Truth
But no one ever speaks
of sea-wide expanses
of clear sky, refracted
silver-coins on wave-tips,
and pregnant palm trees
unfurling frond-boughs
heavy with green-mesh
ladling unripe-as-yet
dates to be picked in fall,
of palm-frond plumes
netting the sky like a
woman’s sacred caul;
no one speaks of the
desert’s chalet-roads
lambent with mirages,
a piebald sky with
puffball clouds
ruptured at the edges,
of dark green seaweed,
like pliant obsidian
trawled by the waves’
strumming on the sea-face,
of swatches of fish-bones
fine-fettled in the morning
sand, pure and untrodden,
no one speaks of the sky
huffing wind, chinking
porch lanterns, suffusing
spadices with life-breath,
bespattering pollen; no,
no one speaks of these:
when they open their silent lips,
they just complain of allergies.
Another Kind of Love
When one squints, the other
dims the moonlight for her,
such is friendship, or so
your parents think, heedless
of limbs that tangle like
limp honeysuckle petals
in the early evening,
before the sky darkens much,
before the muezzin cries
the day’s last call for prayer,
before your mother uncovers
the shallow depressions in
your mattress made by not one,
but two daughters of Muslims.
Nereid
We have a nereid in our sea
smattering ormolu platelets amongst
pellucid yet opaque red fantasies.
She pilfers blue and swaps it for teal;
she floats in an opaline bed telling me
numinous tales of bravery, of a
lachrymose world, moulting daily,
filling up the sea with lathered
myrrh-tears and nacreous emotions.
With her nimbus askew, she dives
into the malachite sea, sharing stories
with me - crystals on cotton – of
crescent-topped minarets moored
indefinitely, of misunderstood mullahs,
of neutered truths that collect into heaps
beneath magnetiferous waves,
spatula-streaked paint coagulating
thick and slimy like ochre okra-pods,
plunging into a pulp of color, breaking
capsules of piquant oudh and stirring scent
into brine, waiting for the eastern sun
to sweat her synergies onto the water,
when our nereid, eternally phototropic,
can press up to the frescoed sky,
and blow whispered bubbles that dispel
terrorists who call themselves mujahidin.
Olfactory Bazaar
The cardamom pods have been drying
for days on old stiff newspapers
in kitchens wafting saffron breezes;
the effluvium of tanoor-baked saj bread
drifts past the perfume of old bukhoor
sticks petering out near the window sill,
and crinkled men with nutmeg-flecked
skin carry on smoking grape shisha, its
whiffs whisking through this forties-café,
infiltrating blocks of fused blue sky
and scraggily tangential red-sand dunes;
turmeric roofs reek trendy store-bought
eau-de-toilette, glossy in its French packaging,
drifting past the pong of Indian incense on
the marble-topped kitchen table, out of open
double-glazed windows trailing the stench
of depression and another life about to end
itself in today’s new crisp newspaper.
Waiting for Eid
It’s the day before eid,
and ghoulish desires feed
on merlot-beaded, blue-thread
trimmed, asymmetrical intentions.
At midnight tonight, you will
celebrate the end of Ramadan,
a long month with days that segue
textured with green dragonfly wings,
adorned with teal and rose, with
hummock-shaped cyclamen, with
succulent etchings, redolent anticipation,
finial evening ahead, awaiting
fresh thyme and crushed coriander
fried with garlic, fennel-seed bread,
plump mutton and two glasses
of Black Label, straight on ice.
The New Kid
It’s not awkward
anymore when you
visit your stepmother
in eid, no, it’s been
years now, and the
situation has tempered
with the swift shifting
of reality, cherry phone
calls on a mizzling day
and the keel of your
mother when she found
out has mellowed with
her desire to live;
no, it’s not awkward
anymore to carve
chit-chat out of those
few minutes, sometimes
hours, when the dull
dirge in your brain
fades into tinnitus,
and you can actually
bear the family’s din;
it’s only awkward
when you visit your
stepmother in eid
and find her face
bitter and reeking
like a durian, because
there’s a new kid
playing with your
children outside in
the yard, a kid she’s
never met before, and
you turn to ask your dad;
“who’s the new kid?”
and your dad coughs
awkwardly and says:
“He’s your brother.”
