A Sin worth Sinning

I long to walk on the highways of my blanketed desires
Towards your valleys, to be near you 
Forgetting all my tomorrows
As sooner or later, I would be crucified

Let my tears populate the tavern
for your wadi to sip moon-lit
dews till its barren lips are drenched

I yearn to preserve the colour of your eyes
with the lemonade spray of inky-sky
Orchestrating ghazals of eternity !!

Let me cloak you
 in the flames of heavenly fire
and unearth your brooklets
in saffron snow and its snippets

Sorrow hath fashioned your skin
You too look a faded fragrance of some one's Past
Even you too can never be mine
Your name's hymn still I shall sing

Slaying all my joyous gods
kissing to death all my lords
Let I worship fair
Let I die honest and bare

What is love?
If not a sin worth sinning!!!

Paras Ali/2017

Nostalgia

It's sunset again and December smells of intoxicating fragrance of star-lit alleys rising from coniferous forests. The icy wind melts, swallowing marrow of bony memories in a single gulp and then my brain sends my heart off the scent by dodging a thousand emotions of mine. At times claiming the earth to be inconsiderate for our union or other times turning him an alien-avatar who actually spilled his guts out. Horizon drops many new lines over the sky during the sunset making me forget the initials of his name; his voice dissolves, his persona fades and then each time I bury the ruins of the past he is born again in an inescapable Present.

Paras Ali/ 2017

Random Thoughts

I believed that human relations are timeless work of Creature                                                        Guarded closely, I  thought no evil murderer could around them lurk                                                      Oh how I forgot , relations never die a natural death
Instead are always murdered

I pledged to my kings to give me a morsel and few droplets                               
To feed my stomach , to quench my thirst.                                                     
Oh how I forgot  statues of stone can never grant
They can never answer.
                                                 
Crossed to my mind , a million hopes                         
And I reserved them to win the people I know                                                                   
 Oh how I forgot ,the sea of expectations have drowned ships
 Mine is just a paper boat.
                     
Helpless I speared my heart till blood leaped up.                                                         
 I skinned my wishes till their skeletons were earthed                                                 
Oh how I forgot, my tragic endings matter least to this world
In a book of history I am an incomplete word                                           

Brick by brick , my house I saw                                                   
Crumbled into dust like a fallen star                                                                               
 Oh how I forgot , a wayfarer has no home
 nor he owns any path

Paras Ali/2017
Image :No Claim

Edges of the Tides

The wind has a familiar taste                                          
Sweetly Salish                                          
Rushes from the waves ,On the bank     
A known fragrance.                                          
The frost surrounding rust                                     
Gathers the feathers of seagulls                                                              
Same barrenness and hollow drought                             
Among finite clouds                               
 Of a starless night                                    
And smell of vanishing smoke                                                   
Winding against the sand of shore      
No leaf stirs, resides                                            
An enormous stillness                                                                                    
Perhaps someone has cried                  
Holding the edges of the tides                    
On the other side of the sea

Paras Ali/2017

Would you ever come back Home?

The first time you left i was fast asleep
Tightly grabbing your chest, 
beholding childish dreams
You placed my head on the lifeless bear
and sneakily departed, 
deceiving me in sleep
Planting a sad kiss You bid goodbye
and murmured to my ear a note of apology
Whenever I was awake 
Which you never dared say.
To comfort my heart, to turn me numb
Barbies and beautiful dolls you sent
Do these expensive toys
Can ever replace the family joys?
Or can those branded clothes
Rescue me from falling on the potholes 
Or can Your letters mourning with explanations
can populate my sky with missing constellation?
You said every year you would be back home before winter
Father!! this is Autumn again
Nor you turned back
Neither like past decades , the calender changed.
Are you gone forever?
Were all those promises fake?

