Write...Edit...Publish : February 2014. What's in a face?

This month the prompt at Write...Edit...Publish is “What’s in a Face?” and it has been buzzing around in my head the whole fortnight, like one of those songs you can’t stop humming no matter how hard you try.  Thanks, Denise for an amazing prompt.  I ended up writing reams - flashes and a short story, a spoof, poems; but fear not, I shall not force all of them on you :)
I am posting the flash that fits the word limit best, though there is nothing very Valentineish about it.  Not much of a VDay fan, me.  Sorry.





Sleepless

The bell has just chimed the hour, and I can almost see that dusty clock face down the corridor if I close my eyes.  Just a few hours to go till sunrise.  The dawn breaks every day and a circle of light hits the blank wall opposite me.  I have watched that for the last month.  Not tomorrow though.  Tomorrow I will be out of here, and there will be no-one to notice how a fuzzy moonlike patch coalesces into a hard, crisp disk.  A round hard face of light.

Loveweak II

the most loving don’t breathe a word of love

in odd lateral threads that dumbly snake

out of nostrils and back, somewhere above

the sore pinhead of years of stuck mistakes

know them by the coolness of their shadow,

by their gentle hands, and palms of leaf shapes

cupped into a mudmoon, incandescent glow

of a million lampborn miniature landscapes

the seahorse ribbons in the oceans of time

the razor coral thorns, barbed as dreamnails

tear the blooddark spaces of valentines

tear up frozen endbuds of limplove tales

the most loving don’t breathe and speak lovebuds

just smooth the disturbed nap of velvet blood

Loveweak I

did my love merit marks - commas, full stops
did it fuel business, make rhymes flow quicker
magic freedom into crystallised hope,
weekend loveshot irises, did it flicker

once in your blingflamed veins and quietly die?

or was it a recurring decimal
sung offkey though holy, strung through your “I”
candied on your tongue like a capital

pulped in your bone in the sponge of marrows?

it asked no marks from me, I can tell you
safely, nothing punctuation, no close
and no throat grabbing start, I never knew

what begun and if it’s finished with me yet

it gave no period at this close of sonnet

Blood urge

I wonder if you know that blood urge

to knead the unformed morning into words

to indent it with three thumbprints of rhyme

and leave it alone in the bowl some time

and check its rise and fall and surge

stretch it thin and throw it into verse,

so what if it feeds into nothing?

It’s what the blood approves and craves in spring.

It’s what it wanted all through the winter

the same three marks made with cold fingers.

The yinyang summers pass, the rivers swing

the monsoons bone dry in the autumn winds

a pancake sun’s caught inside the arch

of veins and madness tucked into the heart.

Foggy lakes

Silence among the ruins, the crows -

staunch friends - sit solemn on a lintel
in ceremonial blacks and indigos
against the stone-chapped lips of winter.
Ruby dreams once sewn in tailors shops
laidback needles in the spider webbing
of satellite cables digitised dull props
delicate necks of cranes, high-stepping
giraffes and slow moving meddlemen.
narratives won’t be forced into neat queues,  
garlanded with marigolds, chillis and lemons
on chilly mornings of foggy lakeviews,
dipping and bowing to crows and humans.
There isn’t any order to a timeless world.

Snow globe

Cold morning. Warm talk 

on telephone, the snow globe

of feelings stirred up.

Didn’t  think it would

shake up the flakes of feelings -

so dense the movement

flurries wiping out 

comical conical hats;

houses of red roofs.

White is peace and death,

the knees of trees deep in it

as it fills the woods.

What do we call this?

Moonpaper, crumpled

parchment leaves lie torn, alone

in the lotusdark

shattered peace so much

debris from a bomb blast and

no one to clean up.

The  Islamic Museum of Art in Cairo has been majorly damaged in a bomb blast targeting the Police HQ.  Collateral damage, I guess.  

Write...Edit...Publish : January 2014, New Beginnings

Nothing that can't be broken.  Take it as it comes.  Let it go and let it be.  Those have been my NY resolutions for pretty much every year for the last decade or two. 

The past year’s been more good than bad – writing-wise and otherwise, chockfull of changes, of milestones.

Martha's aunt's response to the market researcher

I.

I have no memories of tea-drinking,

pinkies out to show off the best shaped nails;
milky coolness of china cups tinkling
while the lazy light outside thins and fails.

 

Had you waited, I’d have puzzled it out,

But as it is – frankly, I can’t recall -
some folks would have them, sure, there is no doubt,
but mine’s the same blank day, and nightfall.

 

Rise before the daylight cracks the curtain

rest after night slinks in the dark of coal;
those are the only rules that are certain,
and certain is the toil that breaks the soul.

