Through the chatter
of my steaming teeth, men,
I sense the garbled sobs
of your hairless selves:
blanched, entrapped,
frightened to face
the crazed elements
or fight as we fight
our low little battles
with bareness for sword
and dumbness for shield.

You prowl and prance
packing your palms
like stunned flat fish
seeking dens of warmth,
your pebble-hard nostrils
drilling darts and spikes
down your trembling
chests and every last blush
of life bleached clean
by the stone-white
woes of the world.

Men,

Don’t you smother the last specks
of pride in the downy
warm dignity wrenched
off the lambs ,
never letting your fat frozen asses
leave their hideaways
in the hides of those valorous dead

Just stop and hear this growl of mine,
no more than a strangled
prayer — 
take all my bows and relish it with
the tail-long wreath of abasement
clasping at my brave bald underside.

In the end, though, a curt cutesy bark,
like a louse plowing the fetid pond,
will touch off a deadly crash
of an echo swollen with conspiracies.

Step aside: make way
for the gutted weight
before your numb knocking knees
give way to grab their chance
to get carried off thus,
pampered by death.

Loosen up and love
the raging reality
all spangled with bliss and pains:
let it get to your bones
in a billion purblind pins.

© Sethuraj Nair, October 2023

Snow Dog Preaching was originally published in Rainbow Salad on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1.

Well into the dead
of night we sat trading
stories of haunted ships,
sipped the rippling dark
from a cleft-lipped chalice
that smelled breezes
blended in vaporous salt.

Between every two shoulders
the sun sat sinking awhile
slapping gold after gold
upon skin-textured bronze
until the sky was sucked
clean down to the ocean bed.

Satiated sails strained
at the sagacious masts
as the vessel skimmed
along, braiding a pair
of silver serpents
out over our elated spirits
spilling overboard, fizzling…

2.

By dawn a swampy shape-shifting
smudge rolled in overhead
and with an orgasmic huff
stubbed out every last moon
in our eyes, bleak and besotted.

Those on the deck hid
behind them the pigeon-tails
of their playing cards
and twitched their snouts
up at the heavens sinking
sideways, star by startled star.

The storm came humming
after, flapping all six
of its invisible wings
and whining, crowing,
whetting its beak
against the iridium base
of the infinite dome,
and trained its eyes
on all that fly, flee and ply,
swaying and swinging
to the tune of pounding
hearts and praying lips.

3.

All around us the specters
of long-buried waves
rose in jagged walls
with a clatter of clams,
trembling fins and frantic
flicking gills and tails :
we saw us turning
into an aquatic troupe
of bipedal beasts, vying
with gulls and squids
for grips and footholds,
gasping for lungfuls
beneath the racing blizzard.

Pattering fists and feet
and balls of knees thrilled
the slimy boards
which seemed in an incongruous
mood for telling tales
of the times they stood
as trees bathed in rains
of pollen and pristine light.

From this end to that the sea
heaved and kneaded
itself under the coalesced
clouds lit by the light beyond — 
and we who were spared
the longest found around
us the limbs and heads
of the blissfully dead
floating at first like half-bitten cakes
and later, from high up here,
like radiant sand and divine seeds.

© Sethuraj Nair, March 2022

Dead Woman Recounting the Shipwreck was originally published in Rainbow Salad on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deep down in my slice of earth
where not a night sets on
vain orange suns and no haloed
wing shadows a shore,

Where horns stand hell-ward
in twisted greed, taunting the
fallen saints like feelers
for the singed and startled wombs —

There I need you, sacred scums,
the glorious wretched
and serene scavengers,
all you inane fickle brutes.

Here in my smoking backyard
you’ll shovel away the blackest
snow, listening to the hymns of lies
ripple in a pool of battered hearts.

Here you’ll dance to the tune
of my coal-baked hoofs and together
we’ll wish the moon its umpteenth death
and curse to vanish its wan waning smile.

We’ll stop the prim little blooms
from whining up to the winds and stir
a clatter of possibilities
snuggling in guillotine grooves.

Call me ghost or call me goat,
call me doom or what have you
but come to me in an ewe’ s guise
and echo back my lustful brays.

