Monday, December 26, 2011

Remaining dues...

I am the skeleton in my own closet,
The hiatus when I go amiss,
Look for me between your fingers,
I am the wind in your hair
And out through the space in between...
Remain, remain...
Post-destruction,
My line of sight befalls and Boom!
My thunderbolt,
Or my benediction;
Remain, remain...
Leveed from me...
Free of my chaos
And our Evangeline.

You are my half-eaten breakfast bread,
My frozen cannabis confiscated,
I am the wind, always the wind,
In your beautiful hair.

And out through the space in between....

Dead or besotted, what line sorts the two,
Awake or just alive, what reason remains
To pay the dues...

Adieu.


Monday, December 19, 2011

Not without a Hint anymore...


You once said, we would run away. We would live in a cottage of straw and wood, near the river of fishes and sunsets.You would fish all day, and come back by nightfall.We would eat simple food and then... you would play your guitar and we would sing our songs...till tired,we would fall asleep.What happened to that dream...What happens to all those dreams...

It's a crying  headache...
A running wreckage
Far from the scene of crime
And illusions,
A fulsome cremation
Of an undead soul...
Clinging to an incomplete dream about Life.
I have come, a long way
Past the postcard yellow-flecked fields,
That moves when the shadow befalls
Like a creature aroused.
There,look,trembling little calf runs,
Anxiously begotten, for its mama.
I have also run,
Through the distorted rails,
The muted wails
Of a winter sun.
Where the mechanical ticking of uncertain dreams
Do end,
And an ancient one begins,
Where life has ceased to end or begin,
Where a crying headache is a disease.

Where we once spoke of running away to.....

There they weave a lonely sweater,
For the faithless stranger of the suburbs...
There they smile,
A token of recognition,
For the hint they would not let slip by...

Let's run away,
The world screams,
Let us all run away...




Thursday, December 15, 2011

Not without a Hint

Nothing new,
Just a pigment of dust
In the patina of an old alloy rust...
It isn't dust,really;
More like a smudge...
Writ with fingerprints,
A thumb rule of reminiscence.

As the eyes bore into their meaning,
Their origin and its sin,
Pockmarked,enervated,never mind...
A dextrous hand and brush will paint out
The lies and truth that was.
A hidden vestige of faith reclaimed
In a leftover dust, a facsimile, the evidence,
For him to start believing again...
That the one sought is gone, but not without a hint.




Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Muse

My Muse is still alive,
Breathing, gasping,and persevering;
A hungry callus of throbbing dead cells
Nostrum to the paraplegia of our united dreams...
It's lying on the grass, gazing up to the sky
Etching a new dream, with the palette in it's eyes
Living a life, fresh out of the pages
Of  a new diary, or a receding sigh.


Who are you?
The shapeless shapes in your comatose visions.
Where are you?
Somewhere in the recesses of your epicure mind.
How are you?
Alive and breathing...
Dreaming of a clear blue sky.
A blessing, in the form of a quasi memory...
Running away from the islands of qualms,
Rushing headlong to forget.
But the Muse is still alive,
Aiding to not abet,


Egging me on to forget...
The scenes from the life
My Muse begets.

A splattered raindrop and gravity's corsette,
Squeezing it down, drying away in its own footsteps...
The Muse shall build, the Muse shall erase.
















Monday, November 7, 2011

Reloading---ramblings,don't read :)

An old love's verve sometimes rings like the churchbells...divine yet sinister all at the same time.But such that you can't keep yourself from listening to it till it fades out,even the last of the reverberating whispers...
And then you will invariably look up one last time as if with some subconscious hope that the source of all the ruckus would simulate some of the effect its gonging had just caused.But when it doesn't, you just walk away...
Someone,a very good and old friend, joked about a stupid habit of hitting 'Refresh' to the inbox of his email account and just staring at it while it loads and then repeating the cycle.Moronic,bordering on some kind of Tourret's tick,right? But he also said that while he does this...he has plenty of time to reflect on plaintive things and slowly,by around the 67th reloading of the same page (and no new mails yet) delve deeper into that one cell of thought and explore all its possibilities.Hence all his Philcrap.
Now I was laughing at him the whole time and not one of those giggles I am so proud of.No, but one of my guffaws...which also I am very proud of,by the way. So anyway, there I was guffawing not realising for one second that 14 hours later I would be doing the same thing and 14 hours and15 minutes later writing this.
So he (not the old friend;the he-who-must-not-be-named 'he') snubbed me again.Big deal.He does it every day almost.Nose,heart,butterfly chamber (wherever that is)...all that.And so what if 2 minutes before that I was being my pathetic self and reclaiming my concerned anxiety for his little puke spells.But incidentally this whole transpired over gtalk and right after the snubbing, I reflexively fell to the refresh,let it load,refresh cycle and 5 minutes later...I signed out.
Yes.It's time to hit Refresh.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Friend and I