Paras Ali/2017

Pages of the Forest

Washed clean of August's sweat

by the frosty dews of november's night

Drool the clouds, leaving the horizon soggy and wet

As the sky sprinkles purple shower to unknown heights

Litters too the candlelit pages of corniferous forest 

The berries then break loose their roots 

To let them grasp few grains of light 

Muse also shudders through the fingers of the shy moon

It gazes for long and long into Autumn's eyes

Draws deep inside its lavender scent

and write word-less verses on the sun-burnt scars of her neck

Paras Ali/2017

Haunting Silences

Often I present my bosom to the Moon
Finding it exhausted while bricking its castle
from the fractured comet’s dust
I mute down the loud bongs of my clock
To ear patiently the story of a solitary flower
And roofless, I, always try to shelter the night
When from the ruthless sun its luminance is robbed
To let the Nature know
It is no more alone:
I too have been brutally bruised
by unreciprocated sympathy, prolonged silences
And questions never answered
But nothing is replied….!!!
Ripple back a hollow emptiness to my sight
Like the cold people of the Earth
Either it does not want to see the agony in me
Or it does not want my arm, nor my imperfect being

Paras Ali/2017

Moon of an Unknown Country

A stranger Moon of a foreign country 
Amid the hubbub of gale
the leaves quiver ,beats the rain , 
and smashes the wind hither and tither                                                  ,          
I Take my lodgings under the date tree                                    
Strangled by the darkness of an unknown country                                          
 I watch motionless ,the eminence of stars fading away                                       
My allied soul , my childhood love : My Only Moon                                               
 To and fro does sway                                                      
Leaving me alone in this wild night                                       
Joint by joint, it sees me sink from its sight                                                         
As if it never knew me                           
As if it was never mine

Paras Ali/2017

Reality of Dream !!!

Life offers you a road to dream ,so, the art is to stay in the mid-way___ the way which margins ingratitude and rebelliousness. This path makes its map in our imaginations at a very early age . "Go , Keep on moving and be Happy again " , a child's first murmur to his ear by a real story's book wizard , could be a mother or a gran. Then comes a mentor from your playgroup to the last class of Academic career : 'Dream Big , Dream High , no matter how hard you fall ,keep on going ' . Last , comes old age where if you are left dissipated by winds of all life' stages , you are taught , "You are never too old to set a new goal ,keep on trying till your last breath ."                                                      

 We whole life wait for the sun to rise and assume that the buzzing we have heard close by is a nature's divine call to make sure presence of our destination . This anxious wait followed by positive pats make us dream___dream like titans.  Then in a blink of an eye , the straight road doubles and Fate asks you to make choices : to go in the direction of the gold glittered shoes all your life you wished for , or to chose to be a part  of "The Great Caravan" because "The Great Caravan" after all belongs to the most important relations in your life.  The dreamer stops stone-still while fumbling in his pocket of wits he comes out with the thought " My people are more important than my dreams ."  

His dictionary adds up another word : Regret. Only his heart knows the pain of not braving enough to set off for the road , he never dared taken .Years pass by and chances begin to slip from his fingers at a much impeding pace. In this journey he is handed over a gazillion motivational books , enclosing ever inspiring stories and folk lore about heroes who survived slumbering giants , crawled over banks of thorns and ultimately successfully crossed seas of hardships. But what for ? 

In reality, A Dreamer if rushes forward to his goal is not a dreamer but a rebel to many because Sacrifice , Patience and Gratitude are the contents of happy life , the same people who kept you imagining all your life good fortune of Goldilocks, flying carpet , a Miraculous Genie and ideal conclusion of Cinderella step back and would ask you to quit your path and sacrifice for a noble cause . Yes almost all of us to our capacity sacrifice , we scrunch our ego , we envelope our dismay of living with the people we never liked and we pretend to be okay among the camaraderie of all those trials we never expected . 

Life moves on with an acceptance that every living has to pay a wage. For one cult you are tagged as coward for not chasing your dreams and for the other school of thought no compromise of yours goes appreciated as for them you did nothing exceptional. For few wise lads, " Jo na mil Saka use Bohol Ja  " 

The world with its duality offers you ears with acute indifference. In this long run the agony of losing your dreams is less hurting but it tears the heart apart to know at some stage of your life that the most trusted people : Mother , Gran, Your Favourite Author and your inspirational mentor lied to you for dreaming high. They never told you in life dreams holds a secondary significance because  saving relation is another name of  a " Sublime Goal " itself. 

