poetry

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.

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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.

 

early morning

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i have got a morning
that doesn’t come too often —

the wakefulness of eyes looks becoming
on my face, the arcs of hyacinth on my care-
worn cheeks, the fissures of words at the corner
of my lips, tricks of a thick smile, teeth like
scissors that cut through the nights of des-
pair, all look becoming on my ninety-
days of seclusion, i do not dream a dream,

but i have got a morning by my side

today.

.
© Anmol Arora

Day 28
(Inter)National Poetry Month