Quiet

Please, stop.
Be calm, quiet yourself
slow your hurried feet,
that I might find the path
up your narrow roads
that this fool might jump
and fall deeply into your skin
that taught me the stars
Into your voice
that lends sunlight to every morning
Into your arms that held me
when we stormed the summer palace.

So please, my sweet prince
rest here,
wander these halls,
and steal away my heavy eyes.
Like night, the ocean,
and the holy beast of every toke.
Like a knelt prayer,
palms meeting face
on dropped knees and fallen grace
searching the faithless
for a glimpse of the trace-less
in the far flung howl, and the returning thunder
and the choir of spring magnolias
in a honey-soaked breeze
In a bright storm of pages
and the reef of sunken ships
taken root in my lungs.
Like the flower that grows up to my lips
to speak your name
I search for you.

Fingers riding rusty veins
into jagged pores
and cracked jaw bones
into shaking sweat
I ache for you.

So hold me still,
keep me steady,
grab me tight
like a handful of seeds
and a chest full of flowers
touch me softly,
keep me safe
till the days of winter,
and the frost-blue cold

For when it is all dust and dreams
I will scour the ruins of your words
to find the hole you once filled.

Let it drain the silver from my tongue
that I might hear your voice,
and finally, sleep softly

They call me..

The way you say my name reminds me that I despise it. It's too strange to be relatable but not exotic enough to be attractive. It's a construct of hard, rolling r's with a slightly too long string of e's trailing behind it.

Praveen.

I fought and won a war against that name, set against the backdrop of my social circle and schools, and it was a genocide. Half of it disappeared overnight. I compacted it down to it's smallest possible profile, as if making it smaller made it less repugnant.

Prav.

When you say my name you remind me that I hate it, which is strange because I don't hate it when you say it.

It falls from your lips like a dance. Like a drop of paint. Like an ounce of fire-light.

You make the hard r sound mystical, and you hide the awkward e's inside the most sensuous way you pronounce the n that sits at the end of the whole mess. You make the v in the middle feel at home.

So, to the world I will remain Prav, the name I pin to my chest like a battle scar.
But in the corner of my quietest heart I will keep the sound of your voice and the memory of my hated name.

Fragment

Listen,
beloved.

In the dusk-dim dark,
of a red-sun evening.
In rain-sheathed light,
I sit and think of you.

My fingertips feel numb
and the words escape me.
But I remember it now,
the half-formed explosions
the almost conversations,
the fizzled expectations of grandeur.
They tumbled out of my mouth
uncontrollable verbal after-birth
misshapen, awkward and unloved.
starting and stopping in short bursts
Still born sentences,
gasping for air.

I lost something here, beloved
inside and within this shapeless dream
a piece of a fragment,
a figment,a fracture
of an almighty explosion

On this red dusk, dim-dark,
rain-sheathed evening
I recall only the warmth of your hand.
So lead me sightless.
Let me dwell in all your shadows
till my eyes are steeped in burning flowers
and the choking flood-waters fall below my chest

Teeth

It’s a noise. 

A god forsaken buzzing like a billion insects nesting in a hollow rock; reverberating through all of the hundred and eighty two centimeters good genes and nutrition have seen fit to gift you.

It’s all the hounds of perdition howling at your gates.

It’s the surface of a lake during a summer storm, chaos, fury and knife edge winds.

It’s the inevitable, creeping darkness, the slow-rot of roots in the warm earth.

It’s slowly losing your grip on the light you used to own and finding rage like you've never known.  

It’s a long-lost conversation that found you, and held you and kept you dry in the rain.

A gnashing set of stained teeth in the pit of my chest.

Falling headfirst into this fresh void, I place my hands on the scale to tip the balance.

Hoping to gain more than I lose.

Familiar

This cigarette feels awkward in my hand. The wind keeps sneaking into the gaps in my defenses as I try to spark it, so I do that silly dance that all smokers do. Transforming effortlessly from a hunchback with cupped hands to a crouched over bird-of-prey, moving ever closer to the ground like gravity's pull suddenly got too much to handle.

The gentle weight of the foam tip reminds me that I’m supposed to quit, but the storm in my chest protests.

How did we get here?

I coulda sworn that when I started this day I was 5 years old in the back of my dad's car. It was red and japanese and the smell from the air conditioning made me light-headed, in a good way.

