Self-portrait in Blood

Darkness is evolving, proving fitter to survive in its struggle with light; it was not an uneven fight after all, our memories aren’t failing. The winning move it made was posing itself as colors. This year, the color of darkness was red in the state I live. If you disapprove of it as another sick vision in the Gotham City of my head, I will agree with you dear reader, even if I am not convinced. Let it be, let your conviction win. I will be a happier man. But at this moment when I am transfiguring into that creature of night, a sucker with a shit of a thirst for life if not the darker knight, I can feel the creatures rising from their shrouds in the villages. In front of the mirror above a washbasin, between these tiled walls bathed with honey and amber hues, I can see my face is melting in each splash. I am grabbing the ephemeral of my fading face; sketching my self-portrait in the age of floodlights.

…and sometimes, the city vanishes from my body…
and I am left with a superhero in silhouettes racing into the night…
but at other times, the ping-pong dies in her lips
and the blood-song emerges from the breast of the angel…
then I bow before his singing
I murder and I sleep

In the age of the floodlights. Fluorescence everywhere, nickels and dimes. And news breaking in. I am sick of those advertisements and news longing for an hour, longing for more to follow, those news and ads sculpted in light. I can recall those bygone eras when a tunnel of light sculpted shadows of dreams in the rectangular darkness; how we waited at the edge of our seats to arrive that zone of the magic-lantern. Now the rectangle of light – smaller but more arrogant as the self-proclaimed source of light – splinters my sleep, invades my cool, prodding me and selling me certain lightness of the times I inhabit. A woman’s teeth sparkles, a man grins; a president feigns concern, a peasant loses voice and his wrinkles starts speaking when the cut abrupts in; a mother has a troubled child, a kid has shot his mates; beasts perform an impromptu jig and an actor persuades that she has real tears too. And a lonely train in Iraq is smoking like a blackened apartment in Croatia, someone has lost the limb he was in love with; dispensable men with expensive arms and women whose expertise is to suck; wide-angled porn and telephoto wars, someone declares she has kissed her father and the leaders of men are talking of peace again. Luminescence flooding in, in the age of obsolescence.
In my city, many cars died in a single day a few weeks back. And they made similar headlines like disappearing corpses and the decaying live. When cars burn in motion with beings inside, they pump adrenaline. When they burn alone, steady and still, they look pathetic. Sometimes automobiles die without a cause, and they died. I am waiting for a commercial from Toyota claiming that their products are torched more annually than lesser coveted ones. They miss the terrible beauty of smoldering cars in cityscapes. The images beg to be recycled; even a crooked car must be deemed productive: buy it before it is burned again! And images smell of burning billions of dollars in a Tom Cruise movie when tons of crops meet watery death in the Atlantic and hunger burns infant intestines in Ethiopia. Oh well! I am not crying pity again. I abhor the light and I intend to breed creatures of the night in whose famished shells; beings of a better past might continue to persist. Instead of spraying cum, I’ll only suck off some of the fluid which is abundant in your inviting neck. I need your love.

she remembers her neighborhood,
the snow…and the red postbox that devoured her
she remembers the eyes of the dead
and the letters made so happy…
and a God stabs her with light

Love. The Ladies. The femme. La Vie. My muse deserted me long ago. I recall tracing her footsteps in the busy downtown and collecting her scribbled verses she threw with disdain. The ladies disregarded fame and I was seduced by the beast. The ladies disappeared when I started dabbling with kaleidoscopes. She was there, standing in the doorway, a batlike silhouette coming to terms of herself in a realm of darkness and secrecy and loneliness better known as privacy. She called the stranger to her bed with those eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile. If she was serene, I pretended to be serious; at least I intended to be so. I kissed her goodbye for the time being because I thought the state of affairs is calling me and I have commands over languages which mattered. I assumed to be responsible; I thought I was validating my manhood. I am a citizen who matters, I thought. I never knew that men of prose treat craftsmen of verses as decorative whores, even if they shout at their hoarsest. They trade horses and I was a mere foal. I left the ladies who would have stroked my neck supple because I thought I was endowed with the power of language.
With language. Language which means, language persuading, language with the inevitability of a Japanese steel. And they had their eyes, their voices, and gestures of music. Women can hear music in the air which we can’t. They promised me that they will tell me about those tunes…
I was blind, looking without seeing. I was deaf, hearing without listening. I thought I was talking, but I wasn’t speaking. I talked with you with words ladies, you looked at me with feelings. I thought my language will win you over. So I worked out my words like those hunks in the gym; foolish enough to forget that you touched me with your eyes, you never heard my words but the timbre of my voice and how a gesture of yours radiated pollens of meanings like sunburst in the dawn. I was oblivious of the ecstasy of mine begging for more. The moment is aural; it fades away, never stays like a sight.
But a man I am – and a better of the species – so I was confused when the worse would have been satisfied. Because your sounds and throes of pleasure sounds like pain; the face after seemed like the mask of the dead. It tells nothing of you but more about me. and the face during was disturbing because it never closed her eyes, it was staring at me straight. A man hates to be looked at when he is working over a body…