Life not exactly plays a trick upon the dreamers but it works on give and take principle to balance the sundry faces of the world. If it gives you a bed of thistledown , then it may ask from you a body of steel. If it gives you night , it asks from you in return muscles of a labour. If in case it does not compensate you back , remember to look down people below your status and most importantly learn dangling your feet in brooks of all kinds.  
                                     
What about the mid-way path of dreams I started my article with ? Let's not talk about it , let's behold to the idea that some day when Lord would ask us to empty our pockets on His Table  we would present Him the Baggage of unsaid words behind our never narrated story and Slayed blood of our dreams for winning His Creations. 
                                                      
 Collecting the tears shed by humans                                                        
 The listless Sea perhaps lost its atlas...!!

Children of my Town

Soaked in silence, drenched in sunset   
the paper boats of my town lay slayed
Shiver no grass of the barren parks
With the marching thud of twittering feet.
The breeze has forgotten counts of hide and seek
and coral puddles have dried out of thirst
to be splashed by angelic heels  
Where went those songs, those childhood rhymes 
of dauntless poets who ruled all seasons of time? 
No pillow now hides a milky tooth 
Would now no fairy , to the adults , come to greet? 
Giggles and laughters are now a story of tales 
The rainbow of innocence has gone so far leaving behind no trail 
How fortunate we were once born as kids !!!  
In the same town of mine  
now mothers give birth   
to only sane adults

Paras Ali/2017

Votive Threads

Nestle down ,one by one.                   
blue hyacinths and sweet violets                                         
Upon the Red Sea's bank            
Whizzing , their petals boom                                            
As the chirping breeze nearby blow                                     
To some they are the flags of the flower's league                                                 
To me they are the votive threads                                                          
Tied by the soil on the wavering stalks ,                                       
For making polite requests to the lord

Paras Ali/ 2017

A Pleasant lie to comfort my aching heart

Hands in hands , feet drenched in carpets of sand 
                                          
He might be picking up the best of words for his verse 
                            
From her radiant eyes; his ever new darling. 
                                                             
A shooting star meanwhile ,will  
                 
 i hope let loose its curls,  
                                      
a spray of dusk-perfumed-clouds would descend down
                                                            
And then first downpour of Monsoon 
                                          
Would sing my saga to him 
            
which he has long  forgotten   
                                   
and dismissed as another chapter of the past 
                              .                                  
Bewildered and smouldered he would see my visage
                                                    
Rippling In every chord of the tidal harp   
                                                                                
Waves would drift him to his memories  
                   
Perhaps he too would burn with a longing of me  
                                                 
Ah what a pleasant lie to comfort my aching heart......!!!

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Pour out your heart my love else the patience dies

Pour out your heart my love
else the patience dies

The Moon does melt into tiny Specs
When unveiled stands the waves
On the rooftop of sea
during last hours of night.

The rubi rays of sunset
do steal a kiss
Though the stone-gone- mountains
beneath the rust of frost hides

How exquisitely the stars tailor the distance
and run miles far
to pen on the petals
with the ink of dews
Rose's name

The distant shadows can meet my Love!!
Springs turn to cataracts
if inescapable is the regime of Fall

You keep your words clenched
for the days to come
For the arrival of perfect moment
Would your letter to, I, the Mortal ever be sent?

 Pour out your heart my Love
else the patience dies

Copyrights reserved to Paras Ali/2017

An unfinished Poem

Nearby castle of soggy leaves,
neath snoring rain bubbles;
in the accent of soil;
To be an only Queen,
An incomplete poem
In the country of democratic poet
Lisped her last....
Like an unsung song
of an unknown soldier...

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Question Mark

Spring-scented- breeze
is about to toss
specks of fallen stars

The snow-frozen rivulets
are near to erupt
weeds of poetic words

And sun is on its trolls
to brim the moon
with nectar full of beams

With this March
The lost ones would meet
The shores would no more be apart

But i am unsure
If ever was I
A lost part of you?

