I used to live in an ideogram of my own world,
Rejecting psychological theories and accomodated schemas
An abandoned tenement of fear and enmity.
Indecipherable sentences scrawled with church steeples
As transparent thumbnails, subterranean schemes
Perforating gently graded turquoise tiled skies.
Symbolic sentiments, each uttered word unraveling
Strings of the woven shroud of secrecy
It was internal decorating and I had been furnishing rooms
With knitted tapestries and mosaics of loneliness
Plaster peeling, lust lingering behind bleached murals and walls.
You created caricatures from conversations and literary allusions
I was metaphor myself, smiling after each sentimental simile
Your arms like olive branches, extensions of laurels and peace offerings
Likening my chest to the filmy breasts of womanly clouds
Raisined nipples more melodious than polished saitic bronzes.
And I still remained the Hieroglyphic heron
With claws for fingernails and winged feet
Trying to blind by waving scarves as prismatic bridal trains
Unaware you were magnifying the lunar landscape of my wounds.
To love solitude, one must have uncommon resistance
And my existence was just divided into stages of pretension
Failures, their seraphim shadows and sheer perversity
Arrogant assumptions sealed tightly within an alabaster jar.
I wasn't calm the day I started dissecting myself
It was Cleaning Day, dirt and debris piling up after centuries of procrastination
Dismantling disoriented gables, uncertain rooftops
Unclasping the shackles of withered risks because
My parents had stained marriage like tarnished silverware
Their discord was the disharmonies of hives,
The stubborn architecture of ants and aardvarks.
And it was conditional responses, as I was walking on the
Trails of my own terrain, trampling on the leaves of
Accumulated autumns, I pricked as thorns or perturbed pine cones.
Time's fingerprints imprinted on my thighs,
And the eroded pavement frowns upon my narcissistic dignity
I used to store written testaments, subliminal messages
With plaintive vowels and combative consonants, hollow
Adjectives, paltry adverbs and suffocating nouns in
Armoires and drawers, the four boards of my consciousness.
And now I reveled in this renaissance, this emergence of self
The siamese sphinx rising from the ashes
Savoring your sweetness, was like the tasting of permanent summer
Which quenches no thirst, expressing sexual expletives in your ears,
They were the incoherent whispers of nations uniting, the ritual of repetition.
Our avenues burn with the brillancy of desires, its
Electric light falls over us as a green phosphorescent mist
Our courtship lit tindery cages, like moths encircling porcelain streetlamps
Where honey tightens in a coherence of rays.
I used to be mechanical, a machine running on toxins
The spokes of my wheels and cogs immobile, I was a labelled Ice Princess, a forgettable frigid lover.
But you were a nightingale singing well formed phrases
A cardinal diving into my circumference
Lashes rustling rhythmically, brushing shuttered sleep
Gently away from my rooftops, reopening venetian blinds.
It was relocating a mountain into my bedroom
In order to possess its authenticity, its aesthetic beauty
Enlarging the negatives of my photographic reality with you
I stopped retreating in secluded darkrooms with
Cryptic cameras and fragmented fantasies,
Holding me and helping to crumble the mausoleum doors of my mind.
We were travelling to different localities
Unaffected by plate tectonics, bringing about our own continental shifts
Defaced of all geography, our love resembled
Thrusting a mildewed gauntlet at mortality.
My life, repainted, the fragile fragments and elements
Given endless shades of color, microscopic points, lines, rearranged
The size and density previously in inverse proportion.
I gather spherical shelled kisses, the acorns of squirrels
Like food against a famine, swinging on ropes
Walking on ledges to the prism that outlines you.
Reason for writing:
The reason I wrote this poem was because I was inspired by my boyfriend.
Birth sign: Not entered
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View more poems by Sanghamitra Roychowdhury.