Author: akmanazar

Poetry

growing up

Gallery | Posted on by akmanazar

Yesterday I spilled a hot pot of memories
on the chipped floor of my acquiescing heart.
And as I crouched down
and dabbed and dabbed at the floor,
my little sister stormed in
with a wet mop to help clean up.

In a parallel world though,
my little sister, about yea tall
tugs at the sleeve of my shirt
and asks for my special seafood salad,
lisping out the s’s through the void
of her missing front teeth.
She disgruntledly peels garlic cloves for me
with her baby hands I wished grew no bigger,
fussing and mumbling until she can dive into her salad
and finish it with her caricatured smack of the lips.
She would then hop away, springing on her toes,
long hair swaying this side and that,
her tiny bum dancing its own dance.
Not a care in the world
until her next mealtime.

No amount of frantic dabbing
can salvage my spilled memories
or her lost childhood, but how I wish
she wouldn’t crouch down next to me
and mop up so well, like she’s got this.

Perhaps one of these days;
when she spills her own hot pot of memories
she would come running to me,
asking for help from her big sister.

Poetry

Spiralling into our Destinies

Gallery | Posted on by akmanazar

Let us wrap our destinies
around each other.
We shall begin at that high
when we were no more
than a cry of passion
a quiver of satisfaction.
For the two of us
and all of the world
are one and the same-
products of pleasure,
imagined
in someone’s moment of frenzy.

Image credits : https://instagram.com/hiroshi_nakamura_naparchitects?igshid=1q5bb5xzh3sew

So let us begin there,
at the top.

I shall glide down the spiral of my life
and you, down yours.
We may cross each other’s paths
but never to meet
until our stars deem it fair.

Let us slowly and simply
glide down towards each other,
oblivious to all those chance meetings
we may have had before,
until we meet at the bottom
of this mystery called love
and walk hand in hand
towards our many sunrises and sunsets.

Poetry

Listen to my strange melody

Gallery | Posted on by akmanazar

Do you know what it is like
to spend entire days
in the ostensible silence
of the strange kind of melody
that comes wrapped
in rainbow sheets,
and in a music box that opens
to the chaotic orchestra
of the clamour and discord
in thoughts scurrying zigzag,
strapped to a bed of thorns,
bursting arteries,
severed tongue,
bleeding heart.
“You’re imagining it”, you say?
“It’s all in your head”, was it?
Why don’t you
crack open my skull,
slice into my brain,
and listen for yourself.

Image credits : https://instagram.com/ane_aleksandra?igshid=cjuiqbhbzuxz

Insomnia

Posted on by akmanazar

There is a sadness
inside of me-
a deep black well,
and every night,
out emerge
snakes and scorpions
and other arachnids
poking their heads out,
slithering out of
every orifice in my body,
crawling all over
as they disperse
into the misty darkness around
only to be followed by more
and more,
as I lie in bed, petrified
even to move.

Image credits : https://instagram.com/fallsomnia?igshid=17xhucw9d6xhi

What is this sadness
that makes me afraid of living?
Makes me wish I could
slowly drift away into
an endless state of dormancy.

All day long, I feed my soul
with sunshine and rainbows
and all things bright;
but tiny truth capsules
somehow find their way in,
dark clouds on the horizon
and no matter how hard I try,
come nighttime,
the silver linings
I had been tracing all day
get swallowed
in pitch black.

Every night, uneasy,
I roll over in bed
like my ancestors
in their graves,
their marble tombstones
decorated with white poppies
and orchids and lavenders.
Every night, I wish
for the kind of bliss
that descended upon them
ahead of time.

Fish in a Bowl

Posted on by akmanazar

My friend lived in a giant opulent closet
draped in his shroud of angst his beloved knit
out of tough love and asphyxiation, with
unwritten deeds of requital for affection
and bound in chains cast
link by link
out of eternal but conditional love.

My friend lived with his marine friends
staring past the vast ocean that never was
for the lone fish and shrimp
that paddled about in circles,
nurturing them each day
in the precious tank he built
pebble by pebble
out of unconditional love
or in its guise.

My friend lived ignoring
the suggestive knocks
on his closet door, unaware
of the world beyond his ken,
a realm of grays, where he could
get more used to holding hands
and less used to disdainful frowns.

Image credits : https://instagram.com/matchywood57?igshid=nvj0mqrhm0wv

My friend now dreams
of building a house
on the edge of a cliff,
where he can slip into quiet slumber
stargazing through the glassy ceiling
and listening to the frothy waves crashing
against the bygone tumult
of his buried anguish.

As for me, I simply hope
that one of these days,
my friend would scoop up
his marine friends in a handful
and release them into the deep blues
over the edge of that jagged cliff
and watch them swim away
to their freedom.

For, what good
is a lavish ‘home’
for fish or for folks
if it is, in fact
a golden cage?

My Fickle Muse

Posted on by akmanazar

Let me tell you about the time
I fell in love with a stranger I’d never met.
Not with his beautiful mane of hair
not with his bottomless orbs for eyes
but with his profound words.
You see, he was an erratic poet.

There he was, a surreal person in a real world
writing so fiercely and with such vitality
that sometimes I would dive into his verses
and melt away like sweet candy,
or sometimes get swallowed
by a whirlpool of sensations,
and sometimes his words would feel like
the aroma of an invigorating cup of hot coffee,
but every time, I would keep falling in love.