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A letter to America

Dear Dream Land!!!

Whenever, in my varsity years, I eared air planes mightily droning to the sky, I always dreamt someday it would take me to you; “The Land of Dreams ".  Like hundreds of youth in my country, I myself decided to get locked in the jaws of world's super power ' The United States of America.'  Fortune tailored the tides to fit in the size of my sea vast dreams and with a commendable score in TOEL, I swiftly robbed scholarship in one of the renowned universities. My stamped visa was the very first, to unlatch the door to the atlas of my dream land. Then the moment finally arrived and I stepped to the threshold of my fantasy Dream Land: Florida. Its ingress cornered by thick boulevards sung the song of American Dream coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The subways narrated me the story of America’s Declaration of Independence and I firmly clung to the belief that I being an immigrant was going to sip deluge of “liberty, Peace and Pursuit of Happiness” which always attracted me magnetically toward the country.

Days went by, and America started to unveil Her in front of me. It bared her chest and I realised behind those robotic- alleys, highly-lit streets and technologically advanced mechanised buildings, she was as raw and charred as an Orient woman. The scholarship which only the cream students in Pakistan earn was in other words "Aid”, a kind of charity to buy talented brains like me. The truth of belonging to a "Poor country" and a student studying on “Aid and Funds” shattered down my inner pride. To my surprise, the freedom only lived in museums and was as paralysed as “Statue of Liberty” which even can't save herself from pattering needles of meek rain droplets. My scarf was mocked, my sense of styling was bullied and I was sniffed by bulldogs for making sure I carried no explosives.  Racism gulped me down like hurricane does with cotton fields. I started suffocating while breathing the air of Democracy with all its legitimate trappings to ensure rights of minorities The war against this crude Otherness taught me to overlook drunkards stopping by me, snippets sitting close to the rooftop of the building allocated to Asians, a queue of cameras to monitor my movements and yes an invisible steel barricade to limit myself from the native Americans – I overlooked them all despite having countless kicks of this system on my nerves. The culture of peace which the state holds roofed my fears with a garment, which with when I cloaked my feet ,it bared my head and when I managed to cover my feet , it left my head whole naked. I genuinely lost equilibrium of my own identity as nothing was more painful than being treated as a citizen of “Third world” who are labelled as “poor, criminals and terrorists. It is said, for surviving in a battlefield one can even compromise on pork but I was forced to eat delicious cuisine from those hands who have murdered trillions of my ancestors since the time of colonisation till today.

. I have turned into a dystopian xenophobe or an imprisoned bird who is hoping for the future which is never going to dawn as the womb I have selected has never accepted me being its child. In this “Land of Dreams”, the past has been sold to buy a stranded future. On the contrary, I prostrate to “Present” and no deity of this name exist here at your place. It’s time to fix the errors I have committed in Past.

Good Bye Forever….

Let him be Silent

I go weary of the twilight
to see the jar of stars
quenching his thirst.
Watching, bowl of lemon rays
Knitting pearls on his face
And glaring at lavender flames of spring
pouring down on him droplets of rain
My beryl Sky!!
Let him starve upon the isle of words
Keep his lips cracked
Like my own dewy eyes
As if he learnt to speak
That moment I shall die......

copy rights reserved to Paras Ali/2017

The Centre

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.
Mevlana jelaluddin rumi - 13th century

