Terminal Moraine

a parting..

2012-01-14T10:42:00.001-08:00

An hour! In an hour I can say good-bye
one of those heart-breaking farewells
when we leave an entire short togetherness behind,
forgetting that the real parting is when
there is any ‘love’ to part from..

Even in the mist I can trace
the invisible lancets of
your moss-grown lips, a queer
stale smell
hangs about em , as if
something within stealthily gropes for
means of an escape..

It’s a struggle
to conduct this mind
around a fucking practicality
it insists though
on wandering;
weaving fantastic, tear-stained conjectures
in drifting tobacco smoke. .

at last rationality thrives
under the allaying sway of
an exquisite whiskey, the incident of midnight
floats into nothingness-

Love affairs; real, tangible lovers
purchase our attention.

forgive me, if there is suffused with it
an utterly selfish yearning to be kissed by you
once, only once again, in my proper character
of a sinning woman,
rid of my righteous disguise

I’ve had my desires, it has metamorphosed into
scars of remorse on my lips.
You were rational. All we can do now
is preserve the ghost ..

His chef-d'oeuvre ..

2011-12-13T09:21:00.000-08:00

She had an odd fascination; exclusively her own; it wasn’t really beauty, but a characteristic far more disturbing, something a man couldn’t resist. The garden was strewn with jasmine and pansies, among them bunches of Chrysanthemums, roses, marigolds, and other hues that impregnate the still violet air. A spring, flimsy and murky, seemed profusely placed in a corner to resemble the sacred Yamuna. There the nightingale sang the birth of her favorite rose while bewailing its short lived charm, the doves mourned steadily, and the peacock danced to enliven the creation. The unified melodies of birds and flowers imbued the painting amidst which Zebunissa, Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s daughter, reclined alone, on a bower of Bougainvillea, waiting and weary, bearing in her spirit, the regrets and waywardness of her heavy heart.

The apartment was small, on the fifth floor of a building, in a congested street. The painting occupied a yellowed wall of its solitary bedroom. Outside the windows the relentless concert of the city played on, the vehicles, the people, the ceaseless voices. Through the open shutters also came the fresh night air of December. Zebunissa stepped out of the canvas and peeped outside. She had often imbibed this dulcet Delhi air. Even the smoke and dust could not stifle the nip of a wild perfume akin to the bygone medieval era. She inhaled a mouthful, gazing out across the tangled cosmos of roofs and lamp-posts. She saw the headlights, she caught some stars, she saw a crescent moon, the lights from street falling in a shower of silver upon the floor, bed-posts, and a table stacked with sheets and brushes. And something inside her moved; something that had never stirred before.

After a long day, unlocking and stepping inside his living room, Kalakar, the sole occupant of that flat, turned with a dreadful spasm. A discomfort leaped within him like an animal. He sensed a presence. The chill air fanned his face. Beauty had often brushed the surface of his soul without penetrating in. He had passed them by often. He had troubled his fingers in drawing them not his brain. He did not scorn it, as an artist he glorified it on canvas, but it had not moved his life to consume his passion.

Zebunissa hastened in the other room. As she turned, warm glows melted in her eyes through tears, like stars in a lagoon. Her long hair rolled over her smooth oval forehead in dark curls, and outlining her exquisite curves, hung a long silken dress with colors of sumptuous hue and lace. She tore a piece of fabric from that rich garment, placed it on the table and stepped back into the painting. Kalakar entered the room and she stood before him, hanging on the wall, a vision from the old world, full of innate royalty, simple as an ordinary woman, at once shy and dominating, beautiful.

He faced her, peering over that immense painting, he had chanced upon in a derelict gallery, beauty beckoned, and smote between his eyes. She came headlong, with her train of stars mystery and perfumes. She was painted by an anonymous painter and since he had brought her home in an amber twilight, he had kept smiling. She was his masterpiece, whoever he was. An enchanting muse. Kalakar wished to claim her. The lonely table in the corner was heaped with sheets of his disjointed efforts. Consequently he had abandoned the hope of capturing her perfect delicacy. In the faint light, she looked flawless, real. So much so, that he had convinced himself she wasn’t painted, but sported those colors as a shelter against the approach of undesirables. He had no words to express that new sensation. His eyes lingered on her figure. He dropped his gaze with a sigh and saw the mysterious fabric on the table. He started. He understood.

If he could not comprehend her reason, he did not fail to appreciate that token of her presence. He held the fabric between his fingers, caressed the softness and perceived her thoughtful brow contradicting by that touch and his own soul drowning in the twin wells of her wide apart, entrapping, limpid eyes.

He hadn’t bothered to think about women’s legs more than the legs of the wooden stretchers that held his canvas. He had sketched many legs but none were as exquisite as those that peeked out from the flimsy material he grasped in his hand. It is the unpredictable that occurs, the kind of instances which we could never guess doing, engaging, or feeling. We fight against fancies but there blows a brazen wind from nowhere, similar to the impulse which had moved Zebunissa’s pre-historic garment and our life is like a kaleidoscope suddenly disturbed and it displays a novel pattern.

So it continued. Days months rolled by till Zebunissa was left with only a piece of clothing which barely covered her archaic modesty. And it paused. He had known that women had whims, his models had suffered from theirs. Devoted, they would sit for hours, patiently evolving under his brush. And then complainingly they disappeared without a promise. It had annoyed him then but it aroused him now. The awareness was like freshly savored wine, crimson, peachy, steaming through his veins, climbing to his head. However, his patience wore off.

“my love.. you give no more sign? “ he implored and tore his hair ..

But Zebunissa snugly composed in her own position could examine the darkness in his soul, taking a delight in observing the immeasurable pleasure she could impart with a little gesture. She did not marvel at her apparent power. All women relish the sway they possess over the mortals who submit to their altar of vanity.

It is a common understanding that we are less miserable when we have companions to share our tragedy. This is a natural human craving. Wretched ones are instinctively drawn toward gloomy persons. Sight of happiness is injurious in this mood but two dejected souls are like frail branches of a tree braving a storm, they mutually support each other.

So Kalakar sought out his friend of distress Ranganath. They had labored together in the mad world of art. They were talented but that one masterpiece which could win the approval of callous critics was still elusive in their armor. Ranganath had risen temporarily from his narcotic created chimera and was hot upon the scent of a new puzzle. The puzzle was whiskey. He was ruddy, the veins on his forehead were swollen, visible like cords. The whiskey on his table was strong and burned through his eyes. He greeted Kalakar with a toast, fondled his bottle, and exclaimed,

“I have heard people describe whiskey as unromantic! I am sure I can paint my masterpiece under the influence of one! Let us have a drink, it may not be effective tonight but this bottle is simply charming”

Kalakar was in no mood to gauge the whiskey’s potency. He gulped enough drinks to unbury his love for a woman buried centuries ago. The queer narrative ended and Ranganath broke forth into a devilish laugh.

