The elevator elongates behind her
Eerie portal to her kind of eternity
She guards the passage
Ghoulish red wine
Black pepper bodice
Arms spectrally stretching
Welcome
To
My world.
Can you hear me
Swallow my scream
As fire erupts beneath
Tafetta red skirts
Who is watching my back
I turn to face a mirror
At her grinning apparition
Crackling Rosy stares
Deadly red-black....
And ... I sink
Before the queen of the night
As
My world goes black.
© Amrita valan 2015
Pain
Tarnished memories
Like word associations haunt
Making mind fragile
Water boiling over
Scalding blisters of hurt
Breaking old skin wounds
Tearing claws on
carefully patched up scabs
The dark blue veins of clotted
Blood flow its poison flowering
Poems of madness
The faded yellow scars reassert
A kind of vicarious life
Viciously driving frozen icicles
Stalactites and stalagmites
Furrowing apart painful caves of
Darkness.
Why do you say to me
That the healer of wounded hearts
Is Time?
Time is unconscious flow
Of passage of events
Memory is the grail which chooses
To keep the bloody trails and broken bits
Of our powdered hearts
Crushed by conscious agents in
Acts of deliberate cruelty.
The cross we carry, is like the
Laugh of the madman
He knows not why
But laugh he must
And raucously howl
At the moon baying for
His heart blood.
He who willingly ascended
The Cross, carried it knowing
How we too are bound to ours
Beasts of burden
Beating our breast the
Heart's cancerous tick tock
Reminds us of our time
That concocted figment
We imagine as past
It dwells to charm
Swells to burst
But cares not about what is
Forgotten.
What is lost in oblivion
Is not our past.
What is healed and happy
Is not a memory.
Those pretty pictures
Are our background cover
And introductory face to
Our hidden cave.
Inside dwells the primitive
Captive of the living past.
The past from which
There is a little reprieve
But no escape.
Time can't discard the sacrificial
Entrails of our chopped up selves
That flow bleeding into its currents
Carrying votive flowers offerings
Of our furious rage
Against pain.
It carries on, just like us
My friend.
© Amrita Valan 2015
To a Girl I Knew
I remembered you last night
Too distinct too cold for comfort
You initiated our all too brief friendship
Because I used to get so tongue tied
Even though I smiled a lot.
Pretty you are and always will be
My gracefully demure friend with a
Suitably picture book life,
How hard you made your face when you discovered
Mine simply wasn't that nice.
Do you know how it broke me?
For I had placed my faith in you,
Marked you out as a nice girl who won't abandon
A friend,
Because she made a mistake or two.
You wanted to banish and I was expelled
Blacklisted to desert terrains on the fringes,
Watching the ice creams you offered to
All the other little boys,
Except to my own little one, my friend.
Sigh....I wish I could just forget you
Such memories need an exorcist
Your heart was always aglow
upon your smiling face,
You charmed me and I couldn't resist.
The hope of befriending one who
wouldn't judge
And condemn on hear say alone,
But your life Mrs Vanilla Super fudge
Made mine seem dripping dreams
from its messed up crumply cone.
I remembered you last night again
For once again, sadly I had made a mess
But the tears from my eyes refused to rain
Because I recalled how when I confessed
To feeling pain,
It never failed to make me less.
With stony eyes and a maddening vice,
Iron tight and heavy, dumbwaiter heart
I surveyed hushed, a dull mute misery
The valiant walls of my vacant flat.
And my blessed friend from a
Far more happier place.
Thank God, for you will never have to know,
The effort and depth of that.
© Amrita Valan 2015
The Evening Beyond End
The sky lay out satiny carpet embalming
Earth with dark duvet
The quilt worked exquisitely
With mythic pinpricks of light,
The Host refulgent amongst all stars
Venus ushering in silky bolts of shadows...
The evening wefting and warping
In tricky descent.
Rose a few glimmers of other Stellas,
Treyas and Estelles less prominent,
Divas in their own right, dots of mystical
After thoughts random dropped
On blue green muslin slowly darkening
Its ink....gravitas, celebrating,
Accelerating towards rich velour.
My child threw his head back and kick started
The merry go round, one foot dangling,
Hanging on to handlebars with two hands and a
Casual foot slung in....
Spherical velocity tensing tiny muscles,
breathless, laughing in dizzy merriment,
Circling his field of joy, his centrifugal dreams.
I wish I could have seen his small patch of sky.
Before centripetally predetermined course
Lulled him into it's pull of order.
My own mouthful of dreams fading in the west
Where trees joined palms to fan ancient breeze...
Gentle vespers....whispered
Namaste....
Divinity ardent, self supplications
Of an universe,
God's prayer wheel in motion
In praise of His constant glory.
Dazzling exhibit, stupefaction of senses
The artist's masterpiece on display.
Piercing my heart into a million brilliant shards
Small jagged pieces
Of puzzling beauty...
I must put together some day
Before this world draws its fine net mesh of
Oblivion over my greedy eyes...
Before the luminous shards can pierce
My suffused lungs
Astounding breath.
Forever drinking beauty...
The fire of Djinns and Gods.
The allure of attar sprinkles into the aroma
Of roses and marigolds
Memories like silt deposits
Of miracles.
I cannot take in enough....
salting away the stunning
sadness of night claiming day forever
Its herald,
Offered such fleeting
Stewardship.
