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