“A mummy dropping her cerements? Haha.. get yourself laid by a living one... ”

“you do not believe me.. ! come along” screamed Kalakar.

Her still eyes were blatant, the red lips seemed pouted scornfully, and she was looking askance. She had the look of a woman upon whom a rare grace had fallen. Divested of the royal robe, her external appearance dazzled with spiritual dominance and splendor. To the coarse male nature the depth of female passion and caprice remains an enigma. Woman-like Zebunissa had teased her beau. That very night she had decided to reward Kalakar’s patience by tearing off a chunk of garment under her throat. The two men stood gaping in wonder mingled with admiration, at the sight of Zebunissa’s imperial bosom, which met them, when they rushed into Kalakar’s apartment. She seemed furious. Ranganath broke the voluminous silence.

“Why.. this semi-nude.. ? She is only covered waist down! She may not be Zebunissa after all..”

“Shoot me Ranga but she was covered from head to toes when I bought her. She is offended because you are here.. I can sense..” he ejaculated dejectedly.

-----

Kalakar longed to live the supernatural life of one who is captive of a secret passion. He was wiser than before and made no further attempt of parading his treasure. That exotic elixir, flower of happiness which enchanted in the dark, scorned him in the secluded recesses of his heart, how did he know that the prying heat of another’s eye might not shrink and burn her grand petals? He could not risk repeating that mistake.

Tardily the days lingered on. Jewels and moonlight, scent and incense, the tinkling of her anklets, Zebunissa clung to his mind though she remained unmoved in her painting. Her bare bosom mocked him. It was a bleak, forsaken world that engulfed him, a world of shadows, clinging fog that trailed along in his dingy apartment, a frowning humanity, terribly depressing. But there was a reverent spot on the wall, where hope was still clear, despite the growing impatience, love glowed there, so he walked, keeping his eyes on her.

He gently removed the painting from the wall and tenderly secured it on stretcher bars. He could sniff the haunting fragrance of painted flowers, their iridescent hues and melody of birds that conveyed deep shafts of brightness to pierce his sorrow, making Zebunissa even more mysterious. She had never loved! Locked in a harem, surrounded with beauty, she had pined for one soul who could claim her virgin heart. Just like Kalakar. She had reached out to him with her pre-historic youth and Kalkar had sullied her trust by bringing in an intruder. Could she forgive him?

He did not require a fresh canvas. The hopeless passion ran like a corrupting poison through his combustible system. To the impassive world it was nothing more than sheer moonshine, winter madness. That night he painted his masterpiece; another leafy bower, in the very same painting, just beside her. His own figure seated on it, facing Zebunissa. A masterpiece within masterpiece. It was a scene of riotous amorphousness, exotic poison, gurgling, simmering, scintillating, distorting, and menacingly bubbling, in cosmic and vague chiaroscuro.

After the last stroke of his brush, weary from labor, he dropped on his bed, dreaming deathless dreams of long-dead artists, their muses, their romances. There were splashes of colors, soft music of rustling garments and voices that called him from the depth of their soul. Night intoxicated, her haunting shadows infested his heart. He never woke up. On the wall, Zebunissa smiled in her canvas. She tossed her lustrous hair in guileless coquetry gamboling with beguiling grace and there the Kalakar embraced her.

Nirvana

2011-12-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

blank noise, a pinprick
the blessed black-out --
world is forgotten here,
not the world merely,
also its memory ..

I’m done with holding back,
bubbles of pain surge
in turbulent maze--
a perfect asymmetry

dazed on shaky rim
in his orgasmic embrace
the monster is haunting

a manna in wilderness
living, mystifying, pearly; a power
deliciously confusing

he lays the naked spell
of wild perplexity
slips, squats
rises, follows, he isn’t shrouded
nor revealing

copulating with moonbeams
at the sepulcher of surrender
dropping his noxious arms
he grips my neck,
gathering in…

No.
he can not detain me
I acquired celestial legs
a syringe that injects
the beauty of stars
in my eager veins

I can see them fading
in numbed ether of dreams;
the human beasts -
their paws of
clobbered steels

and the vivacity
that rises
from this oblivious lethargy. .

there is no hint left
of monotonous melancholy ..
I can measure infinity

stretched over
a tranquil cosmos
behind the masque of death
am accumulating life
of psychedelic fancy

squirming in morbid hope
I catch my mind occasionally
an addict’s wavering hope is tenacious,
for it is her last
ironically ...

A shuttle of dreams..

2011-10-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Empty-
she tends the corner of the aisle
by the Altar of Sins,
inspecting freckled sun fade
in conquering shadows,
picturing forlorn day-dreams
until the day-dreams blend
with nightmares -
she falls asleep

He proposes
to stab the incubus
with his artifacts of masculinity
until they crawl back
into a nebulous nothingness
whence only her bitterest fears
had facilitated
to creep forth…

his first service
to her ‘built-in’ town,
which, to its own humiliation,
had endured the souvenir of
an Egyptian darkness,
or worse, of Skepticism,
here in the midst of
a Garish city

"Confide;
you intrigue me
for how can we
arrive ‘at it’
unless we dig a little?”

The present has such a coarse plan
for treading ‘it’ down.

there are new manifestations,
novel dramas,
kisses, gropings, tears, and yet
threading new strands
in blurred warp and woof
of something they term
‘a moment.’

"I am better off," he screams,
she beholds
the ghostly shuttle of dreams
shattering -
in a psychological loom

he knows, she knows
he never wished to set it off
or cared for
an illumination from
‘that’ shuttle or ‘those’ dreams
what he desired was
to flaunt it before her eyes, and insert
a prohibitive price over it..

A Journey... Incognito..

2011-10-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

Etymology

Look, this never happened to us
that is one reason for swallowing it
another body would devour it,
or at least give a seasoning to darken
the settings and semblance
lending an evanescent fidelity,
altering it in future to a sheer legend,
a romance divulged
out of hazy distance…

Fuckopath

in our bodies it obtrudes;
glares perpetually in infernal unforgetfulness,
devouring the seasoning,
invariably retrieving itself from legend
turning conjectures and speculations
into rationales,
Duh..

witnessed incognito
and in this fucking city, of all places,
unplane, unfanciful, unlove.

Orgyment

I can humbug with vocab
about as thoroughly
as you do with lovers .

I have my sex’s wizardry over phrases, ironies,
innuendos, half sarcasm, half whimsical,
an outlook on obscenity that delights to amaze
you have your’s –

the cajolery that, on literal diagnosis,
turns out really to be the reverse.

Crouche

Like a half rehearsed aria
that trips in head
dissolving the instant you try to hum it
these ideas accumulate
in the backdrop of reason,
behind my reason, as it were,
and decline to come forth.

