Thursday 29 December 2011

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.

Tuesday 29 November 2011


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.


Sunday 20 November 2011

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.

Sunday 16 October 2011

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.



                                                                               

Thursday 8 September 2011

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.

Wednesday 7 September 2011

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.

Saturday 9 July 2011

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.


Saturday 9 April 2011

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.

Friday 18 February 2011

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.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

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.

Monday 3 January 2011

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.