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.