Against Translation Read Single →
“My secrets cry aloud. / I have no need for tongue.” —Theodore Roethke
The body moves like dust & our. Rain. Rain from Shillong, Paro, Bangalore.
I congeal the fat between my index ngers & thumbs approximating its atrocity. Like the measure of time while browning a roux. Or force.
Water tanks re ll the hospital nearby & I sni the petrichor like an emergency. Three dogs fuck; I touch myself. The way language can also mean & be.
At the end of my sadness—the threshold is ecstasy. Once I was a child at the trough of hills, a skinny boy: leek, of pines & peaches—dark as mulberry; now—I am the king of fetishes.
Feet & pits. Once my legs celery: my mouth gooseberry. Now—it is just a mouth. I mull tea leaves beneath the remains of a cup.
All my desires light & so melamine. See . “Mutual funds are subject to market risks.” Diversify. Diversify. Diversify. Smallcase portfolio or invoice discounting? Tell me your thighs.
The body moves like dust. Pirouettes. Wrings like a wound ayed by a blade— The body moves. Squirms like a worm in the ass; twists in the gut. The raccoon heart dies.
This heart dies of a sweetness but late. Love / then die lest love dies. The body moves. The thigh breaks; I touch myself & shake. I was wrong about so much:
At the end of my sadnesses, there is no threshold—only ecstasies: Fields. Some grass grows & bends like lovers in a war singing a song.
Someday I will be sinless as the sun & hum. Until then a body. The body moves like dust. Like ower. Rains.
The body moves like a canticle in verse: My own personal nomenclature of lust. Cruelty kneading me.
“Motion is equal to emotion,” wrote Roethke weighing two hundred & twenty- ve pounds of gut vitality.
How do we enter the world from behind without rupturing a life? The body naked—a circus of bones: Nakedness its only show, its enamel shield.
Early in this life the millenium turned into the walls of an asylum: Teal & north-eastern; taught a boy a body. Fatherless & still a boy:
Love, less of a moment, more, more a consequence, long, containing spillage: I live you. Diseased—I live you. Malignant.
“As long as you’re feeling the chill of the knife, you’re ne.” I learn to dice as we yearn to die. That boy is me & still only a body.
This body is me. All those boys are me. All those bodies me. Me—my mother’s womb. My father’s tomb.
Once the glance was my favourite shot; now—I stroke myself. See, see, don’t you see some muscle already?
Once I lived in a ladderless orchard; now—I pluck. Once I was a body; now—I am a body.
My mother mushroom. My father fruit: Both their hands vermicelli—my ancestry & you.
Our sad family on the sad ground in a sad country at this sad time.
The body moves like dust & our. Rains & ower. Then the body moves curling towards shame. Petals in that rain.
A body is a body is a body is a rose then a body. Then a shrimp. A colander. Then water. Then a river & you.
Twilight—your knee. I too have a frugal need for tongue. Until the body. Until the knee. Until your mole: A monastery where I moaned like a bell once.
Till then both our bodies, birch, mere attempts in trying to concede like an eye.