 

So it’s just as well that you’ve found someone

with nice memories to answer that question.

 

 

 

II.

 

I don’t know what you are talking about

childhood is something that other folks got
the toys and food, terraces facing south,
the breeze-in-hair trips to picnic spots.

 

What I learnt early was not to spill lentils,

I knew the yodel of the factory siren
violent men who tottered at our doorsills
women who were always tired and sunken.

 

Not one brand of crisp, arrowroot biscuit

in those kitchens where I happened to eat
I’ve no answer to this teatime nitpick
the names and games played with salt and sweet.

 

I’m glad that you pushed past me quite offhand

and found someone more clued up on brands.






For my framily in MR, who, unlike the researcher above, never pushed past anyone's aunt.  With love and many fond memories.





 

Insolence! On thinking it over...

It didn’t fill all the hollows, the spaces

of the heart aren’t simply measured, but
the hunger and thirst of other places
were heightened and deepened by it, so what
if the heart was filled? The empty knots
remained still, lurked subtle between faces
of complexities, in flattened foils of thoughts,
in tangled dreams and strange wakefulnesses.
It didn’t fill everything, nor quite made
the earth and heaven spin, it just lit
a tiny flame that trembled at the shouts
of many bearded blizzards, of grave trade
winds, at their forbidding, sharp-tongued wit;
and cowered small, but refused to be put out.




Read the first thought here.

 

 

Remembering Galali in the small hours

Thinner than a needle’s eye, sharper than

its point, the blade of moonlight cuts the lane
without white markings, no signs, nothing urban
just the growing sound of an aeroplane
overhead, preparing to touch down
its lights winking, the sea is a black pane
of glass, nothing else for miles around
one huddled island, some huddled humans
melding into the vastness of earth and oceans.





Galali, and more generally, Bahrain has been on my mind recently, along with friends I made there.  All of us have moved on, Galali is no longer the same, I left Bahrain almost a decade ago, and my friends too, now settled elsewhere, many continents away from the nights spent plane spotting. 




 

Down at the Dead Sea

I tasted the Sea, it wasn’t salt,  

more like a bitter, burning flame.
So, a lake has come to be called
by a somewhat grandiose name;
and just as well I tasted a drop
because lakes and death both might be
named different from what they ought;
based on their past reality.

 

It’s rarely enough to think a thought,

each drop must be tested twice,
and I mulled them over as I walked -
the names of lakes, their taste and size;
a lagoon had somehow cut off
its lifeline to the birthing sea
and so both lakes and death might morph
beyond their size and history.

 

It’s never enough to think just once,

each thought must be tasted twice -
a drop of bitter on the tongue
on second taste gets close to nice;
meanings acquired when I was young,
as I change I must cut free,
but they persist, correct or wrong -
lakes; and death; and eternity.

 

I tried a drop, but  it was not

as I’d expected - the burn of salt
somewhere between bitter and hot
and no way of pinning the fault -
whether it’s my taste that is flawed
or that’s the truth of salinity?
All that’s certain is that I strode
down the shores of a once live sea.

Insolent

Love didn’t seem to make my world go round -

it was spun before, curled into a ball
in some ancient time, before the ground
knew the tongue of my feet, before my small
dreams and ambitions fought over control
of dark spaces, and cliffs of frothing sound
crashed on parched oceans; before the blue bowl
was flipped to cover them, before profound
meanings were read into chapter and verse.
Overall, it seemed rather a recent
demand that it fuel the earth’s turns and twists.
I was fine with what love achieved, its sparse
course, its breathless spasms. It’s  hardly decent
to ask for more.   An insolent wishlist.






 

Excerpt : Alexandria

The eastern harbour.  The lighthouse that fell

the stones configured now to a citadel -
the guide’s laconic. Meanwhile, some of the city
has been clawed by the sea into its depths
cobblestone streets gobbled, the warp and weft
of grand architectures of peace and probity.

There’s nothing remotely romantic about

a lighthouse, the strongest beam shines out
not as golden hope, bloody fancy metaphors!
just a plain warning, turn away, keep off,
keep off the grass, the rock, this shore, don’t stop.
The moth and flame in vaguely shocking reverse.

The bunched weight of history easily slips

like a tote-strap off shoulders, no way to grip
it simply. Teenage kids high-five on the pavement.
A black and yellow waspish cab in cruise mode
rubs up slow against the kerb. The waves erode
the rough shoreline till the backwash is spent.

Never too dark

I will walk away a little, stand apart

by myself, wrap my arms around my heart
a bit tighter, watch you strike the match
light the fire with one single spark
and the years, the tides will crest, the foam dash
again on the rocks, and I will see
once more that nowhere is too far
for you to reach out however dark
for you to hold out your arms to me.