Tasenda

Somewhere in the night Morpheus sobs into my sleep  Combustible dreams made of sulfur invade my senses Nerves being injected by blue liquid crystals Under dark lights of abandoned night clubs City lights hurt my eyes, chlorine cutting through Saccharine purity, blinding with the florescent blaze Of a sanitised interrogation chamber My breath water-boarded by babel Powdered blade mixed with melted glass powdered In a chalice made of orchids, drunk by demons Who are not demons, on a winter solstice night Fraught with reflections of people loved, despised and degraded Little pieces of madness smothered into Perfect symmetry till it resembles sanity, crushed And melded into a dirty brown stone trapped in a Grill of iron, decorated with fringes of silver Smelted onto my finger, scarring the darkness with unbearable easiness, an armor made Of Uneasy dreams

I hold onto the ledge of sanity by the edges of my fingernails polishing a tune that i heard long ago on radio Kashmir, sandwiched between propaganda and farmer's show, where they taught how to sow blood in fields of saffron to reap a harvest of dead bodies mutilated with joy and skinned alive by bayonet edges and threshed by a machine made of army boots I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edge of my fingernails playing an imaginary santoor, made by the last santoor master of Srinagar, its wires made of Human tendons and its small wooden hammers, bones of young poetess its fickle frame crushed bone of orphaned children trafficked from mortared houses into army camps disguised as play grounds I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edges of my finger nails dreaming about refuge in the asylum of ugly emperors and handsome beggars hiding behind masks of iron, smelted by gunpowder made behind the mosque made of stone, where th...

The many fires that burn the heart,  Revel in the agony and screams of Buried desire, your soul cigarette ash, And all that matters is a man who carried Luck in a black suitcase full of rings made of trash The burnt salt over my palms exposing lines Of fate that I had forgot, Love faded like a Ragged lion cloth once dyed in indigo And desire slipping through the folds of Creased anger dragged over the plains of pure agony Separation puts planets between us, Neptune and the sadly named Venus, Each inch a fucking mile, each moment A rusted nail, digging deeper and deeper in The burrow of my face. A smile held together By plastered guilt Deadly madness takes control and ramblings In sleep become a divine scroll, All burnt, all razed, all rubbed clean Expect for that part of me which is She, of many fires

In absolute silence, the wind remains perched On the ruins of an old city. Guardian owls hoot The nights away and slay silent monsters That lie in wait besides the doors of decay. People tell wonderful tales of the day when The disgust was melted and poured so it Would coarse its way through the veins of the city Marked by shrines and gardens, silence Symbiotic with noise within. Beneath the domes of soot, an underground River flows, Its memory, dimmed by Sounds of furnace blasts, an old essence Once found in perfumier’s dungeon . The walls of old houses plastered With baked mud mixed with dried Grass still bear the marks of children Taken away by the shadows of night. In the old gun makers quarters, the Gun-powder still hangs in the air Like the last mourner at an abandoned funeral. In the lane of metal polishers, half-burnished Pans lay abandoned like widows of Vrindavan. Besides the bridge of poetess, empty temples Wail for sleeping Gods even as their do...

I came undone at the edges Of our shared memories, Even though each door  Was unhinged and each  Window pane torn apart, I could still see your face  Veiled by your secret smile, A dagger drawn in cold Arabic blood Your eyes hiding a hunger Of the most devious  kind,  With Persian spewing In the night Your fingers carving deadwood,  Making firewood of pagan Gods,  One measure Heresy, one  Measure pure madness Niran, Shadows cried but  The fires consumed them all Unhinged doors and windowpanes Torn apart  I am coming apart at seams Of our shared past, melting  Ice in heart of many fires

I will trace the Jhelum Across Your back with my fingers In barely discernible darkness It will form a paisley Drawn from the memory of An imagined Kashmir No language spoken by Man or Gods shall be Uttered that night Words will be melded, Sentences molded to form A new language of love The ink, a fine powdered Amethyst, shall dry as We write its grammar The quill tips, fashioned From old bones, shall Burn in its blaze The room will be Full of scorch marks In barely discernible darkness -- Tz

I draw a deep breath, An empty chair sits in the corner Hastily scribbled notes scattered Around the desk, abandoned Like lilacs in battle filed Wandering eyes rest among the Clumped clothes, a black sequined Scarf pokes pathetically from Among the ruins of our lives, Staring at me, accusing me A half-eaten apple still Sits on the top the fridge, next To the owl totems from the time We visited the dead shaman, You used believe in -- The movers are here, Walking up the narrow stairs Stomping feet leaving shoe marks, You so hate, across the Floor, Our floor The empty boxes laid in front of me Forcing decisions I never wanted To make, what to keep and what To ditch, how much luggage to leave For the insidious new occupants -- Tz

