Scherezade Siobhan
BOMBAY, UNCUT - II
This city I am step-mothered by is not an intimation for confidentiality.
Leaks out of every lie like coarse rice from a gunny bag nibbled by hungry rats.
When I am midair, every descent maps to a noctilucent, naked motherboard: reams and reams of tenebrous circuitry -- unkempt, bewildering, garish boheme.
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Tarred up veins, gasoline & rubble; asphalt jungles silken in persistent black flora.
Engine oil slicking desi liquor bottles. Tamarind-brown pelt, matted fur, squirrelesque gumption.
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Her brown is not roadkill. Her brown is heady meat, vulgar curiosity inching a finger up its own thigh, a malt-rich peg : whiskey wetting the weapon of a teenaged throat.
Beauty like music is somewhere between rigorous orchestration and casually fucking it up for yourself.
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She gives me chronic headlessness, viral proximities; a brain gutted by clockwork migraine.
I watch the glowworms crash into streetlamps in a studied chain-reaction of kamikaze zen. She is the sum of shanty sex between depression & darkness. Wakes up mid-afternoon in July rains and thunders every cloud - a billow of damp plastic bags ballooning above the altar of the Arabian sea in a tourney of [redacted] gods.
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The gunpowder they scrub onto the yellowing teeth of corn.
Ditches molassed to a sulfuric hush.
Shirtless boys reincarnated from dog star. Boys of sallow light, kitestrings aching inside their spines, a single muddy football, shinbones colliding against each other like badly played pawns.
Girls of red-bodied gossamer leafing the malabar swallowtails. Girls of pirate-eyed bellybuttons. Peckish heat. Long limbs of cinnabar coasts. Skin mirroring a recession of sands.
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All you see from a distance are mouths –
(Mouths filled with the blood / bright shiver of my heart / like a forest fire dying / in the rearview mirror)
Every loss murmuring the same name with its clean & endless sharpness.
The sea spitting back the difference between failure and loss.
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