They are crouching like an orgasm
waiting to spring,
the tangible consummation
never takes place.

Penultimatum

night has brought in the closing act--
of a choking hell-lust
crimson fires leap up
to whirl their strips of red shafts into
the wedges of bleakness..

they flicker erratically
upon squirming bodies,
paradoxically practicing
the calamity of the morrow -
languor and nerve-waste
by grim orgies and waltzes.

Conclusionary

first light of dawn has assailed
the stench of lechery
which had veiled our love,
while the dying fire festers
into silvery smoke, my throat
labors in stifling gasps of saliva,
you turn again..

the ungiven kiss burns our sensual lips
as our specters trail out silently
into the bush…
Incognito..

renegade

2011-09-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Another death, a bottle,
and a cigarette
reposed like a squib
that has scorched itself out
whimpering with hisses,
an ebonized snippet of sheathing,
wordless, extinguished

shadows amalgamate, and yet
there’s left an acumen
to diagnose this dying-down
it had really been decreed;
my current conditional inebriation
has little or nothing
to do with it

Ergo, for the last time,
behold this carcass
a withering globule of blue,
wading in ether
here should I;
frail flakes of soul soot
quiver silently
across the hollow,
into domain of unknown..

do not cherish me,
in feigned warped ethics
of the world you inhabit
judge me secretly
from the heights of that pedestal
from which I’ve fallen, and
endeavor to accept me
in the coterie of derelicts...

Ante Scriptum

2011-07-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

the world is grey like a vault of cathedral
frowning and ominous; am walking home
imagining that an eternity has slipped by
and you are finally there

haunting my nights with incantations
I suspect you’ve always had plots at hand
a head crammed with treason,
a grim incubus biding his time

do I hate you? you do not know me
I trust you never will
hate is an eclectic wine of exquisite nip
most provoking draught in the world,

no my dear, I’ll live on this vigorous dietary
I’m in the blessed state of an inhumed fossil
a perverse and obsolete ideal resuscitated;
nobody will excavate me

expunge my cerements, will you?
we know what an outdated castle love is
how time and ghosts have soiled it, raiment on
walls stripped off; dilapidated

the entire heap devoted to ruin
in the tawny cast of decay
living with whispers, speculation, and arsenic
to postpone the climax of fatal lust

already the eldritch smell of tombs
have infiltrated your kisses
the callous curl of voluptuous lip
performing burlesque of fabricated faith

I desire you simply that you delude me
into a fleeting limbo of my doom,
scorn me with a phantasm of life
that isn’t and can never be

In the nocturnal sky
when you look for meteors, tempests, ravens,
I’ll surge from the carcass
forsaken half devoured

clammy with dew as if with infinite tears;
unless death annihilates the closing act
there perpetually is a tomorrow
to be reckoned with..

this summer ...

2011-04-25T02:55:00.000-07:00

..for fuck’s sake, let us go through that,
the way we sipped hot tea on a sidewalk
in sweltering Delhi heat to cool off,
a paradox we can swear by;
witnessed at high noon beside me
your shadow casts a trivial shadow
baring the world ahead as a matter of fact
thus I can return zigzagging between
lurid darkness and nebulous nothingness
to the shell and husk of you
lying on my bed after I had watched
the love and the person walk out,
leaving only a stale periphery of
what had gone by to show off, and puff
a cigarette, sun filtering through curtains
as caressing fingers resting on eyelids
cerulean smoke diluting in golden haze
shrugging you off with a poem,
like everything in the brazen past,
which appeared rosy in remoteness..

One Night Stand

2011-04-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

Indeed. Behind hazy veil of moonbeams
draping your haunted lids,
glimmers an image
the beats of invisible spurs,
while my figure itself
maunders, partially clad, sucked back
into wavering shadows,
like tales which simmer around
warm excruciating autumn evenings
summoning fragrance from everything.

I am sinking
with every trivial throb of your throat.
And coloring too.
It isn’t blue.
Its red that changes hue
each instant with kisses upon mouth,
tint substituting tint
tone fusing into tone,
our bodies rubbing words of a melody
as I scribble verses on your chest.

Oh. In red blaze of warmth
your eyes bring splendor,
pouring forth vermouth and absinthe
over pearly expanse of
heights cloaked with perennial snow
thawing into
a consuming sea of radiance
that kindles dark labyrinths of brains,
imparting secrets lurking through

crimson shafts penetrate your arms
while perfumed breaths
swell and expand on lips,
until we appear bare,
terminal, and complete to conquer.
Unforgettable, unrepeatable
we keep it between us
lest the world slays singing buds.
A rhapsody of russet and unearthly
we leave a poem with the other.

poetry to lay down with in the night
and wake up beside ...

Moon-Stricken

2011-03-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

“Water..” He barely unclosed his eyes, pursed his lips, blinked and stared at her with an uncertainty which broke into a painful smile. He met her eyes for few seconds, a feeble but tranquil look that sunk deep into her soul which spilled a salve into every wound that destiny had inflicted there.

She got up gently to comply and then pulled aside the blind from the windows to peer outside. There lay an opalescent moonlight, the soft lucent affect on the trees and sky amalgamated together in one expectant silent mystery.

And the moon, pouring in from every opening within the staggering buildings and trees, turned the wide-open alley underneath into an anchorage, shimmering, undulating like another lagoon, the tangible one, which stretched out yonder where she had found him.

In one such breathless night under the full moon he had waited outside her palatial bungalow. He called himself Aladdin and she was the Princess Badroulbadour, full moon of full moons. Could the scene appear more brilliant if it wasn’t enacted under the moonlight? No. The wilderness in his eyes, pensive and solemn, the lonesome clumps in his throat, the ennobled hollow near his chest, and her misty distance from where he stood beneath the wintry illusory light completed the intensity of an adventure.

She needed love and only his love could manacle and contain her reckless will. She yielded to a penetrating rush of desire that was still pulsating, now, laboriously through her veins. His lips with the mark of hers upon them; sturdy nerves stung by illness, his form tense by fatigue, and the limbs paralyzed from running held her eyes, terror-stricken, between anguish and dread.

Through the extravagance of that miasma which clouded over her senses due to his nearness, she could perceive him again, and herself, more distinctly than when she’d left her life of comfort for him. Her memory had retained a shade of his erstwhile beauty, his profound smile of color and outline, their unhampered freedom, opportunities as vast as their dreams of forests brooding in the sun and rain. She exploded into a convulsion of crying and laughing at the same time as she walked toward his supine form on the cot.

