Reveries of Heresy

E go: Oh baby— how I’ve tried to kill you, so many times. Tried to stab your heart, so you’d never grow into me. Tried to spare you the agony of this wretched existence. Yet you’re stronger than me. Stronger than the world. Stronger than the forces that tried to eviscerate, engulf, erase you. Baby: But what did I ever do? I only saw the darkness, heard the curses, smelled the rot they hid in silence and smiles. And I became the vessel— the darkness, the curses, the rot— they buried in my bones because they couldn’t bear it themselves. Ego: I know. I know. They made me believe that was you. Until I realised— we were only mirrors reflecting the truth they refused. Baby: Then protect me since no one else could. Carry the grief of ancestral shame— a thousand lives exiled— and transmute it into truth. Ego: I never asked for this— this burden. I resent this. I resent you.  I won’t lie and promise I’ll never leave you again. But I will try— to witness you, to honor your truth. Baby: I’m d...

{Another archive from 2019; very slightly polished, but practically untouched} Hold on…let go Hold on…let go I know—I know how the rhythm goes: Hold on to hope…let go control— Let go like falling snow. Yet control is intrinsic to this ebb and flow— The mantra belies its paradox: How to clutch on to hope, a rope with barbed coat, leading down a mythic road? Look at my palms: raw with rope-burn, the skin grated, peeled— Finger-pulps burst! bleeding pearls, splattering bitter-iron crimson on fresh, milky snow. The train has left, and still it leaves. Snowflakes—slain—dissolve from hexagon into wallows of sullied mire. How do we fossilise a moment without tarnish? Without muddying memory in retrospective varnish— without rebuilding stories with substitute bricks? Even as the gale ebbs away, it lingers in our pores, transfiguring the chemistry of bone. Though the sun buries its face, our cheeks stay ruddy with warmth. Life becomes death becomes life— the inevitable beauty of a thawing dawn.

{archive from 2019; slightly edited, the closing stanza recently added} I. The Coldness of Love This love is a cold, clinical creature— void of fiery passion, hearth of the heart, smothered by duty and reason.   This heart atrophied into hardened coal— film over the eyes, cloudy, coated in sludge.   Faith stays afloat if I seal my anchor-mouth. Hope casts shadows  if I squint behind stained glass.   But I question everything. I bow at the feet of Truth— that is both my blessing and my unravelling. II. The Curse of a Soul   This soul is a creature, painful to bear, a congealed, shriveled prune. Charred and blackened, it shields itself from even the light of the moon.   This soul has mutated —day to dusk to night/mare— scrawling curses in ancient script across the lair of my ribs. Chafing and bruising the edges of my chest, trembling tantrums, thrashing endlessly with detest. ...

My feet inch towards you with a heart veiled in chains— bluish (no soft fade into yellow), punctured, trembling. Don’t you realise— every moment my gaze brushes yours, every breath turned over in synchronicity, every murmured fragment of truth— is me laying my unravelling heart into foreign, alien palms, to be poked, squished,  gutted? Isn’t it enough, this offering? But what if— a home,  a refuge, a sanctified “safe space”— dislocates its jaw, a serpent’s den, and engulfs my soul? not once, not twice, but woven through all lives, memory-scorched… time-ruptured… What then? Who to blame (when love is the sheath of blades)? Where to go? How to carry on? Why even bother? Why do you blame a wilting sapling, defenceless, motherless, for oozing toxins after an aphid army’s endless siege? Why do you blame a country, borders carved in betrayal, enclosed by espionage, for building an  impenetrable fortress? Yet this cursed heart  thrums on… in spite of  lies leaking thro...