Go haunt the abattoir s—

but dare you hold beneath my snout
the petite skeleton of a past
painted in pleats of red;
offer me one heap of gore,
pulsing pink, or steaming meat
and tender nerves limp
and damp and dripping death.

All through the eternal midnight
your last latent faith will melt
and melt till you see me ascend,
from Baphomet to the head of state.

© Sethuraj Nair, February 2022

Head of State was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How, dear, is the flight
so far, our bodies light
as a teardrop’s ghost
haunting ancient skulls?

Do you feel in the depths
of ears the hiss of time,
shrill as the saw rending
a bone way too fresh
to forget flesh’s embrace,
or do you mistake
it for breeze, a baying
queenly wolf, the groan
of the unsheathed sword
yet to be done with
bedding with peace?

The shadow we etch
on the valley beneath
has called forth a crowd
so used to the bland
apparition of gods
passing poker-faced
over their dead and the dying,
their dreamless nights
and famished tomorrows.

When we set out
hauling our souls
off from the land
of mirthful green
and fragrant brooks,
where people’s eyes
echoed the prayer
of senile stars,
where the skies
hang far less deceptive
than these humble
puffs of dust
resembling precious
smoke and piecing
up the grand old world
of golden doom — 

when we set out
we were more than
a pair of nightmares.

A child spotted us first,
Remember? — 
As he dipped an upturned
finger deep in the distance
between us and the earth
I’ve glimpsed in his eyes
a question or two
and a waning answer
in his heartless grin.

Hold your cloak
from flowing out much,
put its liberties to rest
until its warps and wefts
freeze into the web of tales
we’d forever wished
to weave for the world.

We might as well keep it
for our own imminent use,
for I can sense somewhere
far down there a barrel
of gray fire holding its breath
to hasten our trip
to the blood summit.

Who wouldn’t love
to be left in a casket
shrouded by stories
and the timeless reek
of your own rot?

© Sethuraj Nair, November 2021

Off Toward the Blood Summit was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At war is my heart,
plump and calloused,
​sized a pregnant whale
thrice-impaled
​and flailing just the same
​in that private pool
of blood and froth.

I guard heavens
from brays and prayers
and stare down horizons
bathed in miry light,
my trunk and rump for ramparts,
endless ones walling
the chamber
wherein your gods
retire and snore.

Try dragging squashy legs trapped
​in pairhood, all snarled and tangled
​in glistening mess of sterile gases,
parched and vacuous as promises.

The earth beneath is bland and flat,
lending a teeter to my rebellious strides.

They’ve seen depths:
these feet and toes,
eyelid-shaped calves — 

They learned firmness
wading the marshes
of a paradise drowned.
​
People,
as you scatter like a blast of meat
​to save your asses and horses,
why not see the merciful shadow
my shoulders cast,
true as your pet angel’s wings.
​
People,
help me with songs and sight
as I dance deaf and blind,
eyes and ears too large
​to hold the humblest tear or rumble.

People,
Love me and in return
I’ll tell the hills
to fling at you a shard
of their manic stillness
where I’ve buried
the seed of fragile majesty.

© Sethuraj Nair, September 2021

I, Giant was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He couldn’t believe there still was a place on earth without fire. That too an island set deep in so desolate a nook and harried by freezing southerlies round the year. Sailors since the 17th century had reported such an island, which the slaves used to call what in their language meant ‘the lightless eye.’

There lingered an even queerer legend. On this island lived just two humans, both male. Forever. Some believed it was the same men all along.

As an anthropologist, he would have laughed it off hadn’t the story recurred in some totally unrelated sources, decades apart. The island was too small to escape any decent spying. In most accounts, telescopes picked out a pair of heads peering back from over a low rock and, at the slightest threat to privacy, turning and dissolving into the thicket behind.

The island cropped up in his team’s lunchtime talk as the crew of an Uruguayan coal-carrier had just discovered there a human skeleton sprawling ashore, supine and sand-crusted.

‘So the island must now have a single resident.’

‘Yes.’ The anthropologist tapped a nail on his Coke can. ‘And I’ll visit him and show him the fire.’