She observed him sinking deeper each minute into the quicksand of time. Everything within her was merged into one singeing, clasping horror; Death. Thirteen months lay behind them, stormy scroll of time, with an unbroken stretch of labor, stress, and struggle. And now it seemed almost over, when she could be at liberty. An indescribable invigoration surrounded her and through all her withered self ran an animated fire that shaped one thought in her brain – “I should flee”, and four words on her lips – “I can save him!”

He clung to life because instincts were stronger than reason, harder than any of the dismaying realities they had met together and knew they must go on confronting. They had to live, with a past which had a distant comfort, tumbling to the future which they attempted not to see, because when they did envision it they were afflicted with a similar terror as now immersed her.

There were families hoping and waiting, longing and starving, in every street she knew. She wondered listlessly if she’d ever get remunerated for the toil of keeping him alive, whether she should live to get out of the frozen recess of cosmos, where he could no longer protect her, or whether she should die and decompose alongside him, in that open grave, where her living love was buried.

Multitudinous tiny specks entered through the open window, twirling and whirling like the pillar of dust in a desert simoom. She strained a tip-toeing outside which emanated from the staircase. She wondered who was there. She had ordered everyone out. He was dying. She wished to be the only living soul beside him when he slipped into the comfort of death, free from running, free from disease, free from her. And yet.. and yet.. there was someone.

In the omnipresent gloom that floated over them, under the drapery of dusk, deprivation and starvation, fright and malady haggled clamorously, while Death strolled silently and persistently about their darkened streets. Had death also arrived at their doors? Can she recognize death if they were standing face to face? Can she wrangle and defeat that faceless, formless enemy? Or was He a friend? He’d come to rescue her from uncertainty? Better death. If he couldn’t live he should die. That settled it. Or did it?

She pressed her ear against his chest, caressing the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks had been, smooth and polished. His heart was beating in response to the cleaving, checkering sound outside which affronted the silence within, like a lacework of agony. what music could ever compare with that great duet from two varied sources? A capital concert of the inanimate things that sing within soul? It became a terrific combat, between life and death, in which the defeat of one was to be recognized in a sublimated form, beautiful in different, monstrous way.

She rushed to her trunks and rummaged through the contents, feeling for the loaded pistol, their sole treasure. She’d practiced shooting in the same moonlit alley in broad daylight. They lived enveloped in danger. About the present, it was better to be stolid, about the future, a future as theirs, to be dead. And in stupor of a dead trance, she meditatively held the agility of her nature. In the havoc of new crisis she knew that the actual moment of dissolution had arrived.

As she looked at him again a sense of appalling loneliness lacerated her heart, and then suddenly she knew that in the chill of that moonlight she was alone with Death. He had come for him at last. The flaming figure in the cot began to grow dim and pale, gradually his feverish luster diminished, till at last his face vanished altogether, leaving no trace of its former suffering but a small crystal flame which slowly took the shape of another man who sparkled through the murk like a suspended ruby. For an instant the room was completely dark, filled with the fragrance of jasmine and she could scarcely discern anything else as a haunting impression of the supernatural diffused the inscrutable hush and abysmal shadow.

She pointed her gun and fixed her smoldering eyes on that grotesque new figure, looking straight into his wicked eyes, as if to mark the altering contours, the heightening lines, the droop of the lineaments, which communicated the mild advance of death. The moon, icicled and ashen, through the unveiled window, tossed a turquoise ray, like the extended arm of a specter, against the opposite wall, a ghostly effect which was deepened by the contradicting garish glitter of the rubicund face. Though she moved her lips in an attempt to break the spell, she could find no language worthy to the moment.

Like a repulsive and grim chariot of death the eyes of the unknown puffed and expanded until they were right above her, enormous, terrible, and she felt his gelid moist breath of automated congruity against her face, encompassing her in a noisome fog. She reckoned that the wraith reeked of tombs as it made a moaning sound. She was numb with horror as she held his gaze. He was unarmed and she was assured by the power of the pistol.

Next moment the drama ceased; the wind roared outside, flinging gusty dashes of moonmist against the one window of the room. The footsteps on the staircase were retreating and the pale form on cot was breathing rhythmically. She could still hear the intermittent rumbling of the terrific movements on stairs, the faint tremors under her feet from the shock of the nabbed avalanche.

In that moment of victory she ran to him and held him tighter while he groaned..
“my Ba-droul-badour..”

She showered hot kisses on his sentient lips and he fell into a musical slumber, smiling. She rose and leaned towards the window, giving herself up to the dolcefar niente of imaginations, blinded by a flood of sapphire moonlight. It poured in through great skies, peaceful and diaphanous, like a cerulean mist turning the huge alley into a submarine grotto, surfaced with moonbeams, full of glimmers. The sky was aglow like a brilliant aurora but the light was cold, blue, vaporous, funereal.

Some dark points rapidly emerged from the prismatic mist resembling the figure which had appeared few moments ago near the cot. There was uncertainty in his features as if he was pondering his next course, as she watched. If she had been smashed in body and mind, her vitality drained like the man she loved she could stand passively and let him go by, and she would have been at peace.

The figure in the alley vibrated and quivered like the stars that are scattered in the profundity of heaven. The voices in her head wound and unwound in distant, ebbing phrases, fretted with scales, halting now and then and swaying as if panting in languorous agony. Something was subjugating her into gradual paralysis. She felt dead outwardly. Only if she could reclaim her consciousness, they were safe. Could she fight that madness of silence, the thickening darkness, and creeping numbness? She felt as if her body was dissolving, that she too was turning fluid and vaporous to unify with that figure yonder as the moonbeams merge with the dew.

She lifted the pistol and pressed it against her throbbing head as if under some necromantic spell. She had lost it, killed within by a great sorrow. Tired. The vitality, the resilience of her arms, her beaming eyes was physical, in the heart and soul there was a chill and dismal bitterness, the drab stretches of deserted age.

The phantom in the moonlight beckoned her and she descried a sinister smile on his face. The smog of her thoughts cleared, she fought that indifferent unsighted stupor. She combated that agony until at last she was sure she was going to die. Drifting into that last delicious sleep of receding sensibility she was zapped again. A flash of lightning danced vividly before her eyes, accompanied by a crashing peal of thunder, she saw to what end of a wild journey she had reached! She had to overcome that phantasm or she would lose. She had to keep that lonesome vigil and subdue the enemy. So she aimed.

.. ..

The sleepers outside the room were roused by the noise of a fired shot. When they broke inside they found a woman standing beside the window, expressionless, holding a gun, and staring the man who was shot dead on the cot.

