Do I dwell in words, or do words dwell in me? I dwell on them as morning dwells in flowers’ scent, birdcall, boiling kettles – an after-tinge, altering day’s perceptibility, thrumming under tongue, inflecting, infecting – words that awaken in dreams with voices of their own, stripped of language and sociability. 

                                     Dreams are words in isolation, ordered perorations, deliberately direct; mould growing on bed, over the sheets, through pillow, cradling my body in sleep, like a million breast-buds promising new milk. I regress, slurp these ingrown sounds with fresh, downy-haired lips. 

                                      I sleep as though freshly birthed, pushed through to life’s inevitability, jolting awake dry-mouthed and with full bladder – drinking, emptying, drinking emptying – the night palpitates in my ears with the desperate hatred of old lovers that pleads to be let in, to inhabit my body’s scared crevices. In sleep, words are voyeurs into my soft feet, my pink belly – they pry my legs open, kissing the gentle insides of my thighs, titillating, gossiping, meandering – my skin glistens with their spilt semen, lit by mother moon from behind scores of concrete. 

                                       Night is a single moan split through pangs of sleep and awakening, a quaking of neurons through rapid altered states, a tightening of words’ chemical circuits – morning consolidates: this is life – yesterday sheds its sweat-soaked phrases – in the throat, an urge to enunciate – a voice with no sound but its own forgetful booming; as if the past were suddenly a story, I radicalise each day with subdued disorderdness, disperse these words with a smelly shudder – change is filth. 

                                        The body scythes through space-time, moulting from its assimilations, challenging each hour with noise and recklessness. Between my toes, in my armpits, deep inside my perineum – words, vestiges, damp and disfigured, rekindling, redirecting – as I charge the day these words force their own charge, scripting faces, differences –  strangers’ gazes, mute but surprised, irritated, litter my feet with defiant pointedness, lifting and recapitulating me. Each gaze a new dermis, a new sheet of cells proliferating malignantly, creeping through flesh, where they hiss at words like fuming metal. Through each crevice a word is plugged, gazes foisted like invading flags. Under this tight assemblage of words and gazes, I squirm and heave, my body aging, decomposing with each cycle of sleep that shuttles it through this indifferent expanse. Each morning, I loosen up a little, and an original word, an unfamiliar gaze, assaults my naked body. 

                              There’s no letting-down of nudity. I keep posing. Living is exteriorising: but to die not knowing death! 

…

Mathew (any pronouns) is a poet from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, whose work focuses on the in-between-ness of everything, the liminal spaces of contact and distance erasing and redrawing boundaries.  Four of their poems were recently featured in ‘What Else Is Rain? A Frontline Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry from Kerala’ edited by Gopikrishnan Kottoor.