Center Fresh

If you are the beginning, then you must be my Center Fresh.

A bit too sweet, all too pungent for this.

Still, I will carry you in my pockets, not willing to share it with anyone.

I didn’t ask anyone to flail your arms, like yards of brown silk, in my dreams.

Eyes: Weighing like bars of kohl and a sooty word that sits between.

You sway through me like my grandma’s needle- in and out, out and in. We could have

made floral whorls, we made promises near a rusted tank and if this story were to

land in another literature student’s lap,

She will look at this tank as ‘emblematic representation of our psychological

demons’. There could be an essentialist reading too. Blah Blah.

But, would she be completely wrong?

Or,

Question: Was this completely wrong?

Answer: But how does it even matter now?

Alarms rang like blood hooters but I still didn’t put you away.

How many people got drunk with you, danced on my terrace and walked half the city,

strolling through tea stalls at night and rasping, talking, stretching tongues like

birds on adrenaline?

Or watched soapy love stories and saw your tear up like a chocolate doll?

Or smelled your skin, freshly bathed, sizzling with lemon and talcum?

Forget the ones who are already with their Center Freshes, I am talking about skanks,

who aren’t really, but are waiting to be understood. (Me.) They will also cup their

faces and listen to my story.


So will Sita, and tell me about the first time she fell out of love.

Turn fingers inside your skin, baby.

If she could creep fingers under her skin, she would find greasy alphabets with ten tongues to bite her back.

They will tell her about a television that lies to her everyfuckingminute and rattles over her body hair. Marilyn Monroe. Angelina Jolie. Elizabeth Taylor. They are all here. Their faces, swirling like holograms and then a mirror crashes, smoke rises from the window. She stains her lip with a bloodless red.

She couldn’t be a stranger but she is. To herself.

Sometimes when she caresses herself under the shower, her nipples don’t smile. Her hands don’t warm her thighs and her eyes look arid. Like, somebody just took everything off with a syringe. She sits there by herself, waiting for her body to sing back. So she can roll in the wet, mute grass that will only stare at her because nobody knows where she gets it from.

That huge black smell of a secret, it walks along. It adds on that beauty, that smiles and dangers and arouses and pisses.

This jagged, little hiccup runs in her veins. When she is unclothed and thrown out.

So much, so much longing to be loved? She stands in front of her lover: rock hard, to be punched back.

Let’s change trains from trains, one streetlight blinks. Other blurs away.

(Artwork- Mine.)

Calcium camera

Flickering. Slurrping. Through the mobile camera.

They think of love.

Hands, legs, whispers, last spray of his favorite perfume. It gazes into her eyes through tiny beeps.

She becomes his ocean: Hiding all the stories, waiting to be discovered.

No. Maybe she feels like Titanic : humming in that deep deep trench. Someone needs to give her a mic.
She is done with it all
She wants to speak now.

Through the cameras, on the bed, through the Internet, in real, in fake. All men sound the same.

All the promises have calcium deficiency. Brittle bones, like her.
They will break on her shoulders soon.



Then what is that keeps her awake, waiting for his phone call at three in the morning?

Burning TV future

She knew that today, this sun will break into mercury bits

And plop on her window like confetti flakes, licking fire, rolling death. Steaming from the edges.

She walks out to seep in the cracked sky. She could smell, along with the diesel, someone was burning her past.

Once she wanted that, now she would like to reclaim it.

She ran and ran and ran and ran. To find something that could change it. But what can be done now, when it has all gone? And words have hurdled into a language that rams into your grammar and puts explosives in its G-spot.

This time lurches up like a drunken slob.

She could taste melting liquorices in the air.
Bats fluttering with a bandana and her flesh , whiskers to be peeled.


Her world switches back to a static noise.

Somebody has turned off the TV.

(Artwork- Afreen)

Flying away

Loaded tongue. Words greased with ammo.

She was always ready to fire.

But.

Something has changed from the past few days.

She thinks, I think, that her tongue dawdles into a numbing pain. It’s frail. Diseased.

Sickly blob of skin.

Leashes are let out on her.

Bruises are blue. Embossed over her knees. Peeking at her like children from Kashmir

.

What will she tell her friends when they see it? They will think that heroine has died. Her courage has evaporated and now, some tamed bitch has taken her place.

She won’t walk up to you with bosoms heaving with stories and fingers, dripping pride.

She won’t swell with midnights of handsome escapades or feel that need to.

HSE SHE HSE ESH has been longing to break words and shove them into electric sockets.
She will sit in her room and watch the sparrows fly away.


One by one.

Nobody rule us

I sometimes want you to put me back on my feet again

Because

When I am done running alone and shadows don’t steam from mirrors,
Your voice foams over lights on a screaming highway and
It strums through the rain drops. I see your face through it.


I have wanted you to lend my worries.

Or

We could share them over a drink, bite into them like cookies
And you would tell me your favorite.
I will pack it up in a whisper.