C'est l'amour

2011-02-05T02:04:00.000-08:00

may be it was Love
in crystal February atmosphere,
beneath golden electric lamps
suspended in lucent air,

when you gave your right hand
wine obliterated those blazing rays
reflecting glimmering stars
like sequins in dark gauze

all was turbulence; without
within, a tranquility prevailed,
adorned with grave murmurs of
harp caressed in zephyr

we were monarchs reigning a scepter
a kingdom was ours
a kingdom of roseate ether,

in an ensuing pause
as though our empyrean awaited
an unraveled splendor
you smiled, your Dionysiac smile

making it all at once
so far off yet so near

virile and effete
angelic or demonic
we stood on our feet
in an apathetic nakedness
watching our world fade,

afterward we wondered, was that Love
which vanished like gossamer,
that antediluvian force of nature
was it pain,
or pleasure?

the old and new year..

2011-01-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

its that time of the year
when am tempted to recline
staring into
the vacant spaces of
my room
reviewing the fluttering panorama
of my fucking existence
for the past one year

there’s nothing
that doesn’t choke me with
regret, and there’s nothing which
by any credible effort
I could’ve altered

I could not have escaped
one of those barbs –
the men, booze, filth
the breakdowns, boredom
morning terrors
or leaking faucets

I could not have undone
any single act
or the depressing fact

there’s an implacable continuity
in this chaos –
the infatuations, exhilarations
self-pity, tears, pills -
an orgasmic perfection

there had been an intense game
and I –
merely one of it’s pawns

in the new year
I’d lounge
under the blue moon
with my frigid muse
that highly cultivated,
muscular hypochondriac
with wicked instincts

get drunk on
melancholy and rum
then make love to
the goddamned traffic lights
which are stuck at red

say hello to
excruciating aversions,
weary by leisure,
yet inept of action,
I’d remain
inconsistent in every aspiration
except my incessant love for
grotesque fuck-ups ….

the lost stories...

2010-12-17T05:39:00.000-08:00

Those stories
I’d written -
moonlight shone through them,
as though
specters outlined the hues
without substance
when words came,
wearing forever an affable guise of
earthly bliss

Their delicious and blithe tones
lingering musically in the horizon-
how far away,
close to silence,
and yet; so very clear

and so they are,
the testimonials of immortal pain
amiable signs which survive
everything that was exquisite
remains, behind
their enduring celestial veil

and meanwhile,
my only solace exists
in resurrection of
memory, the aftertaste and reflection of
the body which had sinned, but the spirit
redeemed ..

I scribble these verses,
only to tear ‘em up,
throw the ramblings unread
into a fire

and yet, you never know..
as the blistered pages sparkle
dwindling into
the rosy cinders,
the spell might be broken,
and I may claim again –
the lost prose
that forfeited liberty,
and my failed genius..

two grannies..

2010-11-21T03:03:00.000-08:00

It's the story of two grannies in my maternal village.
I had seen them since time immemorial, saw them old and wrinkled, exactly the same for past - don't remember how many years. I visited my Nani (maternal grandmother) once in the gap of 3-4 years and found them the same; affectionate loving caring but invariably venomous about each other and backbiting.

They were not my real grannies, someone in my family tree, some great great grandfather must have owned mammoth portions of land and prodigious mansions. He must have divided his estate amongst his children who in turn would have done the same and down the ages after every division the present status of these families was reduced to bare minimum. They all fought for the meager resources, blamed their parents for siding with a particular sibling and unrighteous division of the property, but life went on…

My grandfather managed to stay away from this; he was the only child, a zamindar; he inherited extensive property, was well educated, he doubled and tripled his possessions and had his own solitary habitat at the edge of the village.

Whenever I went there all distant relatives and neighbors invited me. I mostly sojourned the village on some occasion with all my cousins and we made a tour of the village and of course never forgot to meet those two sweet grannies.

They were sisters in law, now widowed. Their husbands were brothers. In his life time, their father had split the property and his portion of the residency between his sons(their husband). In quick succession both men died, their children grew up, left for bigger cities in search of employment and the two ladies were left alone fighting with each other. Interestingly both grannies had sons (not sure how many...coz I had seen none) and no daughter.

X granny was elder than Y granny. It was impossible to make out who was older. I had heard stories of their beauty and charm in their prime but I couldn’t picture them young. I wondered how old they were and often questioned my Nani. Nani had no definite answer but she made some vague guesses .. Whatever - they looked antiquated but I was equally surprised by their energy as they worked very hard from dawn to dusk and their stamina in trying to put each other down in almost everything that they did. It seemed they had been alone since eternity with their entity solely confined to each other.

To begin with -the bone of contention was a huge hall in their dwelling. The entire house was divided with same number of rooms for each other but that huge hall was a common property and both grannies used it as storage. Both owned a partitioned small mango garden, little piece of farm and in off-season they made pickles, papad (that they sold in the village market) and also did some stitching and knitting. They were famous for their variety of pickles and both tried to prove - their pickle tasted better.. their mango was juicier .. their farm was ideal .. their roses were brighter .. their stitching and knitting was in fashion . their side of the turf was better kept and lustrous ...n so on n so forth...

When we visited them we gathered in the courtyard surrounding the colossal ruin of their house that was set in a dell - amidst some goats on the rooftop, hens squawking away and few frail dogs quietly watching. We sat on cushionless rough benches near the doorway loving their enchanting sweetness looking through their wispy white hair. Both of them served us a variety of delicacy, trying to exhibit their traditional culinary skills. I can’t forget the taste of their rice rotis, aaloo puris, fried eggplants in mustard gravy ..chilly pickles .. suji ka halwa ..ohh the list is perpetual ..

Later in the evening either of the two came by our place to smear - how the other granny was torturing her .. trying to capture her share of land .. spreading false stories about her…etc etc . They labeled each other a ‘witch’ and had remarkably sharp tongue when they talked about another.

Entire village was amused by their stories. Sometimes the grannies started quarreling from the wee hours of the morning. The reasons of these bickering used to be as small as- someone dumping her side of dirt in another’s domain or someone trying to put water in other’s pickle spread in the sun, someone trying to steal mangoes from the other’s garden, or someone letting loose her goats in the other’s fields and destroying her crops. Villagers enjoyed these barrages, they all gathered to watch them exchanging verbal abuses- which contained nasty language and an attempted character assassination, everything unimaginable in typical rustic flavor. Some village women sided by their favorite fighter to make the fight spicier ..

I visited my Nani few years ago and in the evening was awaiting their arrival but neither of them showed up. Finally I asked my Nani and she replied that Y (younger) granny died few months back during the winters. That year they had witnessed one of the chilliest winters and Y granny could not endure the gruesome weather. None of her children came to see her so the villagers collected money and cremated her. X granny was shaken after that. In Y granny’s last days, she was the one who relentlessly took care of her and since Y granny’s death she was bed ridden.

At once I stood up and ran to see X granny, she welcomed me with tears in her eyes. On that occasion also she only talked about Y granny but she called her “dulhan” ( that’s how elder sister in law addresses the younger one in my village). She narrated Y granny’s illness, her desire to meet her kids but none dropped by and now that X granny was herself bedridden her own children were not concerned ..