I had a friend.
We dug up mini caverns
In the backyard garden and pretended
To be cavemen, with our inadequate words
And fall asleep to wake up in our beds…
Schizophrenic children, worst best friends.
Till our time came, you paraphrased your name.
I have a friend.
We chase ant trails and
Draw rude words in uncouth window mists,
Blow bubbles in wiry lanes
And chortle at soapy breaths…
When the clock strikes monsoon, and he can’t be there.
We count moon clouds,
Gather bookmarks
Curl up, legs intertwined
And humor our old friends,
With a snort and a high high five…
Then she becomes another dream…another friend.
I like purple, he likes blue,
No, we both like red, his shirt and my dirty fingers…
It’s not a birthday card,
It’s a little paperboat
With a hundred words in its multifold…
And we smile, and I blink, it’s another friendly face.
We giggle all day, lipbalm or vodka breathed
Not enough pathos to fill our heads,
Her fingers through my hair,
Our feet tiptoes through forbidden streets
A beat and our cover is blown, we dance in defeat…
When the smog ebbs, she calls herself back,
Crashed vicissitude in her footfall dies
And everyone gather to remain quiet
They hold her hand as she dials…



To a text that is sent from me to
Myself.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Diwali,2011

Thank you for being who you are.Thank you for not letting him and them keep my smile in the shadows of the past this Diwali.Thank you for taking the initiative,buying the crackers and the lights and those cute little diyas we used as candle-stands!...Thank you for pushing me to the terrace and making me burn the last of the truckload of fireworks (when did you get the time to buy them!). In short, thank you for unleashing my laughter in the sea of the laughing echoes and sending out that rocket with my name on it into the universe along with the rest of the ones of 'them petty humans'.Thank you.... for reminding me of my rightful place in your universe.Your princess.Thank you...Dad.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Teething Story


Like a hundred hummingbirds beating away
Their feathers of flight, just bidding away
A time to recall how many times a day
They will hum their daily chances
Of remaining airborne                  
No rules to beckon
To and never again
Will we hear them stay…
As they will always be on their way.
These nails are born
To hold me in a strait
From potholes
To a tousled bed
With a tipped night-lantern…
These nails will be biting away
At my teeth and a pacified,slower canter.

You are a thought, a throng of dots
Pilfering your own time,
A menace of nots,
A pulsating vein
On this sunny forehead,
A doodle of pinpricks
And a crass paperweight…
Lest I fly away,
These nails will beg
For once a habit
Is always a mistake...
You will hear me not,
You will only hear me hum,
Oh but the nailbiter
Is again at her humming rum!
These nails will be biting away
At my teeth and a false alarm.

A rogue of shallow cadaver,
A petty human beleaguered
Into the craft of playing naked
In the muck, with human laughter …
I remain yours to always be,
Enslaved by your rivalry,
These nails will grow and become a need
To be alive and not to feel.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Daalia

Sing me a song,
Over the raspy telephone,
Deny me a title
For the lyrics I gifted you;
Hum my mother's lullaby---
I know you heard me hum it
Between your eyes,
Along the immaculate noseline,
Under some sunny streaks
Of littered rice, a story-telling device,
And dahlia dice...
So you were my Daalia,
As the Thakur would remember,
Your royal tunes will play you....
And I will be in denial
Waiting for a dream
That was shimmering
Like a Tista mirage
On a foggy morning
Hither, before me...
Fishnets and medieval;
We played a village game.

You cried a ruse
To run bemused
On the banks of a winding lane
The asphalt tar of bitter words...
Verbose,

The running city dots
Sea-gulls in a river's coven...
Anachronous
Of faltering vanes...
Where to go,
Who to blame?

Gone...
Bucolic,
And undone,
Run,
Daalia,run!

Daalia,
Sing me a wordless song,
Daalia,
Sing me a wordless song....
As I hum...
Over this broken telephone...

I can hear you run.


Friday, August 19, 2011

The Hole

Hole in the heart,
I breath through you...
Let my sins,
In your sinews,
Turn taut and cold,
I forgive
The moon-crumbs
That shine iridescent,
Irate like the sun,
Through you.