We could have walked down that road again, where no one comes at this time
And Bunty The White dog has made it his home.
You could tell me to sit by you. Street lights have washed our faces into the brightest orange.
Your stubby fingers skitter cigarette ash on my jeans.
It’s your sly smile ; you make my skin slip down ; let it creep over you and never come back.

So, play that stupid song you think ‘is the hottest’ and let cars stare at us as they go by.

Tell more about your dreams, your regrets.
Make me sit right here- under the rain at midnight, sharing a cigarette.
Just talk, just talk to me.
Let this all turn back, melt the clocks, explode the trains, hijack airlines, burn these tickets.

I don’t want to go.

Nobody rules Bunty and I just wanted, the same for us.

Going back and forth

Hello lovahs!

You know what? I can't believe that I once underestimated the power of old notebooks. It's a major fuck up and now I have leaned- If I feel low, go to old pictures. Few days back, I nestled into my wooden cabinet and scrounged for old diaries, drawing pads and incomplete canvases. Some of the doodles and scribbles in these books were shockingly honest, even for me and I couldn't relate to some of them (to certain things, that I have grown over now. We do right?) or they made dreamy or made feel all puffed up and evolved. But largely, going back to nostalgia was a very creative experience because there were things I could complete in a better way now or had more ideas to shoot over it.

Okay! forget all that sensibly-growing-reflecting-artist part, the best thing about peeking into these diaries is, you have a lot of fun. You can giggle at your inanities, the things you messed up with or descriptions of some hot guy who sat next to you in college but, you have never had the vagina (and balls) to speak it out. The books you loved, the places you went to- it's your history, mahn! You wrote it. Here are some of the better paintings/doodles/mixed media bits I found in that world and they just help you in moving stronger ahead.

Just close your eyes and let that laughter, pen scratches ring through your ears.

Amy's nightmare.

I don't feel the need to constantly rationalize my madness for Amy Winehouse and if something is deliriously in my head, it will certainly make it on paper. This artwork carries a very deeply felt anxiety and also, a creepily-perfect timing of release. I happened to draw this just a day before Amy's death and in those days, I used to play 'Rehab' and 'Back to Black' at a breathless repetition, talk about her music to literally EVERYone and I felt understood by her music. These artworks are, sort of, my tribute to her and the proud legacy she has left behind.

But even after all this, every time I listen to her, I feel like I am just beginning to discover her again.

More to Shivah. (after Karraikal Ammaiyar and Akka Mahadevi)

1.

The ghoul of Karaikal,

Wanders through clammy forest caves, chewing on cannabis and slurping his name.
Her body has finally been swallowed.
Just sockets of bones and a mouthful of blood.
And this disappearance is making her insanely happy,
She jangles her beads and toes over cymbals.
Maybe he is watching her too,

And


Silently crying.

(Image of Parvathy Baul. Equally divine mad beauty)


2.


When I think of a man, it should be you.
It should be your eyes, that burn mountains to a singing flute
And give me a reason, to not touch anyone again.
How can I forget your arms that swill through the sky with a musky scent?

You make me grin through ears and my toes curl,
If I even think of loosing you.
But my man, teases me with a hidden smile and
Disappears before I can be relieved.




3.


Shivah,

They tell me that I don’t belong here and
They have tried every way to fix my broken mistakes.
They wound me in a white cloth, wrote names over it to be read.
Streets ran over my head with fingers, they will push me on a throne when I succumb.

But I am still naked, my cloth has been torn.
I walk through raped cities that clatter a strange sermon,
I want to forget this language that comes with a thousand brackets,

I can only see you.

It’s not a blur.

To Shivah. (after Karraikal Ammaiyar and Akka Mahadevi)

1.

If he is blue, then that is the color of freedom.

Tie me in tongues, that only speak of him and
His every breath is impressed upon me,
In shreds of lilacs and moth’s skin.

2.

In the lap of a brimming lily,
Oozing electric blue, under a storming sky,
Adorned with gold.

He will embrace me and make me forget,

What I have been longing.

3.

Shiva,

My body has only known trouble. The only thing it has learned.

It must burn to be complete
and every morning,

Flames gossip with each other : He is waiting.

4.

He never shows his face,
When my eyes are closed and
She, who has seen him through,
Rain and pyre smoke,
Shares no secrets with me.

I run amok with her…

She greets me with a fluorescent tooth and shows
Me a meadow of skulls.

Stroking her anklets, a huge lotus shoots through the earth.

Splashes of wet earth, her molten flesh.

He is rising over the clouds and
Shamelessly, licking this impatience.

5.

His voice,

Is crisper than the summer sun. It’s redder than a womb.
She told me that he has splayed his tresses over mountains,
Rivers and even the oceans.

He is made of acrid evenings. After rain showers. Over a paddy field.

His touch. His touch, is what we have waited for

And

If it demands us to be stripped and rode on streets,
We offer our charring bodies with delight,

To be inflamed on his toes.