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To Faraway Friends

Sharing lives and toothbrushes

Prepare, to be strangers yet!

To pass by in the street perhaps

Muttering other names

Rushing to homes elsewhere

Inhabiting other beds, other worlds

Carrying names, not our own

Like foreign coins

Jingling in these home pockets.

While this ancient city

Knocks the door

Of those new lives.

And we’ll measure distance anew—

A little further perhaps than

Today,

When you lie,

Half a pillow away.

This guilt offers no getaways,

No spiral path to re-trace,

A walk back to a beginning,

To un-knot the middle

Of a fixed telos set in wet cement.

Except perhaps, a forever of

Slow regret seeping through

The crevices of days.

Book-ways

This landscape of memory,

And the portrait of one

Posing forever, frozen

In some sepia world;

The margins cleared

Of remembered words,

A text of desire paginated

Into an easy understanding

Of the wise ways of the world

Hard-bound now against

The despoiling of time;

Crisp pages, each

Chaptering new moments

Whirled in continuum

Of infinite whiteness

And traces of ink

Scribbling away

New lines on old die-hard tales.

The three-way split

Restless, I peel off the layers

To excavate 

The three-way split

Of one self.

They who have passed

And they who will,

A future become memory already,

A past come alive,

And the present,

Seeking words

To hold onto to itself

Slipping like smooth muslin

Run through a gold ring.

You remember perhaps,

My deserted streets,

The secret hideaways,

A city revealed

In epiphanic moments.

The ancient time-worn monuments,

The plaintive tones of tombs and mosques

Old forts and new ritual sites

Will they remember us?

Or are they merely stained

Like a giant spittoon

With the excesses

Of the innumerable

Who have walked by?

Perhaps, our loves, our lives

Were not enough

To carve out

A name, worth remembrance,

It seems.

So I have dreamt up 

New gods, new myths and sites

To fill up 

This memory shrine.

                                                                               

To write

Write, write, write, we must

Else, who will tell the tale?

A possession it is, a muse divine,

Blessing blind poets with nocturnal visits

And to us poetasters,

Only a passing grace.

Say If

When all the angst

Of teenage rage is at rest,

And very adult ‘affairs’ through

Perhaps a worldly ‘sanity’ will follow:

The ones they call domesticity

And death.

A few twists, here and there,

Say: If the ugly cityscape

Had offered less scenic views;

Or, if we hadn’t held sacred beliefs

In myths like god and such;

If breathless desperation

Was not called lustful names

Like love; then

Perhaps, a conventional choice and

‘A lifetime of happiness’,

Would be embedded

In the twisted lines of our fates too,

Now diverging

Like railway tracks trailing away

Different journeys.

Hear What They Say

The words are held in a crevice of silence:

Echoing off these endless cliffs

Meeting their own reflection in half-way haunts;

Like two mirrors forever held

In the narcissism of their self-same images.

Perhaps the silence will speak up some day

Claim for its own this voice

Resonant with the cacophony it holds within

Like water frozen in those ancient stalactite

Awaiting the dawn of another time.

Mistake not this calm for melancholy,

No more of those common sorrows

Which every passing breeze brings to banal hearts,

You, who have refined words into silence,

Deserve an ode which words cannot sing.

A perfection you have taught to this unruliness

Time wrapped on a warp, spun in a weft

When Orpheus cannot err and glance behind

Nor may one escape into the fantasy of a future

Only to drink at this fountain of here and now,

Each gulp, a sweeter succulence.

Perfect Strangers

Now there are days, and there are days,

A couple, a week, and no more,

Yet enough, to make togetherness feel new.

Then there will be the keeping of watch

Over the many years, and the comings

And goings of days will fade into nothing.

Such is time now, and such will time be then

And not knowing you will be a ritual

I will perhaps grow used to.

And we will perfect strangers then

Like we were perfect lovers once.

Of forgetting and remembrance

In pain, in loss, in memory

I can draw contours of your face;

In bliss, I held you too close

To ever recall how you looked.

And yet all forgetting

Is not mere erasure,

Perhaps from there begins

Knowing and all remembering.

Heartbreak

Heartbreak came late,

in twilight years,

Lurking to deal

The greater blow.

She was a jilty little thing

Saucy mouth and cocky airs

A bit of another and her mother

And I was another ogler of her charms.

Youth allowed her cruelty

And pity was all I could hope for

Yet perhaps, she might have

A kind little heart

Who glances at me and remembers

One akin to her father, as I stood,

Silhouetted against the pitiless sun

 In these twilight years.

My Mad Woman

Gathering in silence my armour of anger

I prepare to war

My mad woman,

Locked up in the mind-attic now.

Armies of another time, place, gather

Ranging the fringes of childhood, innocence

Of a faraway self who is not I

But grew up to be me.

Now, far beyond reproach is she,

I merely question

The accidents or dreams

That led her to be.

Possession

Possession is an entrapment;

His arms or her eyes

Whatever it might be

Hell within and worse without.

Her tinge of blue

When you pried my six-year old self

Or sent me to the shrink at twenty-two,

Running to Maa was not a shame

I could gulp down and live,

So I ‘let’ you be my secret

Held tight at the throat,

Hands and feet and thoughts

Tied together with

With threads of melancholy,

Or perhaps a lifelong lust for touch;

‘Bitter chocolate’ it was indeed,

But unlike the creator-and-destructor

The three-eyed one,

My neck belied no shameful hues,

Merely a tinge of awareness gained

That innocence would henceforth be

Just a word, no more.

Begging Bowl

With a heart full, a self empty,

What begging bowl may I fashion

To earn a glance from your eyes?

When it is the void 

That you so avoid.

If I had a drunkard’s courage

I would find another door to haunt.

Truth-tales

As pockets are rattled and

Turned inside out,

I searched the apparels of your tale

Hoping the lie will tumble out

Like an errant hideaway coin

Telling truth in silence;

But those scraps I found instead:

Tickets belying travels taken

Tissues edged with coffee and stray thoughts

Tokens bookmarking memory

And my fragrance, wafting on all.

Witness

Late fruit of tired loins born in a good year

And thenceforth anointed with high hopes

An optimism not shared by fate perhaps

And later, nor by the fore-mentioned ‘fruit’.

Buoyed by the ease of easy achievement

A second place seemed too cruel

Unexpected of one held with ‘expectation’

Mediocrity became the burden he bore

Sometimes resisted. Dissipation offered

Dubious delight, cynicism comfort

And reflection yielded

That life had been a deck of dominoes

Mistakes lined up against the next

Crashing to every harsh touch;

In the trial box, he pleaded guilty

Witness to his own conviction.