1. Purification

You smear beeswax on my face, turning my sighs into a honeycomb of multiple possibilities. Someone asks me to second-guess the shape of my future sacrifice. The sky rolls out its washed-out prayer mat for the parrots screeching infidelity. Blindfold me. True devotion is when you kill the god you worship and the devil you fear with one stone. Remember the days when we rubbed our names against the matchbox of silence, producing orange flares that mitigated our thirst for revelations. Our ears were acute then to the blasphemy of angels who singed their unwieldy wings, flying too close to myth. Now I shelter your scream in the crook of my arm, dissolving it layer by layer in my pain. Only the sea takes note as we fidget between hunt & haunt, our sins pinned to our breasts. The cobalt blue waves throw up the last of mackerel & swordfish, hunger prowling outside our bellies. Our afterlives gather moss in the pith of evanescence. Coins of sorrow clink in your pockets as you skitter over the rocks, dead slugs clinging to your iridescent heels. The flowers speak wilt & rot. The smell of crushed lemongrass on your underlip, bitten red by the dying sun, looms large in my olfactory cortex. The clocks run berserk as I rinse the night clean with my tears.


2. Offence

It is already dark & I come home carrying the freed heartbeat of a sentence I killed with the wrong verb. There is talk of culpable poetry, but my ears are stuffed with the lingering hum of creation. A certain sweetness resides in my mouth, coating my tongue with clangour. Rain flips nonchalantly through the pages of my crime, bookmarking contusions of imagery with thunder. The carcass of imagination turns livid with too much precision. The rivers rush shoreward with their magic of resuscitating the dead. They offer temptations of thirst. Between the boughs of the Ashoka tree bowed with red clusters of irate flowers, the moon hones its instinct for self-denial. The courtroom of twilight plants evidence everywhere. On lily-white reams of paper, foxes skulk, waiting for the hopping feet of ink. The instrument of slaughter gleams in my hand, the blood of mundaneness turning wine-dark with time. Often, the passage from owe to awe is too rough, the obligation of sanity overpowering wayward flights of thrill. Death drags a flurry of full stops through the dust. But the pulsing continues & words start growing like organs around it. My scarlet offence thickens into song.