I imagined him through the melancholy
in his writing, all but skin and bones
frail and fading in his ill fitting clothes
sitting on a beautiful armchair by the window
washed in the sunlight streaming in
and with ink pouring out incessantly
onto blank paper- his intrepid cascades
of thoughts manifesting as free verse
and elegy and imagery and whatnot.

But like the waning moon and the wilting rose
and all good things that are short-lived
his words started withering in the sultriness
of life itself, his lovely poems slowly smothering,
and one day, just like that, I fell out of this fickle love,
moving on to another whimsical poet out there.

Yet I cannot help but wonder
what might have been of those verses
had they found the milk and honey
to live another day so that I could tell them
that the little bit of meaning they lent
to a stranger’s mundane days had the elbow
to incite bouts of the poetry I now weave
out of the sun and the earth
and the air that fills my lungs
but also out of my memories
of an erratic poet I once fell in love with.

So on occasion,
I like to imagine
that perhaps
my galaxy of words
are the clouds collapsing
in his parallel universe.

Kota and the Deconstructed Cube

Posted on by akmanazar

The following poem was written as part of an online event organised by “Busking Kochi” where artists come together, collaborate with strangers and create customised art for them. I wrote this poem for a sweet boy I met, as a toast to his love for the city of Kota, which he and I believe helped him rediscover and unbox himself.

Image Credits: Ishant Kumar

Once upon a time
I was trapped in a strange cube
where dreams floated around
like iridescent soap bubbles,
limpid and unclouded, but untended,
popping quietly into yawning oblivion.
A strange cube that swallowed me whole
into its fathomless chasm of mortals
milling around in the pretense of performance
while I sat cold and desolate, stifled
by the musty draught of dreams
interrupted much too abruptly,
staring at sombre green walls
decaying into discoloration and
out the lone bleak window to glimpse
at slivers of a glorious sunset
falling through the cracks
between redundant warehouses
lined up next to each other.
Tiny slivers of light
against jet black nothingness-
my beacons of somethingess.

So I chased the sunset
out into the city and glory be,
what a vision!
Kota, you seductive enchantress!
Oh how you made harlequin kites
out of my lifeless desires
and hoisted them up
in bright blue skies!

The city that witnessed my discovery of love
for a girl who didn’t stay
and then for a hidden yearning
to freeze fleeting moments
of rhapsodic epiphanies
and capture them in the cup of my hand,
fold in dazzling sunlight and glassy water
to pour them down the crevasses
of my memory mountain.

Beyond 50mm macro lens
a veil was lifted and I saw.
For the first time.
Amid flying peacocks
and camels roaming free
around a leafy green talab
and under the tranquil gaze
of Lord Shiva
guarding his floating temple,
I saw indeed.

So one night I snuck back into the cube
and dismantled it to cut out six plane faces
painted white over drab green
and erected them on my mind’s easels.

I now make art on them.

Thoughts per Metre

Posted on by akmanazar

What is distance really?

Is it the amount of dead silence
that englufs the tension
hovering over a fighting couple,
or the expanse of wrinkled bedsheet
spanning between their bodies
as they lie in bed, with their backs
turned to each other.

Or is it the inky infinitude
between eyes chasing comets
from opposite ends of the world.

Can it be measured
in a baby’s first step,
marking a quicksand lunge
from the comforts of infancy
to the brutality of growing up.

Or is it of a lighter note?
Metered in a clever regional reference
while in conversation, bridging
estranged hearts in a strange city,
or in how many kilometres there are
from Washington DC to Miami beach.

Maybe even ubiquitous?
A simple smile or a handshake
or tête-à-tête over tea,
going from unfamiliarity
to companionship.

What if it’s a little more abstruse?
Like the blind leap of faith it takes
for some people to fall in love,
and the countless mistakes
for them to grow in love.

“What is distance really?”,
I wonder, as I sit here in my isolation chamber,
fiddling with this simplistic explanation
that I just came up with:
that of a glass wall and an airlock
between me and everything I hold close.

The Pattern of Purposelessness

Posted on by akmanazar

Ten fortnights ago,
before I moved to this strange city,
I was on a surge, the calm before the storm
and I wrote seven clever poems one after the other.
Today I stare hard at blank paper and at life
and what has become of a bud once in full bloom.

These days, I vehemently pluck
at that one stubborn chin hair,
scratch forgetfully at that
swollen pimple on my right cheek,
count the number of tiny green leaves
on my pet sapling,
steal furtive glances through my window
at immigrant kids next door,
devein pink shrimp
and watch shredded garlic
burn in melted butter,
pick up fallen strands
of burned out stray hair;
these days, I do all sorts of odd chores,
tire myself out and fall headfirst into
slow, numbing, nauseatingly pallid sleep
during hot humid afternoons,
and wake up
to the pale pink glow of dusk,
with a dull rumble inside my ears,
head spinning, eyes throbbing.

Some days I find purpose in anxiety
over nothing in particular.
Some days I find purpose in tears
shed over careless words, one too many,
of people dear and near
while on their spell of painful wisdom.
Some days I find purpose in sleeplessness,
some days in patriarchy, reinforced
as I clean up behind others’ mess
or try to stay unperturbed
in the face of rejection.
And most days I die a slow death
as I wallow in my false sense of purpose
and try to break the pattern of this new life.