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Beauty

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  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...
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universal history

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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...
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Excavation of Memory

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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 Purely by coincidence, I found Walter Benjamin’s unpublished single-page thesis on memory.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...
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From Dreamless Green to a Tapestry of Bone-White Dreams

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My body complies too much with sabotage. As blame is thrown, I watch it return with a force I capture in chemical absorption. He said that the body is all we have, he said that ignoring the body is why some philosophers can never write poetry like mine. He has said too much.  11 july 2024 In recent dreams I see  participants of the past constructed in yarn be  unlaced and sewn back— all my friends from times  that don't belong to me drifting in absurdity.  And when I come to, mornings  acquaint me with a child: splitting image of my mother.  Day becomes the hem of a dream collecting finer particle memories; exhaling not love or adoration—what I thought I’d miss,  but clarity of conversation; an evasive, perturbable ache in my chest.  While I narrate these visions  of sleep to him, record betrays that I long and yearn;  an off-putting nostalgia threatens me through dreams.  Metaphors of the body do  not seem so marvellous t...
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Desire

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My desires are impossible to decipher. It presents an image, an almost comical image, an expression, imprint of the ways in which love lives in things. A gush of faucet water throws up  the thrill you send through me  in your awaited absence.  It is ridiculous that I cannot produce  my desire for you as coalescence  that can proclaim  language, art, history, and every justice in the world. Yet I find myself gently rising, like eyes touching the summit, to the conclusion—  I need you as reminder. I don’t need to imagine sweet childhood loneliness to describe love anymore.  Instead, I must find ways to retain you on my skin, because love is lost in the seines that cover me.  Never can I shake the habits that leave indeterminate  all the ways I will embrace you.  I know your sharp eyes have already made note, the ways in which I fail,  in which I paint the tapestry of desire,  with nothing but euphemism.  I will not repe...
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