We have been living there for decades in a castle having bricks of vacuum, crystals of hollowness, cubically arranged on the earth less floor and lanterns of stars transfixed to a roofless sky. Lovers are never safe in this world of lust and cruelty , at times the organic desires burn them to flames or other times tense opposition strangle the emotions to death then were we safe ? Yes, because our abode was rooted to the centre of “Right and left”, in between Nowroze and Day of Judgement and in the middle of life and Death. How could we be located when the atlas of ours had no mark of existence in the map? We sipped from the motionless tranquillity, dews of stillness and from muscle less horizon a meal of tender soft solitude. You might think that overdose of solitary solitude scrunched our passions but trust me it was a joy mightier than the freedom itself. No one asked about the pennies in his pocket, his future and his religious sect to be my life long's companion nor was I punished with labels of a rebel, a cursed daughter and a non-conformist sister. I never was redolent of sandalwood so as an aftermath in future I would not be questioned about my beauty. Neither had I expected him to write eulogies on me, announce his love for me, to whistle my name on the winds or to bleed with the yearning of mine. I wanted him to be nothing in real things, just like my own stock-still existence. We were two strayed stationary souls found by 'the troops of lost'. Love drugs the sensibility, blinds the vision with its narcotic fragrance, people say that, but our love was squeezed till it reached the center of “Right and Wrong”. Where do we met then? We met in the fields margining sanity and insanity. My aura several times collided with the energies his orbit emitted. Our lifeless breath mingled whenever we distanced ourselves from fire, water, earth and air from our bodies. His gravity was a soul to mine whenever he swimmed in my dreams, closer more than my imaginations. Like the eye is a grave to million moments my stationary being was to him and this way he knitted the patches of my soul and I sewed his dismantled fears of securing a bright future for me. Lovers are two in one but we were no one in one; as identity has been out of question.
For a decade, the union of I and Him locked the jaws of swishing of brain, hissing of blood and melodious notes of heart. Suddenly a moment larger than centuries whistled at the frozen castle. A hole fissured. Cracking a needle wide surface of ecstasy and voices of sun and moon slithered inside it. The ray of dawn aflamed his statue which I preserved across ages and with a tinge of spark, he started melting like wax. Drop by drop he fell to the ground and then clayed into a mould. He started to get stiffened in bones. A cloud then beeped, drizzled a droplet to my eyes till my aura of heavenly quietude broke. I rubbed my eyes with back of my lashes’ heels and saw a pair of hazel toned eyes were already fixed on me. The Line erased, I became a fully bloomed flower of spring and He turned summer: masculine, dominant and a giant of clay. He moved forward, leaned towards me and girdled around me, our wavelengths collided, another circle formed whose equator was known to us, probably a place where we have lived.
But in seconds, the circle sweltered into a triangle because one between I and Him had been transformed into a demon…….. (To be continued…..)

Copyrights Reserved to Paras Ali/2017

Envious of Your Moon

Tonight I will
                         

 Set on flames
                          

The silver self of mine
                   

Till caged in iron chains
               

I will gulp down
                      

The chalice brimming with nothingness
                              

Till insomnia in my eyes settles

 And in the puddle
              

Where fossils of imperfection float

I will drown
                         

To let my blood in it get muddled
                                       

 I will let the flakes of cosmic dust
                             

Wane my heart
                         

Till I am sooty and blotched
                                  

 I will be a blank paper
               

Having a spotted equator  
                    

To become a bewitching metaphor
                             

Like your nocturnal Moon...
                             

Would you then doll me up in your verse?

Copyrights reserved to Paras Ali/2017

Blasphemous Mother

The red robed whore bares her stomach to get it scissored

In closed-pavilion, the reeking clots she desperately cuddles

During the hours when darkness sets the moonbeams blurred

Because the bastard in the city of saints deserve some respect

Look at that hefty, thick lipped she-male?

Who tarnishes the last bone of cigar's ash

When ax-edged droplets of pan are spat on her face

And whole night the she-male prays for nothing

But to be a Ma of a complete human

The Queen of the Jungle, while, is the Queen of the gore

Benumbed and blind, she watches ‘Man of her life’

Rummaging through the thirty teeth, picking his furious four canines

To tear down and incise his son's last crumb of flesh

Not frightened of the sun, not scared of the woods

The Queen of Jungle stands like an unmoved stander

                                         Dead to the fact this cub had more than half of herself                                                                         To win his love, his numbered nights and days.                                              The cub's breath is traded-off on cheap bargain

Paras Ali/2017

How can I Harm you?

