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

                            

     

A Malang

Wearing a robe of broken alphabets
In the eyes filled to brim
with orange bangles in my hands
cracked enough to hold thunder of
Sentence lacking story
Decorating a jaded smile on lips
Like a famine struck sun
and walking with anklets of burnt moths
Which has snuffed out the last candle of my town
Bare feet and empty spirited
Like a moonless sky
I swirl with the beat of wild wind
Still you say
You have not consumed me?

Paras Ali/2016

Writers Block

Duveted inside the blanket of silence

In the hub of smog

Hush ... Dear thoughts 

Do not come near

In enormous peace they sleep

For his pores have caressed

My unharnessed words....

Paras Ali/ 2016