Party! Party!
Oh the fun
we’re havin’
the booze is flowin’
and skin’s showin’
the moves are
on the dance-floor
and the DJ is groovin’
Oh the fun we’re havin’
pasty China-white
with ear pierced chaffin’
against a tattooed cheek tonight
and he with moonin’
on the mind
and she, spoonin’
him behind the red tapestry
so no one can see
but someone always sees
through the red tapestry
sees the booze, the skin,
the god-awful-dancin’
and fondlin’
of pasty white on white
that goes on tonight
Oh the fun we’re havin’
on New Year’s eve
Kuwait is smashin’!
Leitmotif
It wasn’t quite a heart attack that he got
when he saw the decomposing figure
against the wall, lurking in the shadows
of the hanger’s flannel his-and-her robes,
the red Moroccan daraá, and the limp dark
green, ginger-filled neck brace, not quite a
heart attack, more like a tightening of
tendons and muscles, a creaking of bones,
and a scraping of conscience all at once,
reminding him of his filaceous existence,
thickets of guilt and patches of dappled
light limning his memories. This unstirred
figure, a leitmotif, sledding past once-
cocooned reminiscences, now re-emerging
from under these piles of clothes
to remind him of a coriander-fresh
youth, when he carried a pomander of
truth in his pocket, and she – where was
she now, anyway? – sat on her hair,
disentangling love from knots, when all
the while they had been loping across
a strigated life, slipping into its creaks
and channels, irrefragably abrading
into molecules of bergamot and oregano;
and as he slumps onto the bedroom
floor, the grey, craggy figure of death
scurries forward to disembowel guilt,
desiccate memories, and assuage the
living wife with revenge well-planned.
The Other Wife
I wrote to you on frankincense-scented
paper, green ink frilled, blotted, bruised
with sequined teardrops, and when my
gem-rimmed words oozed out, like resin
from the winged serpent-guarded
frankincense tree, and solidified onto
the red-earth paper, buckling into
schizophrenic calligraphy, morphing
into crushed-velvet roots, the green of
that unripe-mango skin I peeled for you
the night you left me for her, preferred
her new rose-petal skin to my crinkled
coriander-sprinkled rind, the green of
my devoted Friday lunch mint-infused
overcooked okra, the green of this abbaya,
oudh-soaked just for you, when my words
oozed out – oh-so-green – onto that
scorching red-bulbed paper, I thought
perhaps, for once, for the sake of
shameless years and endless dark stark
nights of service, you’d read, listen, soften
enough to send me all five of my children.
Fate of the Gulf Mariner
Garlic-pink,
blue-swirled sky
regurgitates
seasons for
me to coarse
through clove-black
seas, lateen
sailed; myrrh burns
evil eye;
shark-oil sealed
planks stitched with
palm-husk threads;
emerald
whorls, flute-like,
play for dill-
fish; my skin
catches kale-
green, digs gold
runnels for
four months of
spring on my
sambouk; I
catch them lit
mottled in
gill-nets, pearls
and fish to
live; and you,
my son, hair
sea-sticky
like palm-leaf
matting, brown-
leather skin
thin from years
of diving,
breath borrowed
by waves that
slurp the shore,
tell me, son,
as you lie
heartbeat-less
on my deck,
how to spare
your mother
these tidings.
