Muse (For B, who tried to make a poem out of me)

I confess you grabbed me by my collar, shook the sleep out of my drifting body and left me altogether speechless, tongue-tied and clueless, wondering how I must reply.

I confess I am flattered a poet of your intensity should find such bludgeoning beauty in my insecure, black body, that you should be mesmerized by my smile, that you should drown in the murky depths of my eyes, that you are probably drowning still with no hope for salvation.

How must I rescue you from this poem you are making of me?

Confess, B, that I am but a figment of your creative ecstasy. A half truth, a bold, distorted fragment of the real, carved from malleable clay, fashioned by your crafty eyes that peer into the soul of all matter in their compulsive quest for poetry.

Confess, B, that I am but a poem inside your head, one that escapes syntax, simile, economy. A poem you must pursue because it drives you mad, possesses you, etches its essence all over your hungry, prophetic tongue and remains unattainable because you can see, believe, but can never touch, grasp, contain, own.

Confess, B, that I am but a vision inside your soul, a stark naked angel wandering the smoggy terrain of your prophecy, a morning vision that will vanish by noon, that is vanishing so soon, vanishing as we speak, slipping away softly, on tipytoes, when you are asleep, while your body is breaking into the seductive arms of some other product of ecstasy.

Confess, please, that it will vanish in spite of all your pleas, your eager appeals to patron saints of memory.

This is how it will unfold,

The Vanishing;

It will begin with the forgetting of the curve of my smile and will steadily swallow all the intent in my semi-passionate eyes. This will follow; the sound of my voice blurring into oblivion. You will try to make it reappear but will hear only the sound of your own voice paralyzed by poetry, screeching in the deafening stillness of night.

You will shriek at the sheer wonder of this pure poem you have made of me vanishing into obscurity, too exuberant to have been true, too real to have been imagined, so incredibly out of reach, so unreasonably ideal, so fucking beautiful it makes you want to weep.

Liar Liar

You’ve been lying to me for a while now. I’ve found a pattern to your deceit. You try to tease me with half-truths. It’s easy, I suppose, to lie about little things.

You said you never forgot details. I quizzed you to see if you could recall the colour of the lace panties I wore the first afternoon we made love. ‘Blue’ was your clever retort. Liar! It was a trick question. I was naked beneath my coat.

I inquired about the last time you fell in love. You shot a cold glance at me, said you never fall. I asked if you were falling now. You said you were already in love with me.

And just yesterday I asked if you had made the bed or whether it was still messy from the last time we fucked. You said it was remade. That you stretched the sheets yourself, tucked the corners neatly under the mattress, put the pillow back into place.

You lied.

I stopped by while you were away and found the bed umade and dusty. The sheets were crumpled and misplaced, even the pillow and displaced and reeked of me; your sitar stood like a bystander to your innocent crime-scene.

I made your bed again and graced your covers with my body. You returned and brought with you the mad scent of wet grass. I warned you not to enter your bed, which was now in my custody as punishment for your deceit. And yet you stole into the covers and peeped through the window of my back. You trespassed through private property. Your fingers scuttled over the steep incline of my ass and crept into my burrow, thieving my goods, my underground loot.

Let me assure you, you gave me no pleasure. I resisted you, didn’t twitch an inch, didn’t sigh or moan, didn’t melt or groan. I was stiff, like whipped cream. You sank deeper into my whole and unraveled me, struck a secret spring inside my cunt till music came gushing out of me and your fingers waltzed on my wet ballroom floor.

And now you rummage through my body as if it were a familiar room. You seem to know where everything is kept, can find my light switch unerringly in the dark, can navigate around my spiral staircases, my corridors, my rain-drenched roofs. Your flesh rides through my curves, my steep turns, the bend in my road, till you occupy ever sacred-square inch of space with white lies.

The Laugh of the Medusa

There’s this ridiculous afterglow on my face that refuses to cease and my dark skin appears warmer and more luminous, as if there’s light trapped beneath that’s seeping through my pores.

My hair is shorter now, but livelier, there are flicks that fall over my face, and the light caged inside me gleams through in little bursts.

I watched myself in the mirror today, I charted a course for my body, examined my contours, looked for souvenirs. You haven’t marked your territory with a bite or a scratch or a tug but you’ve left dents deep inside me, in some unmapped region of my soul. In this un-tapped pristine jungle, you make in-roads, you chop at overgrown trees, snip off weeds with your bare hands, and claw inside me, carve a niche for yourself, make a home where no man or woman has been before.

I looked at the mirror and caught my reflection and saw my armor was gone.

There’s nothing to stop you now. I have no army of lies or deceit to keep you at bay, no treacherous things to say that will make you hesitate. I’ve laid aside my weapons and I’m willing and I’m waiting for you to take-over me.