there’s a black baby buried
in your backyard…
red clown,
did you devour her soul
after the murder?…
…
but when you pressed the trigger,
I saw your skeleton
(your ribs were rusted
near the place
where you once had nipples…)
you buried the farmers
beneath a stolen earth…
but what of the ghosts,
red clown?

Men of power worked over bodies in my country this year. Nothing special about that, they do it always, throughout the globe. But city-gents like me suddenly feel it once a decade, or twice. Feel? Feeling not like bodies which is worked upon, but feeling like men who were working. Working like…tarnishing faces with tar beyond recognition, girdling bodies with car-tires and burning them, filling empty stomachs with pointed leads, keeping skins unscathed and bruising the flesh beneath and writing themselves with nibs of steel over their bodies. Yes, all victims are feminized and all perpetrators of violence are masculine. I felt that I too brushed her eyes close when she watched me working on her with a vehemence of rubbing her face off. I can recall filling her underbelly when her heart ached for care. I thought she was contained because her surface of a face resembled calm and I wrote myself on her considering her soul empty.
And now I feel my body is inscribed with the anatomy of a rapist and therefore shame, because nevertheless I am privileged, anyway she is not. I am guilty of being innocent. I am guilty of neither being the killed and raped, nor being the killer and the rapist. I am guilty because my language is sheathed in condoms within limits of safety; my blog won’t be banned, and my posts do not have the potency of a hastily planted poster even. Anatomy of rape and shame, because I am a man endowed with the possibilities of being a rapist. I disdain that I have certain vestiges of power in the year when power displayed that it can afford to speak after it acted.
Speak. That act of persuasive prose again. Men spoke like books, men reasoned like already worked-out statistics and skyscrapers of power and news resembled Excel spreadsheets. I started abhorring languages resembling strobes of light. I missed you ladies, your verses of night; your supple curves where reasons slip off like loose garments and your shoulder which can bear the strain of a day. Each day of yours out there is like venturing in a wild-west town without a sheriff or with one where he is the worst of the lot. When you presented me that shoulder I missed the layers of grime laid by glances and whispers behind, and their sniggers. I thought it was an empty canvas to write myself on and I missed that after the act my palms bore those stains of shame.

I have seen the eyes.
The eyes.
of the scarlet girl
…
I shall move in those eyes
like a shaft of light…
and ask you the language
of dreams…
…
when your soul
is lonely as the northern hills…
and your breasts
are electric birds…
impatient…
till I slay them with love
…