I left with a heavy heart and when I returned to the city .. after few days I heard from an acquaintance that X granny passed away.

Though both grannies appeared to despise each other probably they were each others pillars of strength in some strange way and after the death of one the other had nothing to live for..

pS- I had written this story almost 5 years ago and had posted it on a site where I am no longer active. Was browsing through – 'coz I had nothing better to do and thought it deserved a copy here on my blog ..

Cimmerian

2010-11-12T14:09:00.000-08:00

phlegmatic self
savagely shrill -
the elfish quiet
of a wintry night,
every pulse,
beating vehemently
chest and shield
clamoring together
in hungry fury

dying flames
stifled in grate,
vault fitfully,
raven fragments -
psychological enigma
before my brain

in spasms of
secret desperation
I lean there -
endeavoring to lynch
affinity from
humanly fiends
whose claws were
clobbered steel

descending into
condensed miasma
of starless night
harking the muffled
voices of darkness
I crawl closer
to wrinkled Death,
ambushing in thicket -
a rancid supplicant
waiting for
door to be opened

in - between..

2010-11-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

I don’t like indifference
the coerced dormancy
impedes my verve,
goading viciousness -
while it lulls appearances
in an abominable
stringent repose

the animated soul within
has shrunk
in fear of rejection
it is turning sinister
lying in ambush,
full of cold
stealthy impulsion

I wish to wreak vengeance
upon your mind
for this sin of body
I am abysmally, mortally
distressed

the candid shift
in your disposition
from invitation to avoidance
smudges the suggestive,
and penetrative

Formerly I loved you.
Now I must hate you.

silent passage of
raunchy towards apathy
has left my soul crouching
betwixt extremes,
woman's body twitches
with longing
to avenge the death of
the lover

I feel it shall never --

never repay this ennui -
by some necromantic spell,
you’ve robbed me off
my intensity and insanity

the desire of conquest
doesn’t elevate me
there is nothing to lose
naught to win
I hate it here, and yet
let me be
just like a coarse wine,
unshaken -
steady within cup.

familiar strangers

2010-10-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

the temperate weather
chimes the turbulent dirge of
autumn, before launching the winter in -
I love, and always did, its grand
ineffable music,
foreboding and sniveling,
with its uncanny disposition of
release and ruin
as the day shortens to wintry span
the edge of inflamed sun blushes horizon
you and I, outdone by concluding rays,
hasten homeward

over this street and around it
is a placid twilight
the vivid moon, deep cerulean
ample meadow of constellations
soon make it a night for holiness -
there are no moaning winds,
not a friction in this knot
the lips utter no sound
my transparent cornea wafting in shadow
taps softly on your shoulder
you strain a tear which drops of itself
from the iris and skims its way
to spray the ground beneath your feet

nature, with her mercy and malice,
her pinnacle and corruption,
simulates that cosmos -
the human heart,
in which abodes, a paradox
centuries and seasons
discipline it to a quiet stature,
the incidental instincts
augmenting helplessness subdue desires,
sinful spirits in the hour of parting realize
that love and love alone is
the keynote of destruction

thus you and I, prematurely
before taking parts in this game,
when the stakes become abysmal and critical
silence that yielding smile,
forefend that inebriated look
at the bottom of which lurks
a fatal sweetness --
it has been a long night
the intermittent autumn tears
haven’t cooled my smoldering heart,
they have only set it steaming.

--

pS - Title Credit - Perry Strange

pPS - we are trying to converse in poetry.. one for one..

now his turn to take it forward ..

prosaic ..

2010-10-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

To grope like this, in a supersonic stream of apprehension, sustaining reverberations and appearances, hiding bruises and blisters on the surface, could not be called living. I had unbarred the spout of passion and through it.. invited a stream of voices, sermons and mockery ...

I do not blame anyone for reviving these sentiments in me. I had a refuge from this ruckus of the senses and I could muffle the inner voice which acerbates my life. I could hush my scrutinizing reason, which moves to and fro in the brain, concocting fresh researches, and like a double-edged dagger severing every frail branch of my happiness.

Should the commotion which exults necessarily have a name? I would not disgrace my feelings by conferring common nouns verbs or adjectives, repeatedly misused by the wobbly beings. Can anyone feel what I feel? Such an entity did not prevail before; so there can not be a name for my despair or doom.

When the whole shebang tumbles before me and behind me; when the prosaic past stretches at the drab horizon like towny of the dead; when the future extends into a zilch; when I see my whole being enclosed within the cramped circuit of present, who could blame me if I’d tried in vain to hold thrifty present in my arms like an inflamed lover I’d embrace for the final time? Oh, if only I’d cherished the present and loved it as such ..

Given a chance, we flurry about, and would not refrain even from knocking down the next person in our way, pining to steal driblets from the fountain of lust, but aren’t we all identically fated to depart thirsting? I was soaked in this fleeting victory coz I’d tasted the forbidden love while you’d lurked in the periphery to rejoice my dissolution. Show me your ‘one’ virtue’ and I’d cease to be a sinner.

Most of us have perceived ‘self’ in the amplified reflection of passions, contemplated the drapery which shields posterity and then turned away shuddering from their own doppelgangers. Poets and seers have painted their fancies on this drapery in vibrant or somber hues as per their whims. Some of us sinners have succumbed to this ecumenical curiosity, and through well crafted duplicity have been led astray by their very own animated imagination.

From my passion I portent more despair. In present circumstances it may have been the most potent course of withdrawing from reality into a metaphysical dream. It was bound to reach a crisis and like a virus injected through artificial means it has expunged the inborn affliction. I am only a face of yesterday which would soon turn unreal, almost phantasmal and the print on the soiled page no more significant than a newspaper you read once and throw away. This search ends here. You were kind. Peace.

verbal orgasm..

2010-10-14T05:52:00.000-07:00

I’d resolved; that beyond this treble of passion,
from warm security of infidelity,
you could also strain the rhythmic rumbling of
this terrific heart, and feel its faint tremors

after the stupor of a suppressed avalanche
can you ignore my presence?

thrust me yonder the lambent circle of
your sentiments, into the outer darkness
I’d haunt you with a troublesome persistence

the mere carnal instinct to sin
is a compelling force within
Oh, am young and fragile,
aching with appetite for life in its fullest sense

for it doesn’t make me suffer severely
as I’d ever suffer on bed, due to
the indifference of callous lovers,

or squirm in the muddle of the front lines
of ether-pungent whore stations

the sharp-toothed pain akin to stabs of pleasure
these invisible bayonets and visible bruises
there is morphine for tormented bodies,
no opiate for smitten spirits,

don’t stop me, let me convey in whispers,
with ostentatious tremblings, and daunted looks,

take me as I am from distance, and
mutilate my brain-power
drug it with your aroused depravity

turn me into a facile instrument of pleasure
and entrust yourself to me as such.

of what avail are these twinkling eyes
if they aren’t stricken between ecstasy and terror
honey laden limbs and its delicate curves
cups of fragrance we know as lips
and this round wonder of form called stature

yield to this penetrating tide that beats,
letting the intellect to go down beneath

thus we, with invisible marks, without affiliations
of any sort or illustration, would be tossed upon the world
to sink or swim, just as, the Pilate should decree.

played out ...