Hole in this heart,
They seep like a flood---
From under the door,
Into the bedspread
And the pillows,
When the flower-vase falls,
And doesn't shatter,
Saved
By the gurgling water---

Through you.

Hole in the heart,
We part,
Like the lips
Of goodbye,
Or is that surprise
Knowing you siphoned
Us into this bloodbath...
And that I let you?
Pulse of my window
I will escape...
Into the red stream,
Of another lover's dream....
Through you.






Hole in the heart,
Filled up with changelings
Of dreams...
Never the real heart....
You were.

Always a would-be...
Last chance, say you will be...
Mine.




Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Great

How would it be...
To be a Great?

To touch a tinkering bell
And let it rhyme as well...

To resonate with the crowd
And shimmer and stand out...

To touch a copper string
And have it obligingly sing...

To step into a water-puddle
And unveil two nimbus shackles...

To amble betwixt two breezing trains
And feel a caress in an immortalized ordain...

To crouch under the old bed,
And whisper to the flashlight-dead...

To smirk into the mirror,
And dissolve into its abysmal horror...

To touch a temple,
And know I am there...

And realize---I am not Great...
I am only better.

How would it be...
To know that I could be...
Just Great?

No dart to a new heart...
No moth in a spiral path...
Nor a retribution sought at last...

Just Great and green grass...

Friday, August 5, 2011

Then When

When the narcotic dew does subside,
Will you be waiting for me behind
The stable, near the elm,
Under the yellow, lucid rain,
Upon the ground, covered in hay...
Our roof, so I fall
Upwards...
And plummet towards a holy dead end?

Let the light of the day
Burn a hole through me now...
Let me hear your laughter wane.




A dream...a dream let you be,
So I can sleep dreamlessly
And wake up to the everyday humdrum
Of never knowing you
In this onerous life...or after...

Let the light compel you to me,
Propel you to the end of this anomaly
You were never there, it was just a dream...

I pray...a prayer...
For you to disappear
So I can revel in the crushed paper-planes
And the melon tambourines,
Toothpaste sandwiches,---no,don't taste!
No,I was here alone...

In the once-upon-a-dream,
When I was a would-be...
A golden ribbon of narcotic dream
And everyday dew...
Before I knew...
You.

Then when?
Again.
After you found me...
And then...

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Laundry Day

My clothes don't match,
Or I am wearing something new,
This old guise is stilted with mildew.

I have watched the tedium rise to the occasion
And take my breath away!
It slunk into the shadows of a pose
That swayed like this...everyday.
Old and hackneyed, this laundry bin
Will fill to the brim before...
It tossed a pile of these old clothes
And gave the sun away,
To the resonant sacrilege of a duster
And a thousand charlatan runic frays.
How they bite the dust as they go
Round and round, high and lo',
How the saturnine brunt that befall
Their little deeds and writ proverbs,
Every day that goes by will see the sun
And the shadow it carves.

Suddenly they would come to a halt,
The sun will wonder why...
No soap to froth, no foam to smear,
As the clothes will need to dry.
The day is burnt,
Whims will scorn this nefarious end of time
For this mind...

The planets still revolved,

With the button that escaped
The clutches of the day
And remained...with the grime.

The bum who lives across the street
Will sew it to its heart and smile.




Wednesday, July 20, 2011

All the words I know...That Rhyme.

(I have been alleged of complicating matters in my head.
I have been accused of taking petty emotions and turning it into a maelstrom of turbid psycho-emotional conflicts.
I have..been asked to simplify, liquefy, clarify what I am saying, what I am feeling...
Alright.I will...I will.)

When I stop what I feel,
I won't feel what I have killed,
I won't kill to reveal---
I will stand away from---my nemesis to defeat.

When I squirm in my revel,
I stop to marvel
What a wonder, I quell
The tremors,I laugh at my lucid drunken gait.

And you perfectly rhyme,
Even with my masked pantomime,
Like this white crime,
The whiteness that I prevaricate.

It was a mistake.You shouldn't have.

A lie.
I would be lying.
If I told I am trying...
To make it any simpler, for any of us.

A white lie,
I would be tying,
To your wrist of pining
Tourniquets, and repeated cadavers
Of dust.

If I hurt you,
I'm sorry to have loved you like mine.
If I pushed you away,
You said sorry too many times...

Or no...I tried...

Was that a smile?

