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Daily Devilry: Artwork
updated 2 years, 5 months ago
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Poem VI
It’s that time of the night again
when the effect of antidepressants
wears off and you can hear
a dog panting outside
among the beseeching howls of her brethren.
You fell in love with Transylvania
when you were eighteen
and you’ve always suspected
that you belong to the other side
of the forest
where crones peer at the ghost moon
and divine each other’s pasts
by touching scars.
Natal charts, intuitive readings,
you’ve done it all
to make out the identity of this thing
masquerading as your life
but the truth always slips
between your fingers
like a spectre
from Ugetsu Monogatari.
.
You leave offerings
for faeries in your backyard
only to find them
nibbled at by rats in the morning
while you worry about the shortness
of the luck line on your palm.
You try hard to astrally project
but it seems that realm
is as uninterested in you
as this world is
so you watch Wuthering Heights
again for the hundred and fifth time
nightdreaming how good it
would feel to haunt your lover
crooning ‘Let me in through your window.’
(only if you ever had a lover)
.
You walk the labyrinth
splintering moonlight into pebbles
but the spirits refuse
to answer you
and you hear a laugh
from the ruins of a temple
razed long before you were born.
..
Poem VII
My daughter
writes Paulo Coelho fanfiction
at psych ward
where she cannot see the moon
hanging from my window
like the spread out fan
in a sumi-e.
.
She does not write about
the inmates at psych ward
though Coelho has also written
a book about it.
Instead she writes
about a girl
who wants to be a witch.
.
Tell me, mother,
she whispers when I visit her,
doesn’t every woman
secretly desires
sorcery to ooze through
her toothless soul
just once.
.
My daughter writes
about women
who dance through the moors
their arms flailing
like Kate Bush
in Wuthering Heights,
and wild grass tears through
the soles of their unpedicured feet
when the stench of sweat
and blood
distracts her
from the thoughts
screeching like a chalk on the blackboard.
.
We’ve made a group on Whatsapp,
the mothers
with children in psych ward,
but we have so little
to talk about.
They don’t read
Paulo Coelho, you see,
and I don’t know anything
about the Korean boy band
Catherine’s daughter
was crazy about
but we try,
at least we think we try,
to decipher
each other’s language
which is friendly,
yet so foreign
to us
.
And I,
stuck with the ghoulish moon
at my window,
write a Paulo Coelho fanfiction
of my own
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Sorry for spamming. These are some poems I wrote in last two years. As you will discover most of them involve craft in some way, so if you enjoy them, it would be my best Samhain gift. Also, your valuable feedback is always associated.
Poem l:
It’s 6 o’ clock
and rust falls from air.
When you were born
the midwife found an orange
in place of your heart
and after peeling,
she ate it and spat the seeds in the hollow of your body.
Your therapist told you
that aging is same as making love
and as you feel hours opening their red mouths around your skin,
you cannot think of a more ridiculous and a more accurate analogy.
As the teeth of night chew everything living
in the rhythm of sexyou write a memo to the next body you’ll wear
and end it with-P.S. We are all morsels to satiate the hunger of time.
You try to console yourselfthat if you become one with the unborn,
the rain may answer you.
The milk of night
are the bones of your lovers returned to you
and as labourers pass tobacco among themselves under the moon,
you see your ancestors’ bodies splitting with light.
A yearning blackens your bones
and the moon cracks and falls down,
and it takes you an hour
to brush the dark from your hair.
Your body moonburnt
and your desires distracted,
everything sacred confuses you
and you wander
in and out of the walls of time.
When you wake up, you can swear,
the tall poplar outside the window,
almost floats, its branches tearing the clouds.
Light has failed you once again
and now the hills around your village
are turning to moons.
The fog opens like a lover for you
and now you know,
it’s possible to believe in both
cemeteries and cherry blossoms.
..
Poem ll:
It’s raining at the edge of a dream
and you’re not yet used to September.
You’ve assigned each maple leaf
visible through your bedroom window
the name of a dead poet
as you watch your daughter
trying to read the left over tea leaves
in her Barbie mug.
She says that she can talk to spirits.
In an year or two, she’ll talk to boys
and you don’t know
which is more dangerous.
In the town cemetery,
crows always outnumber flowers
and no matter how safe the dusk is,
the night is always full of holes,
dropping a star here and there.
Soon womanhood will be the sky
your daughter can never escape from
and you don’t feel guilty
for clutching at the hope of this shared captivity.
But you know red isn’t always the prophecy
a woman once told you
after touching your scars
Red is more like the sound
of wildflowers stalks
snapping beneath the hooves
of a stranded traveler’s horse.
.
There, out in the woods,
where your daughter once got lost,
you once stood beside your lover
before he changed into a coyote
and cried the silver of moon-but even after eighteen years,
his jacket bristles like a wish rubbed raw.
You know that the sparks
when you brush your daughter’s hair mean nothing
yet you try to distanglethe spit of moon caught in her curls.
.
I love the Death,
your daughter announces one day
as she puts the manga tarot
back in her Hello Kitty bag
and you know that she knows
exactly what she’s saying.
