak solemnly in the shimmer of
another pain that may always stay
within, like a story’s sudden end —

death always leaves one astounded,
even if it is writ in the sky, and on
our fingers, as we touch and hold
each other, we know it is there in
our very blood, and yet it shocks &
deprives us of our effort to under-
stand its proximity when it slithers
inside the room like a voice caught
from miles away to prick our ear,
and say what was not awaited but
known, visible just as the stars are,

until they disappear in a blank fog
and the eyes don’t want to see or
be seen any more.

© Anmol Arora

Something I wrote yesterday after we got to know of my uncle’s passing.

Image source (MOURNING CHANT OF A WHALE, 2014, by Hari Beierl)
Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads

sanctification

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holding a prayer close to my cold chest,
i have put my lips on roses that do not
open their buds, and cheeks that do not
reach to meet my sutured-smile of hope
for love, and all that yields to its touch,

it’s a liberation of a sky riddled with mist
to shine through, and carry the kernels of
a belated sun in its womb, as if a strange
specimen of breath, finding it hard to hold

on to for a sympathetic spring of acceptance,
of unhindered rising, and a welcoming sight
of truth, of places & people, i can call home.

© Anmol Arora

Image source (Torso (The Minotaur) by Michael Leonard)
For Music with Marian: Revelation at With Real Toads