He snubbed the colleagues’ skeptic glances — some adulatory, most derisive.

‘This very Friday,’ he said.

That very Friday, haloed by the drowning sun, he found himself grappling with a clunky oar to steer his little canoe toward the island. Far in the west, the boat that had brought him till there was receding to a scar on the skyline. Mentally he kept rehearsing the planned sequence of actions. He patted the trouser pocket, on that taut bump of a lighter. Once disembarked, he’d flick it on in front of the islander. It’d be his chance to witness a grown human seeing fire for the first time.

What would dominate the response? Fear? Ecstasy?

The islander turned out to be a balding Caucasoid, browning from freedom. With a huge pink grin he emerged from the brushes and waved a friendly hand at the visitor. Save the stark nakedness he seemed civilized. His expression was one of joyous relief.

The anthropologist set about his business. The moment the lighter was taken out and held aloft, the islander hopped in to snatch it. He then went down on knees, picked up a desiccated palm frond lying about, and set it alight. The anthropologist gawked as the islander pitched the blazing frond off into the canoe.

The fire held its breath for a moment and then the canoe was all heat and light and smoke and smell and coal.

The guest and the host shared a grin, which grew steadily into a giggle. They came close and hugged and swiveled on their feet like a single beast before trudging mirthly off toward the island’s rock, arms thrown over each other’s shoulder.

All night the sea lapped at the burnt wood.

© Sethuraj Nair, September 2021

The Other Islander was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It apes a bird of no heights
whose excuse is a single wing,
giving the sun a face
and a bed to rest its rage.

In its vacuous heart of hearts
it aches to be an erect pine,
selfish in its lean canopy
with all too mean a shade.

Its membrane is a bubble cloven clean
descended ever so gently
to scoop an eyeful of dark
out of light’s eternal flood.

Pregnant with winds and shadows
it still is noble as a stuffed eagle.

Its mouth, taut in silence
and at once so liplessly loud,
twirls up and down
in smile and pain
as it heaves open
to the shielding heaven
that never saved
a blade of grass
from heat and rot.

Lean in and listen

before its rattles dissolve
in the molten day
sealed in the glass vase
of the infinitely snoopy skies.

You and me make
its pampered little lungs,
our garbs and glitters
but flashes in an unseen skull,
our chatter its mind’s,
our sweat and love
its secret rain.

© Sethuraj Nair, September 2021

In Praise of Umbrella was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

She has forever been in awe of a teardrop, that thing of fiery purity she cannot produce. So why should her mother, knowing this full well, has to stand so close and make her jealous? The woman has gone too far already with her chin dripping like gambrel eaves in cloudburst, eyes rivaling each other to plop out bulbous swells, wink after wink.

‘Stop it, mom,’ she wants to yell.

Stop it. Who else is crying here?

As far back as she can remember, all she’s managed in place of tears is a sterile sting, an angry burning at the spot where breath sculpted itself into sighs. The doctor who first examined her eyes couldn’t contain his shock at all the parched ducts and a pair of lacrymal glands shriveled as walnuts. She still remembers his own tear, a pink film of honesty and professional inadequacy.

The condition will anger her for she wants to sense how it feels to be this mediator between pain and water. The gift of tears, she believes, is what defines a human. She fumed at her brother who thought animals cried, too:

‘That’s not sadness. That’s reflex, a dumb hoax.’

In reality, it’s hard for her to accept even a beast would beat her to it.

Her drunk dad used to pinch her and cry on her behalf until she was well into her teens. He would snatch the cross from the home altar and hold it aloft, seemingly to ward off some demonic dryness. He’d then go off to pinch either of his other two children on their inner thighs and derive a good deal of relief from the wet and snorty yells of mere little mortals.

One cherry-scented afternoon, when she was kissed on the lips for the first time, she had a chance to be all the more dismayed about her defect. There was, she could see, more to teary eyes than just distress. She couldn’t express precisely how she felt about the kiss. She found herself grinning like a witch, hissing, and huffing. The boyfriend laughed on, helplessly misreading her gestures for veiled ecstasy. She went on to slap him not because she hated the whole thing. She slapped him, goosebumps still live along her arm, because he failed to see her invisible tears. Tears forged of shock. Of disbelief. Of vulnerability.