What your daughter sees in her cards,
you hear in the raven’s cry
and you realise
soon you both will have to bury each other
inside the warmth of a snow flake.
.
.Poem lll:
She lives alone
in a cottage at a hilltop.
Some say she fled
from a foreign country
after killing her lover,
some say her lover
was a lady from an exotic land, and some say
she’s not a good woman.It has been so many years
that she is sure only
of the third, but she
still believes in cherry blossoms
as much as her lover believed
in cemeteries.
When the sun rises,
she spreads the tarot, trying to hope
that she won’t pick the Devil this time.
When she goes down the hill
to pick the berries, she sees
her childless gait reflected
in the eyes of village women
whose hands always smell of kneaded dough.
They are sweeping off the blossoms
in front of their houses with their backs
to each other and the persimmon sun
bleeds from their shoulders to her eyes.
Cows are mooing inside their shed
to be let out and as she returns to her cottage,
she’s careful not to knock over
the horse’s skeleton hidden among wildflowers.
.
The afternoon is nothing special,
as some like to think,
she has stopped listening to spirits years ago.
Death does not always lead to wisdom
and divining future is just as useless.
Time is nothing but the decaying bones
of the horse she sees daily.
Instead, she spends the time
dancing. Her body never fails
to defy her,
and the more she listens to it,
the closer she feels
to the wind.
She once saw a stone circle
behind her home and she left
the knife her lover was stabbed with
as an offering. The villagers
are burning leaves below and the smoke
is scorching her throat
like her lover’s ghost.
The earth is now pulling the sunback to her bosom as if
she was his lover, or maybe,
his mother and her blood
spreads its petals into the sky.
.
She can feel the hot breath
of night at her neck through the tree
she still doesn’t know the name of
and the moon once again
becomes the face of her dead mother.
.
.
Poem lV
There’s a woman at my office,
who says she was abducted
by the faeries as a kid.
They are, she scratches the back of her neck,
nothing like Disney.
.
I know, I say,
Nothing in this world
or other, is like Disney.
.
It was all for a stupid boy,
about whom I remember nothing, except the fact,
that his voice was like an egg yolk-
warm and yellow and crumbly.
.
Yes, we do stupid things
for stupid boys, I remember a boy
I had crush on because
his first name was same as the TV character
I was crushing on.
.
It was late spring, and the weather was
the same as it was in Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights.
You’ve seen the music video, right?
.
Yes, I say, though I know only of the book,
and even that I haven’t read.
I see a group of ants
carrying the corpse of a cockroach on the floor.
Oh, a leg of the cockroach is moving feebly.
.
They made us steal milk from cattle, she exhales,
and go out with boys I didn’t like.
.
Doesn’t seem so bad to me, I say.
.
I can feel the cherry blossom wind
through the closed windows, and I
cannot hide the grating grudge in my voice.
.
It was fun.
They abducted a girl whom I went to kindergarten with
after she dropped out of school
to nurse her newborn. I never liked her.
.
I shift in my chair to stretch my legs
and the twilit sky is too pink to be reassuring.
.
And you know, she laughs,
they made pretty boys sing and dance
and cater to every whim of theirs.
.
And yours too? I whisper.
.
Yes, mine too, she blushes and then I understand.
.
So, I hold my breath, did you manage to escape?
.
I don’t know.
.
I don’t know.
.
Poem V
It is just another day-
a comb with missing teeth
and her knees are bruised with spring.
Kate Bush is screeching
from her dead grandma’s room
and hours are the golden horses
of a carousel, merging and splitting.
The sun is transparent pink
of her mother’s dupatta
and minute by minute, the earth
is pulling back the green of shadows inside her womb.
.
A siren’s call: No
and she knows her heart
cannot withstand its own prayer.
She flinches at the sound
of moon cracking at her feet
and she looks at him for the first time.
.
He is staring at the ground,
and just like that,
he pulls a ribbon of light out of his mouth
and flings it into the moonless sky.
Persephone!
Her name is something fragile
between the teeth of a wolf-
but she can’t tell
whether it is a hunt
or the wolf’s own cub.
Despite this, she holds his hand
and the snakes coiling his wrist
move on to hers.
.
She feels a breaking inside her
and he neatly folds the clayen skin she shed.
She lets her bones fall
and leave them for her mother to gather.
He lets the pomegranate beads
roll into her mouth of smoke and ash
and her discarded bones glow in the dead dark.
.
When death calls your name,
you cannot not look back.
She doesn’t know how far she wants to go,
she just wants to be in the dark a little longer.
Her mother never told her
that a woman’s desires are not as simple as a yes or no
and she cannot risk never to crush
the bright dark of his face between her cupped hands.
Shadows leap out of the walls
to follow her and rain falls
in and out of her dream.
Somewhere, in the coast of night,
a coyote hunts hours
and Persephone’s mother fingers
deep cuts on the chopping board.
The mother’s body is filling up with salt
and the raven’s cry tells her what she already knew.
Everyone is counting the mistakes
she never made
and she knows, if she returns now,
the shock of cherry blossoms
will be too much.
.
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