            

My whole self is a blue butterfly

Caged in the glassy walls of semi-colons

My eyes, the twinkling hollow buttons

Can only inhale the fragrance of moonlit stars

My wilderness is sifted with velvety ribbons of puns

Burnt in ashes, my cells flung it down

Those notes which syntax grins till beheading their crown.

Fear not my love, do not change your path

The castle of yours in my sky vast eyes resides

Still you are the emperor of my town

Why my skin do has looks so pale?

Won’t you ask what turned me frail?

Mocks on my verses, the reverberating storm of adverbs

Grounded in ink, I am a puppet, whose lord is words.

The frothy clouds rain stony diamonds of verbs

Over the stumbling waves of my toddler thoughts

Why would I, a noun less pronoun, defame you?

Words have crumbled me into briny sand

Each time, sun ascends, my bare innards roar your name

Nor words can change, I their foe

Neither I am willing to let you go

Do not be frightened of me my love

Would you leave my heart in this painful hour?

 When all is fair in love and war

Paras Ali/2017

Creatures of Night

                                                                                                                                                                      

Sitting by the side of footpath he fixed his canvass right beneath the street light.  He clipped his messy curly hair falling on the curve of his flatly bulbous nose with a pin and a strange laughter rippled the wavy eerie of silence. Not a single line adjusted its roots on his brows as nothing was new at 2: am because life at night is always louder than the one in day. The howling dogs rent less than quarter of a night , the other half is filled with the sighs of a hopeless whore who willingly canopies herself in the alcohol infected breath of her one-night lover with a hope that probably he would come back tomorrow not as her buyer of flesh but her suitor. Her opiated sensibility keeps the Poet alive and her whispers weigh down the broad shoulders of his pen. Few inches are yet left to complete the circle of night, half of them are occupied by those slum dogs who litter the piles of garbage and populate the nocturnal nights of roads, while the other half is taken up by a painter who picks driblets from the stench to feed the avaricious stomach of Art. This is how the night wallows inside her circle and each one of us like vultures eat her inch by inch but it never spits on us back .                                                            

 ”Quiet children for fifteen minutes only, he opened his bony fists for thrice and mumbled with his lips "Panda rah Minute “to the grinning crowd of young folks".                                       

 But the hissing could not stop so he placed his brush at the back of his ear and crawled straight to them : " I will give you all money, you need to sit in a pose I have explained you earlier ".                                         

 The murmuring got patient with the pledging request of a humble painter. He managed to ignore the way these children of sundry age gazed at his sleek body. He blew a puff of smoke and took his palette out. The thirteen year old girl having silver nose ring caught the eye of his brush first. He sketched her face with a free hand , yellowed her freckled uneven skin and unleashed her handcuffs tied to quagmire of poverty just beneath her lavender shawl tattered enough to expose the platinum  streaks of her tight braid. Then he pouted at the eleven year old boy adjacent to this pale girl and painted his lifted chin, an element of pride usually every man child is taught to have, and then his golden front tooth resembling the red-edged squinted eye of his, as complete as an abstract painting. Third, came the turn of a tail less dog, on his skin clogged dried clots of blood which were at the moment brown. The dog did not has the nerve to bark aloud but with children calling him "Barray Sahib" automatically pushed his wet tongue to lick their shoes slashing trucks of muds .  Everything now was on the canvass, humans and animals sharing the same genetic traits, a slumping cavity of Art in the jaw of colors and another darkness which infiltrated the valley of night.                                                                                                     

Perfect, all done. Can you take me to your hut? The joyous painter husked giving last strokes to his painting.                                                                                          

The mockingly toothy-jawed children responded him in utter assurance:" No, we cannot take you to our place, no one would let you sit with them ".                                                                        Why? You want more money? He asked.

“Our grandfather is as smart as this "Barry Sahib”, though people call him "street dog” but he sounds like an English Pet. You know what he says: “These painters and poets are more Beghaiarat than us the slum dwellers, their pencil touches the face of their woman before their own fingers, and they breed on leftovers ".                                                                

The painter did not shook his head nor furrowed his brows as he knew life at night is larger than the one in morning. 

Paras Ali/2017