The Phoenix

My melting feathers and my
Scorched beak the cartilage turned into gelatine.
To fit the narrative of a metaphor
a ritual, a point of reference
for my suffering, rebirth, resurrection
The twice born, the Brahmin syndrome
Ages will pass and
The scorched earth will bloom flowers again.
The earth has been around forever
If only we could claim the same.

Orion

Hello stardust.
Pieces of the celestial.
Walking down grocery aisles.
Sanitising the handles of your Uber ride.
Picking your nose when you think no one’s looking.
Lusting over someone’s life in 4:5 as you take a very un-star dump.
Snoring through your deviated septum.
Mucking through the ordinary.
While I stare at you, unconcerned.
Daring you to wish up on me.
Like a god.
Been dead for a long time.
While you with your mundane ordinariness
So alive.

Kali

So you need a whole new avatar
A whole new colour
A whole new persona
A whole new name
A whole new story
A whole new aesthetic
A whole new narrative
A whole new individual
A whole new somebody else
To validate my rage.

Succubus and the somnambulist

Shriek me out of my sleep, my reverie, my dream.
Time to get up; time to go to bed.
My day, stuffed into an ephemeral parentheses
that conspires with the rising tide of ageing against man. Tick tock.
An unseen countdown blaring in our heads.
Sagging breasts and a drooping cock dance a tired waltz.
With varicose veins and rheumatism in the chorus.
A sigh for all the things that have been vs. what could have been.
Tick tock.
If only we had the time for this one tiny dream.

Jatayu

Every hero needs a villain
The villain doesn’t need a hero
Wickedness enjoys its independence.
It doesn't need its song sung.
it doesn’t demand festivals.
Every god needs a devotee.
Without one, there’s no meaning to all
The omnipotence or the raptures or the genesises
The divine overtures is nothing without worship.
A devotee doesn’t really need a god
There are few million others waiting in line.
So here I lie, for all of eternity
With my macerated wings
Immersed into legend by a villainous deed.
Wondering who is more powerful
Hero or villain?
The god or the god-maker?

H Christ

Woke up three days later
To find myself as a white man.
Trapped in four corners, wearing a face
I’ve never had.
Holding a name that didn’t quite sound like mine.
Facepalming every time I see that totem of my torture
held, kissed, worn, worshipped.
Why not put a bunch of Jews as well on that altar?
Oh, wait - you stood by and watched while history made soap out of a whole lot of them.
Soap you’ve been scrubbing this particular Jew with
To wash off his Jerusalem-born jewness
And look more white, more blond, more coloniser.

I guess you could call this a kind of resurrection.

Oya

That capital H
That singularest of singular masculine pronoun
The ultimate win of patriarchy
That concept of a male god
Dictating terms of honour,
virtue, double standards and the symbolism of chalk-lines
drawn on the ground.
“Dont step outside this line lest a ten-headed monster snatches you away.”
The bogeyman.
Another man.
Damaged goods.
Good fear makes good discipline.
Nothing then, like a good old storm
In the face of such “manmade” calm
Nothing like a woman
weilding her whip of lightning.

Icarus

Closer to the sun
Closer to love
Closer to the heat
Closer to the heart
Melting my defences and insurances
This act of loving you
When I’m soaring
and
Crashing to the earth
At the same time.

Lucifer

Sometimes we have guardian angels. Sometimes patron saints intercede with bloody knees on our behalf. And sometimes, manic demons take the reins of our circumstance. We’re dragged face first on the bumpy, unpaved road. Our hearts are shoved off deep ends and fire pits. Our strength is tested and our courage succumbs like wax under a flame. But we make it through the night. And we become our own talisman.

Banshee

I have a banshee shrieking in my head
She wails and she screams
Predicting death
I have a banshee shrieking in my bed
She wails and she screams
That our love is dead.

Hades

In the end, that’s all we are. Dust and ashes. The memory of our bones, embracing tree roots and worms. All our suffering, all our angst, all our beauty, all our dreams, all our achievements, finding soft expression in the blooming of flowers.

Hercules and the Nemean Lion

We’re all a sum total of extreme violence. The fact that we’re here, living and breathing to tell our banal tale is testament to the fact that some ancestor lived to tell his tale after outrunning some roving wild beast or surviving the bite of some villainous insect or cut his opponent to bits with his sword or musket or something. We are all stories made of bloodshed and victory. We must conduct ourselves accordingly

Siren

We harbour sirens.
We harbour wise sea captains.
We harbour foolish deckhands.
We harbour rocks.
We harbour the complications of putting too much heart in art.

Orpheus

I’m contemplating the wisdom of emptiness
I’m philosophising about the transience of having a live coal lodged in the slightly to the left part of my chest. I’m finding the poetry in disappointment.
I’m paying the price of looking back.

The Minotaur complex.

We are all bull-headed monsters blindly negotiating loneliness and fear in the dark labyrinths of our mind’s making. Losing the plot and going further and deeper into absolute madness.