We were coming home from dinner with people too uninteresting to remember, but they had a copy of White Fang that I found and stole away to a corner while the other children played.

It feels like you were there with me. Sharing the space on those cheap leather seats, the alternating dark-light-dark-light from the tungsten street lamps tracing a path across my face,waking me up in blinky-eyed intervals.  My dad still smoked back then, the sharp scent of Dunhill Reds climbing into the back seat with us.

You feel as familiar as that car ride, when we were neither here nor there. The social anxiety of the dinner mostly faded away, but the familial anxiety of home still a bit further.

I keep retracing my steps from here back to that night, and for the life of me I can’t tell when things changed.

You were there, don’t you remember? You listened to the stories I found in those books, you laughed when I childishly fumbled the big words, you loved the characters I made up when the stories didn’t have happy endings. We listened to all the same songs on the radio, and watched too much t.v, and crushed on the same characters.

I couldn’t have made up the day I met you, when you laughed at my jokes that weren't that funny. When we accidentally started smoking the same brand. When you fit yourself so perfectly into me that it felt like you’d always been there.

Or was that all in my head ?

I guess you felt so easy to keep near that I didn’t realize that you weren’t me, and needed more than I give myself. But that’s a mistake I keep making, and will probably make again.

You gave me that at least, before I woke up in the back of that red, Japanese car,eyes blinking half-asleep and smelling of smoke. You gave me a glimmer of hope that I could bring someone else into this. To once again share a bit of heat and laughter on the long ride home.

Momento

(I've been having trouble putting something into words. For months now, whenever I tried to describe what this year has felt like in coherent sentences I get stuck. And I just realized it's because Ive been limiting the theme of my words, and in doing so failing to accurately express a very long and colorful year.

So here it is I guess, it it's least compressed form)

1. This year has been a cut-me heal-me, a kiss me tender then leave me. This year's been a bipolar girlfriend with fuck-me-harder bedroom eyes. With days like blades and weeks like being lost in a vast ocean of lukewarm bath water.

2. This year I found the silent meadow at the center of the storm, the pebble at the centre the pond. It wanders my chest like an air pocket through waterlogged corridors.

3. It's like a toke held too long in the lungs, a cascade of sensations like dominoes from thundering pain to lightheaded euphoria, but always leaving a sore burning hole in your chest later.

4. It's the mixture of righteous purpose and fear stained guilt, like a holy man with his knife at the throat of an apostate.

5. A year of being lost. Of a long searching hand finding a ledge. Of a quartz crystal growing roots, and germinating in a dark cave at the heart of the planet. It's knowing that the universe takes an allmighty breath, and being allowed to share in it. This year is a tightly held breath, released in small bursts to last the week till payday.

6. It's been a year of light. All consuming and life renewing light. Light that bouces and spins and shimmers across the palaces of sleeping kings. Light that turns green after dancing through the branches of a mangrove swamp. I was blinded when I discovered and embraced the ever-present luminescence of all things, glowing phosphorescent blue like the cold-body radiation of a dead star.

7. It's knowing that when the hair and meat and humanity has been seared off your bones, what's left will walk to the volcano's edge and throws that goddamn ring into the fiery pit from once it came.

8. It's been a year of constantly knowing that I am loved, and knowing that what love I have to give is enough for now.

Yea, it's been that kinda year. Now onto the next one.

Massive

I think there's a special kind of visual largeness, a unique sense of condensed mass reserved for the larger men of Central Asian descent.

Could it be the colors our bodies wear, that meaty washed out brown sitting next to dark eyes and lips and night-black hair.

We grow larger again, sitting inside the tents of our large billowy jubahs, linen cloth to crease and add lines and definition to this unseemly mass. 

Hair, hair could be the cause. Curly, omnipresent, indomitable, always either too short or a raging growth of indecipherable locks.
Tangled shrubs of arm and back hairs add to that i think, extending, growing the edge of our silhouettes so that we may stand larger than we are.

Could it be that lumbering, swaying gait of a man walking off a heaily spiced meal ?

Maybe it's skin after all, not the color, but the texture.
Slathered in coconut oil perfume, rose water or sweat from the humid asian air.
That shine, that slightly awkward wetness may be that last little something that completes this picture, this image, this reflection, this moment of being obsessed with aesthetic massiveness.