Friday, July 1, 2011

The Three

Three things.
A crass poster of craven whispers of kisses,
A derelict plastic cup with a hole in it
And a half a pencil, eaten away at the butt.

All closing their deals with another opening...
The cracked ceiling.
On the wall, soggy and dripping with moist
My kisses could never deliver.
On the floor, overflowing from the one end
That never knew water before.
On the desk, washed clean...
Still writing...if only but better.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Tooth-fairy

Red windmills,
Claustrophobic skies
Reporting from some despot nadir
I hear you...I hear you hard...
Pitter-patter of baby feet
Growing into the clicking heels
And then the suffusing blush...
Oh,the plush tail will wag some day
The rainbows will clear,
I will try to remain estranged...
The war will soon come to a cease,
Everybody waddles back home
After the fight to save the dream,
But the dream will twist and bend,
And push me another way...

But the lane my room overlooks
Whispers my name...
Follow its trail,
I will be your stranger till the end.

And I will wait,


For you, till the world is safe...
Pray the toothache and heartache to rest,

Fly back,little thing...
Fly away.







Sunday, April 24, 2011

Dear Grace...

Under a microscope of frozen tears,
Through the milliseconds of remaining endeared
Heads of defied opprobrium,
I will rise to know you again.

There quiver the hollowed succinct leaves
Spitting a raindrop into your eyes,they seek
A wisdom of the machiavellian pianist---
I fall, they cry, you breathe, they die...

Where the sun will go down on the short years.
I will shout across the backyard,
A clothesline being shred by the shards
Of a broken microscope
And a rosette of farce,
Admit it, you hate me
Because I can see those tears...

Vanilla cones and pop-corn brunch,
Plastic smile,I still see them veneered...

Then the upended faces of fallen facades,
Billowing in the caved-in draft of ignominy,
But a silly rupture of giggles in the dark
A jolt of "who's there!"
And you will rise again to know me...

And hate me or love...
You will follow me...


Sunday, February 6, 2011

Where She Lay

Virile, the Nile
Does flow serpentine
Repentant for the ghosts
Vilified
By the knights in the
Not-so-shining armours
Nile, bleeding Nile---
Does she bid her time
To crime, to blight
The skulls piled
In her bed, volatile?

She swells and
Forgives.

She is a friend
Of a chiaroscuro of Neverland
And the end of the world,
Where she raves and rants
A nymph, a grail,
A grant, or simply a hated,
Denigrated termagant---
Who loves a wingless bird,
A harried scavenger,
A reckless philanderer
But does she kill
To bring
The one she loves
Into the light across the train-wreck?

She purses her lips and
Waits.

Her vivid red, pull-over,
Awry in the rover
Draft in the air, seducing her hair
Away from her lachrymose glimpse,
That rests on an old nemesis
And draws to a nascent closure
In the sudden epiphany that...even her nemesis
Can open its mouth to a kiss
And her heart beats with ecstasy,
Only ecstasy to envision
That if her own version of Hate can love,
And make her Love what she should hate,
Then Love can defy…hate
As she,till then,knew it.
Did she let down her hood
And pray for good
That from her new found faith
She would never need to sway?

She cried and
Laughed again.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Ripples


To throw a stone at a strident ripple
With eyes closed and a voice crippled
With the renegade joys of a childhood lost
In the turbid, eager eyes of grown-up jaunts,

Is to hold an umbrella to the twilight sun
And revel in some quixotic virtuous norm,
Pretending what has been is never wrong

But to kindle a candle, one needs the wick to burn…

So the twilight will phase into a night
And candles will burn, and fluorescent lights…
One drop of moon in the ripples of water
In a majestic silver mermaid, will shudder

When the sojourn of the stone will strike...
Back.

The ripples will remain, gather and froth
And the ignominy of moon shall stay to spurn…
The night shall change to a new daybreak
And the sojourns of stones shall return….

And sink to the abyss beyond the drop of moon.

But ripples,we still ripple on...

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Finding My Personal Vengeance(or Evanescence)

A soft,resplendant echo
Of a single threshold touch.
I could fall a thousand steps
To reverberate under its footfall...
The 'evermore' hones an evanescent day,
And I could hear the sea-gulls humming in praise...
Warped and maimed, I could rise again---
My lone paramour, my sovereign disdain...
Nevermore, I would sing again
On a yellow,framed afternoon...
A stalker may know the wisdom
For the reasons I show.
A grave,left unattended
Filled with snow
A story,untainted
And concealed with many more.
But then you were gone
Or going away,I'm not sure...
The story would screech to a halt,
I might have crashed,I wouldn't know...
And the birds would fly away,
Leaving us thus betrothed, I want to believe...
By the rituals conferred---
A fire and a central plot,
And a mesh of 'I do'-s and 'They do'-s...
To conclude the wrought.