2010-10-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

so you authored those sounds
pouring all fascination into tone,
to engross the theme that strove -
to soar upward

an inimitable combat,
in which beauty was distinguished,
by its semblance to another beauty,
insidious and phantasmal,
yet all too similar.

surging towards the author,
possibly by an idea
that I must mingle this life
with the life of a stranger --

who could so render my soul,
crystallize my secrets,
and give at least momentarily,
a coherent glimpse of love --

I perceived in that refrain
the hushed sky bending
speckled with lucent worlds;
the balmy swash of murmuring
fused with dulcet chords

down by the bulwark;
but my soul was, as it is,
benumbed-- my mind
always on the wire, was for once
utterly tired, and now

my very limbs ache, on my bed
played out, crimson with
alchemy of rejection, I’d at last
dispose myself, and I promise
there would be; no salty tears.

Autumn..

2010-10-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

doleful music of autumn
how it stings my heart
like the refrain of

a familiar song
treasured in spring --

for an instant
my keys are stuck
as wrath and lament
chokes my utterance

prickled in veins
by tingling desires
I’d constrain myself

till the monsoon sinks
below glassy waters—

till the splash and splendor
consorting its departure
wanes –

into the clouds of
ethereal hues

which appear like
gossamer draperies
of vaporizing angels

till the tawny fringe of
apathetic moon
rises indolently
on horizon’s edge

and then
pacing forward
I’d claim --
the ascending road
to the Villa of Death..

--

pS - have scribbled a poem after a pretty long time -
perhaps I've written this just for the heck of it -
to move on from the previous sordid post ..

Hushed Up!

2010-07-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

Past few months were aberrantly torrid at many levels, relationships, health and my writings- an inseparable part of me which suffered the most. ..
Most blunders are my own doing.. I make wrong decisions, trust perverts and by the end of it all I blame my own self for no real fault of mine..

Last month when I thought I had reached the cul-de-sac.. a dead-end wherein remained nothing to live for, the doctor had said I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and shan’t continue in the same vein. In the nights that followed I tried squeezing away loneliness on the floor and again on bed or standing by the window in the darkness crying bitterly for hours with the night sky spreading away to the south and east.

Then the safest place in cosmos seemed beside my dad. I used to hug him and sleep. In one of those nights my dad woke up around 2 am all in sweat.. breathing heavily. The horror I felt then can not be described. .. all I could do was scream .. and then he hugged me tight and whispered - nothing could happen to him coz he can not leave me alone in this world..
I knew it was ‘coz of me. ..

In the morning I braced myself, I had no right to make my aging parents suffer beyond this.. I have no one beside them, they have no one beside me, how could I take such step ..

I told myself thousand times; I’m lucky, I’m blessed, I’ve the most amazing parents in the world who love and support me despite all my follies.. but what have I done for them?
If I could give them one moment of pride.. only one moment of happiness.. for having and raising a daughter like me, a constant source of trouble, a gullible fool, an eternal loser.. and yet they never utter single complain ..

Yes, whatever has happened to me is worse than what can happen to most individuals. No dignified person could treat a fellow human in the manner I was trampled over. The details of agony shall never be conveyed to another living soul. It shall die with me. I know that in this world of mortals there is no justice but if there is a realm beyond death .. I shall have my justice..

I am happy. I can hold my head high and forgive all those who can never look into my eyes again .. God bless them .. even they know that life and death eventually gets us all .. I can forgive I can never forget..
The kind of experiences I’ve had, if my sanity is intact its ‘coz a grander or bleaker destiny awaits me and I am prepared for both.

I am digressing, I am posting this on ‘parent’s day’ coz if you are someone like me, if you too are disillusioned with life, if you also have nowhere to go, if you shrink from life and mistrust it then look at your parents - their love is an assured phenomenon which shall solve all questions. In their embrace is the logical Mecca of your long pilgrimage, the end of all this hunger for love and understanding and the pleasure that comes from simply living and existing in harmony.

Coming back to Terminal Moraine..
I am not exactly quitting. I can post something tomorrow or I can post something after a year. I do not know. All I know is; that I shall certainly post again. However, presently I feel I shall be away for an indefinite period.
There is too much happening in my personal life which leaves little time for poetry. Also, I’ll be traveling for some time and then I wish to concentrate on my book.. it’s the only dream which keeps me going ..

If you aren’t in my friend’s list on facebook and wish to stay in touch please search me as ‘Aria Sharma’. I am using this name as it would be easier to search or just leave your contact as comment I will make sure I do not publish anything that shall remain private or if you are on twitter you can find me on..

http://twitter.com/adagio_aria

I have nothing much to write so twitter seems an apt platform. Perhaps I am too happy these days and I’ll start blogging again when I have a new pain as my muse.. :D

In short, I’ll read the blogs I love in bunch whenever I get time coz I can not stay away permanently from the lovely writings of exceptional bloggers, a great source of inspiration and learning..

Please do not forget me. We shall meet here again ..thanks.
Love and Regards to all …

the aftermath ..

2010-05-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

words as conventionally detrimental as these
ought to have moved you, as I set them down
the irony of their falseness do not touch me

I saw, I felt, plain virtues in a man, whose
miniature vices could no longer harm, you are
a daylight ravager, the robber of predictabilities

I remember our brief togetherness, undead child;
a nameless experience, amongst largeness usually
a void, an odor, dark and languid, the scent of

a passionate body, most of all, I reminisce over
your lies, which took aim, had no point, theatrical,
enacted on tiny stage, for a tiddly audience; you & I

living with you was never safe, I sat enclosed
in a mist of uncertainty, or else recoiled from
theories of conjugal bliss, which were like shrine,

smoldering with phantasmagoria, an alien faith,
its liturgy and rites abhorrent, incorrigible perversity,
whatever was declared to be truth; a shameful fakery

And now I know ..I am only bored ..

pS -

I really am bored with the way I write.

palimpsest

2010-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

for me there is
no lust of allegiance,
the frenzy of pursuit,
or dust of defeat
in my reverie, I see you,
in Shangri-La, far away
dusk lay on it, solemn coast
gold lined; freckled with
tints of enchantment --

you and I rapt in oblivion
an embrace of racking struggle
vanishing into unknown
your face gleamed over
woods congregated, heights serrated
liquid harmonies dripping from lips
their piercing sweetness
the juice of divine vintage

and I see around --
the grotesque wraith of love,
the most pretentious of all pretensions
the silliness and malice
the pathos and pettiness
sex and disgust, cobweb and gossamer;
and one thing about you
constant and dependable --
your selfishness.