I can recall the date: December 6, 1992. I can recall a decade which ended in bloody pogroms in Gujarat. It was the decade of my early youth. The former year was the year of my falling in love for the first time and the latter was the year of my first sin. No, not everything carnal is sin. Certain carnal things smell like sin, just like certain infatuations rise to the sphere of love. There had been events and dames, a couple of them were love and sin. December 6, 1992, they attacked a couple of medieval domes in the heart of my country. Throughout the decade, they instilled fear and shame on a section of my countrymen as Microsoft counted their sales and the US governments counted casualties in the Gulf. This year, a gentle man in love was forced to die and ghosts of that decade invaded through the languages of hatred infecting my mourning blog: just because I considered Rizwanur Rehman my brother and he was a Muslim by birth.
I can recall them attacking those domes of mosque. They said it was a nursery of their God over which an infidel emperor has raised a mosque four centuries ago. They ravaged the mosque and dug out a baby god. It was a blue baby god. Then they honed the skills of slitting mothers’ wombs and crucifying infant gods in their tridents and crosses and slicing off lactating breasts. It was the decade when I longed for those peaks of love and reached it.
And they raised the domes to the grounds. They destroyed a legacy which I inherited when I was born. They penetrated the present with their myths and my country started bleeding. They started a decade of skillful rape as an instrument to deface memory and insult people who opted to remember. It was a tirade against breasts. Ages ago, they compelled the women to shape them immobile with tough textiles, harsh on skin, so they don’t bounce. Men were afraid of them looking alive, they appeared still and firm like tombs, the erstwhile citadels of life. Women carried body-parts meant for men. They were now meant for male eyes, not human mouths. Sculpted still with gaze, shaped obscenely perfect with silicone, anorexised to a perennial state of pubescence in public and preliminary spectacle in porn, breasts ceased to be a seat of memories, ceased to be the possibilities of sustenance. Instead of being the loft of everything lost, it became the thing of now and here. The decade began the tyranny of contemporaneity and the paranoia of the mother. Aliens, dinosaurs, godzillas all were slain on the screens because they were either mothers or beings able to reproduce fatherless children. The resort of affection where one could have melted at last in slumber became the zone where visual rape started. Begin assaulting her by assaulting there, ‘coz they trigger memories! ‘Coz they embody gradual trajectory of time! Her time beyond our control! Control them! And they knew murder is the ultimate control. Erotica died, porn begun. History died, news reigned.

You bring me the rebel winds
in your white palms…
You bring me prisms…
You bring me the sorcerer’s sword…
and after you have mixed in my blood,
and I in your dream,
after the falcon leaves traces
of sweat
…on the shoulders
of dead saints…
you shall steal fire
from the gods again

I present you my self-portrait, my eros drenched in thanatos. The erotica of being me because news in the age of television is structured like porn: the repetition of the lurid eversame devoid of the epiphany of being alive and free. The curiosity of being privy to others’ lives without being implicated in the act of living. It was the display of bodies in extreme conditions: real pain and feigned ecstasy. The atrocious pleasure of the beholder to know it all without being charged and changed. Loveless pairs do it on the screen only to prove that the viewer is not meddling in sin; people die on the screen only to prove that the viewer is safe and boys grow up to be men. You are gone and love went wrong beyond repair, I grew up to be a man. I have spent a year which became the cemetery of my first youth. But I am nostalgic of that dream I never got the respite of dreaming in its deserved tranquility. When a body makes love with a body, it leaves certain promises. When a body wrenches itself out from a body, both are left with those crying promises. I feel heavy and sore like a mother whose infant has died; I am filled up with promises. The promises of a better world, the longing for a world when no one untimely loses their endeared; when the exploited never return home to exploit back in vengeance, when love is not measured either in terms of savings or investments; when a man has no compulsions to be a man and a woman can be what she longed to be.
When I will never choose and approve of you because I have my idea of the feminine and I am in the lookout of who fits in it; when I can appreciate you because of what you wish to be. When I can watch you blooming from within and my eyes can discover that a woman is at her most beautiful when she is alone, satisfied in her vocation. When we will discover all those body-fluids of joy instead of the crippling sight of vicious blood between us; when I will learn to read your eyes, your voice and your touch and you will teach me meanings beyond language. When I will be the guitar playing the chords to nest your tune; when you will be the clay from which my fingers will unearth you.
Come woman, undo me the man, and make me human again. Swoop down to me like a vulture unto the dead, come smell my bleeding wounds like a shark, and come hunt me, set me free. Feed in my blood. Let us embody the past. I know I suffer because I am the better of the species. Please don’t misread the scream of agony with the shout of an order. Bring me the rebel winds, the prisms, the sorcerer’s sword; you are the one who will steal fire from the gods again. Instill in me the violence of the dispossessed, the wrath of the humiliated, and the cunning of the survivor; because you bear it within you each heroic day of your life.
I will gift you a dream from which a self has disappeared, the day I abandon drafting this self-portrait drenched in untimely blood. Blood and Red is waiting for a new meaning…

Consider this post as a session with a friend and student of mine and a better poet, Inam Hussain Mullick, with whose verses quoted above I have jammed with my words and images. Thanks Inam for the inspiration! One should go here to read his poems.

For a larger view of what the dogs are eating in the lower-left click here after I warn you; for explanations click here. For clues about who is being burnt alive in the right click here.