Do they sing 'evermore' in heaven?
Is this a dream?
Gone and nevergone,
An insensitive,unholy scheme...

And they did...

Friday, January 14, 2011

Blahs and Blues ---14/1/11

The tips of my fingers are lost in anomalies of a long-drawn,age-old conflict called 'touch'.
Do I want to?Should I?Is anybody watching?Would they mind?
All I have to do is lift a finger,and place it...gently or briskly.All I have to do is remain in sync with my tirades of past self-denials and coax myself to walk away...
It isn't exactly walking away from myself.Merely undoing the hopelessness that washes through these fingers each time they are encountered with the four questions.A speck of colour on a grey wall, a face-like puddle of water on a slab of bus-window glass and golden hair of a six year old seated next to me,a dab of magenta in a perfectly green leaf, an eclipsed-sun in a cigarrette butt...
I wish I could touch you,to touch me.
I want to,I should,whoever is watching,minding me or not...

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Blahs and Blues---11/1/11

A naked,begrime,barefoot child on your porch,
dripping the slippery skin of earth;rings your bell,once,twice
and many too many times,making you temporarily deaf...
till you open the door,adopt him as your own and
wash the muck off with your own bare hands...
...
and name him 'epiphany'.

Friday, January 7, 2011

One Day


There is one day for everything.

One day…that will seek dust
On the back of a camel
To ride into the sunset
Of a desert monsoon,
One day…when I shall have written
All my last wishes, not only my dreams,
In one single rhapsody, my tuneless song,
Origamied into a lone butterfly.
Can butterflies be lonely?
Some days maybe…
Another one day,
I will have watched the moon stride
Through the primer-scented grills
And play peek-a-boo
On the wings of my butterfly
And fly
Across the black sky,
Out of my line of sovereign sight.
One day…I will lie down
On sheets of sand soaked in the
Crashing tears of the sea,
Spread-eagled, with arms frosted
In golden muck, praying and
Pretending that gods of quick-sand
Would make a one-wish exception for me.
One day…I will surmount the broken step
Of open-air canvases
And lived long enough to breathe
The hot air there and tell the tale
To the pink-cheeked, one-liner-king,
Blue boy with a palm
Ready for alms.
One day, he shall surmount as well…
One day…I will have crossed
The esplanade intersection without
Reliving the needless, manic squeals
Of holding hands and racing the traffic lights
In one blind-sided go…
One day…I will have remembered
To bring along extra batteries along
With the torch on my search for the
Lost and forgotten time-capsules…
One day, I will remember the date
Of today and write my dreams in a single song
Replacing one day with Today.
One day…

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Condemned

The state of chaos is a hallucinogen
Awaiting the wrath of gods
To condemn it to the rings of fire
Once and then for all...


The swing wreathed with Cassiopeias,
And hung on a thread of aphrodisiacs
Merge and Kiss,
Rattles in a baby cloud's hands,
In the heavens
For a second longer
Lingers...
And is lost in the chaos
Condemned.

The state of chaos,
Condemned by earth,by heaven,by hell
Is alone

And
Everywhere.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Cold Vaccine---a bold new decade----

Slow cold, bold syringe
On flaky skin, violated;
Labored breathe, rhythmless,
Serpentine splash of fountain angels;
Blister eyes, parched crystal lips,
Booms of sky,exploding;
Thoughtless shadow-stalker,
Ripples of crows,
An end of day,
A beginning without an end...

They celebrate.

Me?
I have my name etched
On sleeping awakenings.
Thus they will rise
Steady,stymied
No reason to abhor,
Only fall leaves to rake...
Only a reason to stay awake.
But a stupid repeater, a sluggish hinge
Shall not reveal me
Or my snow-syringe...

I perpetuate.

Crushed leaves,
Heartless sleeves,
Simpleton one-faced pennies
And simpleton fountain angels...
Will surround me forever,
I am here to be around...
Cold,pallid, anonymous,
The same every year abound.

But I will be warm, I will be known
Someday...when the world runs cold
I will seem loud!
For now,till then,
I am here...frozen.
But for this year,yet again...
I am simply now...

I am only here.