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.