Love and Nausea
“It’s not the oohing and aahing
that make my stomach turn,”
“nor the stringy two hairs splattered
on his glabrous domed head when he
turns to face me in bed and huffs
whisky-ed sleep-breath into me,”
“no, it’s not the crunching of
cavity-infested teeth into apples
or the loud sucking of mutton-marrow
stripped from sheep-bones at lunch,”
“ nor is it his mangled limbs in bed
finding their way to an orgasm
without me, no, that’s not it,”
“it’s the way his eyes, glaucous,
steeped in malaise, gnaw into me,
meet repugnance, and shrug, smug
in the knowledge that he is the man.”
Secrets in Your Palm
When he read your palm,
that day in Junpath street
in Delhi, on your first trip
without family, that day
when Kuwait seemed a
distant mote and the scent
of patchouli quaked around
you, a matutinal glow haloed
over your head, the sky ladled
her hues onto your virgin skin,
concealing the disturbing
three ligneous limbs of
the Indian palm reader,
that day when you thought
yourself not a tourist, but
a bold adventurer, and the
universe - humbly oblate
just for you – strewed dew
to cool you, when he read
your palm that day, did he
tell you about black eyes,
a drunken husband and
a womb beaten to sterility?
Taboo
Your arms bare and skin decanted
onto the world in fluid hues
with white enlacing blue
caressing red harvesting black
black morphs into two figures
soaked in dark strokes intractable
sucking souls for Religion
white unfurls Reason
black displays displeasure
at your odalisque contours
those breasts swaying
like heavy globed fruits
on a heaving branch
so contrapuntal to Religion
yet Eve’s replica rests with
unease on a red dais mouth
flickering with the unsettling
vibe of disapproval inaudible
yet loud drifting from those
black forms who think
themselves unerring
parsimonious with their selves
not even offering crumbs of
understanding as they watch
your bountiful thighs immerse in
sandalwood-scented red pigment
with strokes of warm sienna
they are striking in their
diminutiveness these black forms
their rich petroleum-fed blackness
leaps like the silhouette of
Kuwait’s oil-well burning flames
and you with your tulip face
nasturtium breath cinnamon-infused
chest your womb-ripe warmth and
spicy-red mouth you glow bloody:
the blood of menses
the blood of slit skin
the blood of birth
the blood of death
the blood of earth’s epicenter
hot-core bloody red
like a tomato seething bulging
bursting into round-tipped red-bits
so your blood bursts forth from you
warm and lumpy and bare like pulp
nascent spice-stippled your scent
abraded by black infestations
hidden in foul orange watching you
from afar unable to touch you
own you kiss you love you
so they choose instead to rape you.
Hymen Secrets
Seed-rich box carry my secret pulp scraped
virginity pressed
like a new flower
between old pages
cloudy blue behind me moon glowing
shaft cut scandal-stained cretaceous white
carry my hymen’s secret oh scabrous secret
of one more protean woman
r e – v i r g i n i z e d.
Chiseled Linen
Sorceress,
you’ve been silenced for resilience earned,
feminine power scorned, chilled, carved
into marmoreal heritage - broom intact -
washed linen sullied by the stench
of rotting petroglyphs hidden in wadis;
roots gnarled into dusty marble,
dull as the dugong your mariner ancestors
scooped in days that used to glow
like phytoplankton in the mesmerizing
dark waters of the Arabian Gulf;
gone are the groupers and pomfrets –
slimy, silvery-gray – gone the prickly cockle,
the blue sea-star, Queen Sheba’s hoopoe
swishing magic over the dhow-crowded sea;
scorned and silenced for your resilience,
sorceress, incised pride fit together
like past potsherds, seared into place by
the inept hairy hands of intelligentsia
and eggheads alike, smelted
then sculpted into a grainy, shellacked
stone frieze of a woman, sea-salt garnished;
like a peppery furrow shell
hanging a blue-striped ormer,
amputated, yet unrelenting,
you continue to hang linen;
voiceless, still you scream;
vision ruptured by years of
a binding veil, still you see
that inculcated injustice,
that mandatory cremation
of rights and dignity,
somehow you see, sorceress,
that there is a way to be free.
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