Now, here, she is confronting a rather provocative crowd. Her mother isn’t the lone one weeping. A veritable race, as it were, of damp cheeks and sniffles was on. She wants to reach down to the ground and grab a fist of dirt to caulk their damned eyes, gag this blabbing. Or snatch one of these spotless sheets and go around wiping. She wants to scream at every moist eye and up at the violent sun when two men stepped forth and closed her coffin.

© Sethuraj Nair, August 2021

The Girl Who Never Cried was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Learn this, love — 
A tender tug
can tear up dreams
of wings and feet,
break a beak
of lust that preys
on self in servitude.

Pulling string
is king of skills.

Mind those claws
of bloated gloom
purring green-eyed:
at night those intent
mouths will part
in ghoulish grins
stretched in greed,
pink and petal-tongued,
apt to suck a heart
as petite, leaving
the orphaned echo
to die a snake’s
squirming death
in blind silence.

May you be your
own puppet — 

so that somewhere
in an unknown land
a boyish doll
could waddle back
to the backyard box
and spend in there
its lack of life
all rust and wild
from wide-eyed sleep,
getting gnawed at,
burst.

Beat at all cost
pangs of guilt
and let the flock
of freedom hop
and dance
in gilded cage.

You and pain
are of a kind — 
all silk and satin,
pure as pebble,
red and a-throb,
lips taunting
a bleeding word.

Never you look
in mirrors unstained,
unblessed by
a faithful fog:
What you see
of what you are
will hurl you
off the cozy cliff.

© Sethuraj Nair, August 2021

Red Boy was originally published in Literary Impulse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You can’t discern even the cast-iron bench in the gray of the dusk, and so the ice-box sits there stark and portent, never to be missed. By then he has grown bored enough to steal it. A few dozing heads still dot the platform from east to infinity, all leaden and bitter from the delayed train.

He looks about, feigns a cough, bends over to fondle the unclaimed ice-box. Squat. Plastic. Dour-white with a belt of blue.

In a flash, he snatches it off the bench and sneaks away. His chest shudders on, but down in his bladder he feels the thrill of perfect theft.

Back home, he leaves the booty on the dining table and hops in for the customary piss and shower. He never turns on the hall’s lamps. Often he can do with the neighbours’ living-room light that breaches the window by a stride or so and casts over here the trotting rotund shadows of their kids. On his hourly raids to the kitchen he would pause to sigh at them. No human form except shadows has crossed his rooms in ages. Not at least since the times of his brother, who just about beat him in plumpness and droopy eyes — and death.

He ruffles the paling mess of chest hair, taking the droplets up on the chin, and sinks in the chair he only ever used out of the six at the table. His lower depths gurgle and a burp escapes him with a “Jesus”. He pulls open the lid of the ice-box:

A human hand. Well, a feminine paw. Severed.

Ice has begun to thaw around the clotted wound at the thing’s base. Has it all taken on a green tint, or is his mind making it up? From the cracks, a whitish chill twirls up like tattered ectoplasm.

He picks a fork and turns it over, palm down.

It might have been lopped a moment ago. Skin seemed fresh, even sprightly. A congealed streak of blood links the jagged wrist with a thumb. Fingers are spread in an eternal No.

He stoops, and his nose detects the smell of marrow, or something just as violently intimate. Round the ring finger is a pale, circular absence. He breathes down on the waxy knuckles, peers in the pinkish folds between the digits — long, lean, helpless. The polish on the nails is sheer but unmissable.

He feels his lips part. He reaches over and hauls in his leather satchel, opens it. The work-time lunch he packed for himself in the morning rests there in its own little box. The sandwiches have grown stocks-limp.

With a glint in eyes he takes out the hand and places it, ever so gently, on the brink of the lunch box. And settles open-mouthed, arms folded in fledgling-like abandon, for it to feed him.

© Sethuraj Nair, July 2021

The Ice Box was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.