poetry

a cat’s person

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dali-atomicu-salvador-dali-and-philippe-halsman

who are you? where did you come from?
your claws dig for the skin beyond the skin.
wagging your tail, you seem to know things,
hear and see and feel all that i want to hear
and see and feel —

you are a monk, every morning spent
in soulful reflection over your own
lithe form, licking the underbelly,
washing away the filth and dirt
of this uncouth world.

you are Mao, your war for space
is without bloodshed (your politics
is shed), you are in a random chase
for what does not exist. you are the one
i think who would kill me in my sleep.

you are Amma, the protector of this realm,
fighting fleas-like-people (thy servants),
birthing new dreams, you are this creative
spirit, it is in consonance with the stars
that you make all the clouds go away.

i seek to understand you, become you,
all of you, each one of you, i want
to forget who i am and exhaust all
my nine lives to unknow
where i came from.

.
© Anmol Arora

Image source: Dali Atomicus, Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman (1948)
Linking it up with my post at dVerse Poetics where I have shared some cat-chy poems and prompted the poets to write on all things feline

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from the train

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after Munna — a stranger/friend from the train

the train that never arrives
may have already arrived —

he stutters and rushes his way through
many words, obliging the falling dusk
with his innocence and resolve, light
as a feather, sturdy as the city sky
of many colours, all dreams cupped
carefully in some determined sighs.

he had ventured for his truth, a strange
smile on his lips is the worldly gain of
wonderment and curiosity, so stark
against an empty coach and a dark night,
all that we carry atop our shoulders. for
a little while, we can see each other —
strangers, friends of an equal station,
comrades to find the extent of our beliefs.

he lives in a place of a hundred fates,
i can hear him speak in broken-breaths
and amid lilting laughs, that make
the sky a little less harsh, and the hope
of a journey less jarring, and all things

a bit more open to light (not often
found in a new city or a new day).

.
© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at WRT.

Also, it’s been eight years since I started this blog. Woot! It’s been so long — I will perhaps make a separate post about the same. I just wanted to mark the occasion here.

a long walk

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of those streets — untrodden and unknown — white
blossoms hanging in shame — i tie my knots
to a sun-bedazzled horizon — rites
of passage — grey streets, umpteenth times, (un)sought:

from the beachfront to a temple’s tempest,
there is music in every step — stone-dreams
of our bodies, long dead and alive, blessed
by the lilting lights of a silent scream.

of motorcades and urine stains — these walls
reek of years and litters that have inhaled
the bequest left by the bay’s sunken souls —
plastic pools, sodium sands, holy grails:

where all did i wander through this caffeine-
daze?— not all trees that stand are evergreen.

.
© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with dVerse, where i am hosting the Poetics prompt this week. The theme is: On Wandering & Observing

all despots create an unfounded rage

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all despots create an unfounded rage,
the public eats from this free-handed rage.

blood flows through my land of undoubted hate,
all crops deluged by this unbounded rage.

the veiled villain is but a hounded lie,
we are revealed by our well-sounded rage.

these faultlines bring forth the confounded truth,
we all run on a radar-clouded rage.

who do we blame for these crowdfunded wrongs?
what ‘worth‘ do you know of (dis)counted rage?

.
© Anmol Arora

A short ghazal written with a heavy heart, encapsulating certain components like matlaa, radif, qaafiyaa, and maqtaa. Linking it up with dVerse Poetry Form challenge, hosted by Gay Reiser Cannon.
More ghazals: your love took all with it but this sweet pain and i wait at a lost November’s altar

your love took all with it but this sweet pain

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your love took all with it but this sweet pain,
you rendered your sleek spell in this neat pain.

the skies are split open by the heat’s rage,
i smouldered to the whims of this elite pain.

you dropped all pretense, spilled my discreet truths,
i am left bloodied by our defeat’s pain.

you are not my soul, not a complete stop,
i won’t be richer by your deceit’s pain.

all this loss made us change our concrete ways,
still i lost you to this obsolete pain.

do not go to find your past life’s street-mark —
Priceless, you’ll no more love your heartbeat’s pain.

.
© Anmol Arora

A half-hearted ghazal — linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT

ritual of words

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layered blood-thick, brown-washed,
on the walls of my restive seclusion —

the elemental, egregious thoughts fight
against the other for more screen-time —

tea dregs & shunted ideas pass through
grey matter, spilling out cranial fluids
of creative flow —

acid, sweat, water — the dust of dread,
the diligence of death —

how the ritual of words is mired in
the affliction of being.

.

© Anmol Arora

Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT where I am hosting this week — I have proposed an optional challenge to write a poem in praise of one’s source of inspiration for the last day of the poetry month.
My #30Days30Poems can be found here.

Day 30
(Inter)National Poetry Month

appraising identity

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why 176 cms? 60 kgs? — fucks to give?

my anatomy//structure is a wilderness, drinking
through the air, one part mulch, the other
a hybrid of gas-dreams.

why rate my brown-bread-skin through
its number of moles and grafts of love?

why try to measure the length&girth of my life through
an arbitrary number of years?

my freedom isn’t your sugar & flour ration
that you can scale and take away per your
desired capacity for consumption?

how do you measure the taste of my ilk,
my sun-settled eyes, the fight of my cauterized
heart?

how do you see and experience my queer body, in-
tact, (w)hole, sweet&sour&salty like the rim
of your empty shot glass?

why do i succumb to the standards set in my core
by the (ir)regularity of your burnished soul?

i shred figures and hopes, letting the well-paced,
untold story of its desire to take its toll, leaving me
to rot, with a rumbling disdain for this mirror of
your eyes, that cannot tell or realize
the plurality of my roles.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 29
(Inter)National Poetry Month

Edit: (Previous title, the value of existence) Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT (June 4, 2019), where I am hosting this week and I have shared a poem by Kamala Das for inspiration and acknowledgment.