Bright lights up on high,
Pavement of stars
Astonishing luminaries
Mend or amend our
Broke back dreams...
I have been baptized by Day.
Venus lead me bright beauty
Into yonder stellar Night.
© Amrita Valan 2015
The Church
The church smelled of roses
Honeyed mead on drunken air
fair dreams flowering
Upon the holy vine
Of hour upon silent hour,
And every man who walked in
Left his ardent hopes as prayer.
I searched for sorrow but it was gone
In goodness consumed as water into wine
So fearful tears of doom and gloom
To divine providence softly transformed
In this room.
I looked up grave, saw slanting tiles brick red
Deep and dark ebony beams inlaid
Two grateful hands folded in praise
For highest roof over all mortal heads.
The snow white iron trelliswork, held brass
Sconces budding crystal chandeliers,
Light merrily flitted through, in and out,
Denuding skeletal terror of our nightmares.
I glanced up wondrous then, at the crowned
And sceptred Mother, holding baby boy in pride
And quietly together they firmly proclaimed
A promise, to be our help and guide,
From legions of man-made unholy beasts
Love so true in this vast room of infinitude
where Mother and Son, you and I,
Finite - infinite become
Forever One.
So beautiful my state of sumptious trance
A feast for saddened heart, which hath supped alone.
Without the splendid sun, and within the sunlit dark
Soft stained glass shimmered and flickered like
doors to sweet Heaven above.
And thus,
And so,
The bread turned flesh
The fruit ripened into soul
The wine infused into our veins
Becoming blood transfused
Of the Holy Spirit in all...
Man made afresh
In a poem of his own
Where heart befriends
Passion and peace.
And in this hollow most hallowed shell
This sarcophagus of ancient jewels
Man's secret search come true
His commitment made firm purposeful
Reigned a brilliant peace, a white insanity
Crackling zeal, frenzied zenith of joy,
Above and beyond spires of worldly ambition,
Beyond human heart's helical earthy passions
That can be felt, not seen till eyes close in lovely peace.
Glimmers ethereal of eternal power
Freedom's surreal universal bowers
fragrant with love's perfume
Loving wisdom in sweet radiant shower
Forever rolling....aglow, a cosmic sea
A source beyond consciousness and
Its endless stream,
Beyond the backyard of Time's flow of hours
Lies Godhood, lies behind our eyes and
Tortuous sight....
A palpable poetic certitude.
That which is forever free
Will always be
Sparkling cider wine from this water of life
This wafer thin flesh separating you and me.
An internally perceived imperial
Empirical Sea...overhung with regal globe of Godly
Gold ...Stunning Sun of Truth
Forevermore's Most Holy See.
© Amrita Valan 2015
Weekly Challenge Poem
Crimson pearls organically grown
Below waist of denuded goddess
Ruby hued Rapunzel.
Even her back blushed erubescent
Exposed to view.
She came alive untwining
From her cocooned coccyx
A scandalous scarlet chrysalis
Rosy rubenesque nymph
Incarnadine Bathsheba
David's Solomon dreams.
A singular sinful rose red garland
A harlot majestically on lewd display
She aroused pelvic portals
Cavorting Caliph's cerise pleasure
Somewhere between a fragrant vibrant
bud, a living luscious beauty
And a red petaled Bella Donna in
Resplendent display.
Lady of nude sinuous grace
Blooming through trappings
Sensuous dream in satiny lace
Innocence preening coyly,
Peeping through
Red velvet stays.
© Amrita Valan 2015
The Way In.
Ivy encrusted emerald gate
Tall dark silent empty fate
Hung about the castle
Such misty musty air
Another climate, an
Alien atmosphere
Prevailed there.
I ebbed in with my
Indifference
Ignoring abject pleas
From my soul,
Irrationally irreverant.
The trees stood up like pistol shots
Springing to salute my morbid thoughts
The sky above drooled blue greed
To suck away my soulful needs.
The air so hard and harsh and crisp
A bat could wing its way
Through rustling it.
My madness was a solitary pain
I desired to be crushed
Redeemed by reddening sin
To be poison elixir and bleed the rusted heart
Leech my soul out of
Its asthmatic mildewed dust.
Simply I speak of a desire to see
If the fires of hell could liven me
If God shied away would Devil's
paw
Set me terribly free.
All constraints barred at the door
My heart was a thumping corridor
Where if I turned the corner of reason
And dived in through my painful seasons
The portal closes and
This earthly dice rolls, ne'er
Ere again to turn to my
Favor .
I cried, in crazy grieving start and pause,
Jacob robbed Esau,
Yet flourished with nary a loss...
Who the sinner, who the saint?
A sleight of hand a Messiah's feint.
I kiss my Judas kiss and the threshold cross
Who died for me,
A coin's treacherous toss.
In the dark he greeted me
With blue locks of livid flame
He licked me
Clean
Pain and memory became the sin
With hideous cillia arms
he locked me in.
I became the bloody Rubicon
The hideous one eyed unicorn
The red lantern glow from
The House upon Evil's Hill
Where the windows glow
Through the mist they flow
Into your dreams,
Till He finds the key
To your heart and opens
the tender lock
And automaton you sleeping walk
And turn the handle of evil
And enter the door,
From where
You may never return
Evermore.
© Amrita Valan 2015
