I cannot Name it

There is something missing 
In those trillion images
Sculpted on the coins and currency notes
Engraved on the letterheads,
On the bills, on the keys and the passports
This is not the one I set out for
Has the heart to buy new abode sold its god?

There is something missing in that baby’s kiss
Innocence-starved,
Filled with friction
Nothing but an electronic smile he floods
His lips and my cheeks
Near and part at once.
Did the womb teach him about bounds and nations?

There’s something missing in my father’s words
Caged in a glassy fence
He embraces the camera
While I cuddle back its lens
I only know him as a combat medic fixed on the tank
His skin and the face in memory lie blurred
Is He only real in the picture?

There is something missing in the sky
Tossing around constellations of drones
Colorless rain is now a parchment torn
Buried miles away from its home
Human lights fly with mighty feathers
Perchance no wings of poesy are left to flutter
Is the banished Sky like the wounded Earth an asylum-seeker?

Paras Ali/2018

An Open Letter

Dear Flesh!

 It’s not my first letter to you, I always wrote to you whenever in the late hours of iron night, I saw you calmly sleeping by my side, exhaling whiffs of indifference, in between us nothing but centuries like two characters meet somewhere in the epilogue, and whenever lavender lining of the sky descended down our cottage where only I lived. In both despair and happiness you were the first one I narrated my own version of our story crowded with comforting excuses to rescue your status as a protagonist in my life. I walked rough trying to recreate myself with the substance you needed like the ripples dissolving gently in the colorless eyes of the sea or like a dream which bricks its own house and later demolishes it.

Remember? When the raven with his claws clenched in blood landed on your expensive shirt, mounted over the rope to get dews of the sun, and you so much wanted to kill it for spoiling its grandeur, a gentle voice murmured inside you to be gentle and that was me. Though I convinced you not to be a murderer but I forgot those blood stains on your shirt though washed a thousand times never extinguished rather it chained your skin in beastly selfishness. In moments, I saw your clay melt from an angel to a Human who is governed by the bodily desires. For the reason, to win you, to please you, I turned myself into a Poet, so that my words can caress your restless throbbings and cushion your eyes in a healing Hellenic embrace.

Do you know how poetry treated me? At times it drifted me to the soirées of saints and sometimes,  it left me unarmed dying at the hands of my so-called friends ‘words’ and other times it asked me to be a messenger to narrate the story of zephyr to the Milky Way gurgling mournful sighs . But I kept on talking to you though my tongue you often cut-off, as you hated my nagging.

You on its reverse had all the reasons to defy my attention. You were part of that world where carnal desires bulb the caves of flesh sellers, where money is worshipped in the temples, where fake identity markers are sculptured, and where rights are gruesomely skinned alive to live long. It never mattered to you when down by the streets of the sea, alone I cried seeing the tale of my heartburn and fleeting beauty unheard. When you had trillion of sentences to shoulder the affected souls, I gasped bare on your door, for your single word, for your only gaze and for your empathetic cuddle.

All the wars I fought were for you to turn you victorious. When I saw you turning on the waterworks whenever his memories walked closed and autumn reminded him of you, that day I tattered my own garments to patch yours and I gladly sacrificed myself to the inferno of annihilation just to give you one more second of a joyous life. I died many times to keep you alive. Still you say, I am on the verge to lose my dignity in your eyes? Still you claim to be owner of that chastity that never belonged to you?

Things would have been different if I were not by your side.     

                          

Dear beloved! We are made to part, I am immortal and you are mortal. This paradox only illumines books of fiction but not reality. I am sure till the time you will open this letter either I will be gone or your eyes would be deprived of celestial light. Like my previous letters this letter too would remain unread but I am sure some day crawling among blurred shadows, unknown faces and strange smiles you would seek for someone you once knew, someone you yourself said good bye.

              

Yours

Soul

Paras Ali/2018

Sleepless Verses

Tongue-tied
Stand I
In the hope of sailing away
by the swollen waves
to those shores of semi-shut doors
Where I have to wait no more

For the affirming eyes,
For the sacred poise of caressing hands,
For the sourly-sweet voice;
For the world
Where pawn dies to rescue the king
In the game of chess
Which never belonged to him

For those bonds,
for those songs
Which bloomed among thousand scratches of
a disloyal mirror___
a chapter of timeless errors.

May tonight the dust of stars
Flushes out the tomorrow’s dawn
As my arms long to embrace
and lips yearn to pour a kiss
upon my self-loathing verses
Like me
they too have not slept for nights

Paras Ali/ 2018

Cathartic Spring

The fall lays bare in its enclave

Its sighs are muted by the thrashing waves

Spring has set to swirl

For once more

the darkness in frenzied throes

Around the temple of twilight

Once again zephyr rakes up

the hay of gore

And the sun tears up

the clouds of scented flowers

till oceans slurp the drops of musk

Finding that instant

when Change marks the moments

 I too have offered my self

My carcass, my words and my breath

to keep the flame high

to keep your alluring silence alive

 Would then Spring turn to my fall?

Would I be able to gain the Paradise I once lost?

Paras Ali/2018

"Universe of Butterfly Wings"

The galloping sand screams defiance
while it faces the sun
Same does the dusk
It licks from the Holy Grail
droplets of blood
Spilled by the soldier moon;
The traces of whose martyrdom has been removed
If the horizon emanates a holy musk
Why the dusk gasps out of thirst?
Though this wilderness belongs to my heart
Still this station of comets
This place of You my friend
Is not my own, is not my home

Shadow less, ruptured and speared by the wounds of memory
I have walked for miles on the colonies of termite
Fallen to the parched dust
Lost my self
To win you my love
Yet your street’s doorway promise me no dreams
I know not whether You are a conjurer
Or I have mastered Your spell
Hung between words and silence
I walk to an unknown zone
This place of You my friend
Is not my own, is not my home

Cloaked by the downpour and cuddled by the cotton twilight
Quiver our nerves, shiver our flesh.
My fellow Humans!!!
Our roof built of butterfly wings and cottage of straws
Look alike
We all burn to ashes our blood-seeped-stains
to hide ourselves from the nocturnal eye
of this beautiful universe
Yet I am to Them
and They are to me unfamiliar
I know not this curtain of strangeness would I ever breach?
To my destination would I ever reach?
I walk to an unknown zone
This place my friend
Is not my own, is not my home

Paras Ali/2018

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