contemplation on time

I want to write of a bruise            a dark red sky on the neck  I love leaving my breath on your skin and               hanging on your ear my silence Blood curdles as I separate, secrets whisper their shame  in the lighter corners The days that never were become rain  and words are soldiers fallen after a long war You are winged, always finding a window  Over an absence on my skin you leave an offering darkened with love What we create in love is damage, what creates us Your neck still calls out to me a clearing between the trees I returned home and gave you a bruise  that tasted sweet, to fall asleep next to  

  Writing from a place of doubt and worry; I remember an exceptionally long bike ride with Shruthi. She was taking me to write an exam, and we passed most of Kochi behind us. Trees drooped into houses, creepers and climbers spread across abandoned walls with black mold cracks running like veins, houses were inhabited by foliage, and before we knew it, the sky was emboldened with giant grey clouds touching one another in their expansion. We saw them merge, creating a vast expanse of wet burden, as we drove up and out of road clearings. Although the downpour slowed us down, I found myself willing again and again for the forces to collapse, and they did. It rained all through the night. We stood on the steps to someone’s house waiting for it to pass. I realised once again, on this day that nature is not alien to urbanity, as often defined by the dichotomy of the modern human.  In my mind, beauty exists as a struggle between duality, and its transcendence. As objects fall, dilapid...

i have been writing wrong, punctuating words where they don't belong.  i should have tried to find words that equate  how it feels.  instead what i did, was remember: a night in the same city,  that day, two lovers echoed my words back to me.  my metaphor should've included lodged memories, but i failed  to find anything analogous. to the form  a poem holds,  i can never approach— not deliberately,  not without intention.  years i’ve never seen,  cannot conceive the old age barren ahead but i have been told, that i have. this is what comes through tired, in my lack of imagination.  i struggle even now, to imagine anything  brute and powerful, something natural resembling the sensation of sudden memory— captive of everything in only  one moment. there, you remember  the agreeance shared  by all lovers, or a curse  whispered another night,  within an embrace. i wished him,  fated him, with insom...

Eight days passed and no ideas or imaginations struck me. Purely by coincidence, I found Walter Benjamin’s unpublished single-page thesis on memory. He proposed that one must begin digging, and come to find that Earth was never the one to give life, but is only a tapestry, rich with vegetations of memory.  His words halt abruptly- it was clear he intended to write more- and in the inertia, I begin this piece.  The idea of excavating a memory, of unearthing something significant or lost, struck me, or I struck it, with a spade I can hold.  Benjamin’s experiment had echoed in my mind from time to time before I found his text. I envied those who were able to expand and watch themselves in the past, observing keen details, collecting what would become the gurgling soil in their veins. I envied Anzi the most; he would elaborately report his childhood, his college days, his love affairs and his crimes to me, insisting that I write it all. I of course, never did. However, I woul...