Love is such a heartless business The arsonist told me Just after she had abandoned everything And mutilated my life Everything needs to be set on fire Ignited and destroyed So there is no trace left That anything else ever existed All those stories you hear, Of frozen rubies and crushed Mild dew are all lies, Fed to us by the industrial heart complex Everything needs to burn, Her camphor green voice insists But it needs to be cleansed first With incense and hate Love is a heartless business, The arsonist goes on, repeating That it is puerile and pure servitude, Nothing to gain or to lose To save you, I must set Your heart on fire So, you are left with nothing Nothing, but my burn marks On your heart -- Tz

Rumors of snow escape With gossip from the prison Cell of a long deceased poet, ‘He had no heart’, The cold wind whispers in The ears of his former lovers ‘He never loved you’ Unseen hands trace on Frosted mirrors across seas Pictures of his vandalized Grave leak, the only word That could be read, ‘Liar” Tz

There are times when  I wish I knew magic I would weave a spell, I would conjure a trick I would heal your heart, But There is no magic in the world There are no phoenix tears No enchanted pomegranates No exorcisms for the ghosts of pain No magical mortar to cement broken hearts -- There are times when I wish miracles still happened I wish prophets still walked the earth I would visit every messiah I could find I would follow every prophet to heal your heart But, The Dead no longer rise on a touch The seas no longer part for striking rods The Lepers refuse to dance with joy The moon and the stars are no longer cleaved -- There are times when I wish time travel was possible I would freeze time and trace back steps I would stop you from walking to that moment I would break the space-time continuum But, Rivers refuse to go upstream Mountains refuse to bow Sands refuse to meld in the sun But, I can...

If only I could find my voice Bereft of echoes and banshee screams I would become another Hallaj And shout out your name From the roof tops Of the ravaged Baghdad of my Heart I would lay no claims To truth or divinity or even To you. For no one can claim You, it was made clear from the Day Iblis himself rebelled Against Allah and his creation No one could ever claim you, It was made clear No poets, no philosphers, No kinghts, no seers, no mendicants Of cheap arts. They all sought to, but failed. For who has tried kissing the fire, And lived to tell the tale. But rueful though the fate Has been to the lovers of yore I will try again, even though I know My fate Thirst would show on my lips Like ages old parchment recording Banal grocery lists of roman Camps and heat would ravage my face Like masks of wooden Norse gods I will try again, even though I know All I will shout in the end Will be ‘Tobaiey Takseer

This still born darkness Tearing through the night Has ruled over us for so long I have forgot, what it was To feel the sun in my eye - It has been this way, ever Since I lost my way, somewhere Between Nietzsche and Camus, When darkness came riding a Horse, White as light and heart just as black - The legion in me, held its peace Thinking here at last, peace is at hand But wrong we were, like every time Evil was too arrogant and we were too vile It chose not to hide in the dark But in the light - Landscapes of misery as far as Eye can see, illuminated by the moon Of despair , the half-dead along the path Mark the way to the house of Storm. -- The Walnut doors hide the Tempest within, screams of joy (or are they sighs of sorrow), ring the air, taking apart my hope on an assembly line till nothing is left, except a placard, which reads ‘Always, still Dark’

Eyebrows perpetually arched with curiosity, Coupled with those haughty cheek bones              Languid fingers, almost Jhelum-like, stroke               Stray hairs swaying across moonlit face My unstill heart, privy to your unknown secrets, Yearns to be disappears into its soft crevices                 I keep stealing moments from an unforgiving world,               As Qasidas are braided into aayats in rosaries of longing Promises of meeting after the end of time hang in air, Even as my life is held in the palm of a pale hand                 Doomsday , is fraught with too many risks of eternity         ...

We would sit across    each other ,  you would    look suspiciously at me   'you came all the way to    see me',  you would say   in that sweet dulcet tone     'I came all the way to see    you, from the country without   a post office', I would blurt out   and then immediately regret      quoting you to you   I would examine the wrinkles    of your face, expecting you to   say 'you fool, go away, don't quote me    to me, so much of a cliche'   but instead you would smile and   say 'father said you write'   I would mumble and you would    say, 'you might write but you    can't speak except, it seems in clich és'   I would flush and you would smile   and say that's ok    we are all allowed to be ...