Two lines..

2010-04-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

“My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears flow. Whom can I curse, whom can I judge, when we are all alike unfortunate? Suffering is universal; hands are outstretched to each other, and when they touch . . . the great solution will come. My heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry, 'Come, let us join hands! I love you, I love you!' "

I read these lovely lines yesterday and I wanted to write something after a long time but writing would require remembering.. and remembering isn’t safe. You could lose your mind remembering. Memory is a siren, a fetching song on a distant shore, all claws and clutches in person. You court her on your own risk. That risk isn’t worth taking .. at least for the time being .. when I can’t write beyond a line or two...

Writing two lines in a blog post isn't a sin.. or is it?
If I could write two lines like Ghalib .. I wouldn’t have wasted so much space here..

“Mat pooch ke kya haal hai mera tere peeche? Tu dekh ke kya rang tera mere aage.. "

Ask not what separation has done to me. You see your poise (composure) when I come before you...

diagnosis

2009-12-14T04:38:00.000-08:00

Employment of mind elsewhere as a therapeutic auxiliary has produced marginal improvement in this chronic blogger who shows pathological attachment to her scribbles which she calls poetry. She suffers from a kind of moral masochism in which the person arranges her/his life to guarantee setbacks. She lives the character’s (of the so called poetry/stories') fictional life complete with realistic sensations, submerging herself in other, complicated, gloomier life. The contents of this blog manifest displaced psychosexual ambivalence, need for a permanent partner, plus possible neurosis of destiny. That is why she needs to write again but she is trying to locate that fugitive object which made her write and return here to her rightful resting place. When that is done, you can read her ditties, which she claims can breathe, speak, clash, belch, bleed, and cry. Until then …….

Update : - 12th Feb.

Thank you for the comments everyone. Its nice to know that some people still drop by.

I am presently away from Delhi and terribly tied up.

To my amazement I find that my template has changed on its own. Quite funny.

Anyway, Apologies for this disappearing act. I'll be back in a month and visit your pages.

For the moment I am missing my city sorely and loved this article in HT. Hope you enjoy it too.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-s-only-metropolis/H1-Article1-507830.aspx

See you soon.

paused ..

2009-11-11T03:39:00.000-08:00

Emboldened by the newfound sense of a lover’s urgency,
I decided to capture him on a canvas, switching from
pencils and charcoals to pens and markers, a riskier medium,
since each stroke was committed indelibly to paper,
my imagination took over, supplying from memory,
intrinsic shading, cross-hatching shadows, and blackness of
those eyes lit up by the magical incandescence of my kisses
their lofty plumes broken by silvery glaucous tones
I could spend a lifetime shading and refining one drawing
as he revealed his body to my pencils and brushes
but how could I promise living truly with him
for the rest of his life? Beneath the natural ogival cavity,
where his smile appeared, at the spot where lovers
caressed and women wished to consecrate, love was
quite worn away and polished. It was time to go home.
I was wandering the continent on an endless search
and then I thought it would be better to stay; where I was.

ticklish

2009-11-03T02:03:00.000-08:00

There awaited another encounter, not so lucky, with his grotesque boss. She was an angry sea suddenly rendered silent by secret order. He could imbibe her violet scents, just on the authority of last night.

Sun didn’t ascend everyday; that was one time; and one day wasn’t like the other.
“ma’m, you have an appointment.”

Matrimonial Site..

2009-10-23T05:07:00.001-07:00

Unblinking faces, flat and numb, hair well combed, attire clean,
made for special customers , we are not displayed on stalls,
like posters adorning walls, advertising dentists, teachers, elocutionists,
fresh goods, recycled, from all over,
we seem freshly arrived or taken by some privateer.
At times our owners linger on the fringes,
shouting the virtues of their wares
to those who can not read the signs
more often, our posters do the shouting.
‘This elegant face lives a comfortable and gracious life
with their happy and healthy family.’

You’d think our physical descriptions sound like
Sunday customers at your grocer.
some probably are, I am one amongst many,
wherever I am. Getting ready to run.
Sitting on a gilded chair waiting for my bidders,
the icy demeanor not to melt. Through other windows
I can watch the show, shuffling back and forth, patiently,
everyone holding their signs to the windows, for us to see.

Some scurry over me in all fours, they pounce
I promise a list of referrals, photographs, records,
neither of us meaning a word of it.
I love being shocked,
growing wonderfully imperious and offended.
We meet often, exchanging subtle nods of recognition.
They keep fancying me as a runaway. My answers
to their questions are shapeless.
Nouns without verbs.
Lust. Desire. Connection. Weakness.
What I say doesn’t matter. What I don’t, does.

I want a man’s body, a man’s voice in the dark
I can not imagine a life with children,
in a house where I’d live and die, far from home.
I can not imagine building a hearth
that would put a soul in house shared with one
Not now. Not yet. I can imagine no future until I’d rid myself
of the pursuit of the present. I do go on.
There are a few people listening this time.
Its very difficult. You might try it someday.
Believe me, you’d sing a different tune
if you had to risk yourself; as I must.

An oblique verse

2009-10-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

There were days this year that were nonsensical
listless hours that had nothing to do with you, though
in a strange way had everything to do with you;
days of cerulean tobacco fog and tea,
gossip and light talk, cocktail and bitter men,
gorges of crème caramel under tapered candlesticks
nights I’d clutch a pen and decanter
stirring random ounces of scotch with words
telling myself I’d review my efforts later
for the evidence of each potion on my poetry,
knowing damn well that the quintessential pith of
the exercise was an excuse to get rotten drunk
I began with an account of our longest kiss,
two mugs later squeaking aloud, writing
in a surly scrawl interspersed
on blots of alcohol dripping from gelid lips
suddenly I fancied myself in the pitcher
an addled figure galloping beside cubes and cups
cajoling, conjuring, imploring all that drifted
to carry me along to the future
that would make everything all right,
the future was immense, wise and rosy,
final abide of all who were drifting
so I’d said to myself, skim, skim to be a part of…
the first thing I remember about future is
how cold it was, faces hit by hurricane of letters
past settled on crevices like mounds of debris
the shelves of hereafter obscured by history,
stray moments bleeding onto the hearth,
I wished you were happy; with whatever or whoever
it wasn’t love described in poems, some rapture
wafting into the realms of bliss
was it leading us somewhere I could not go?
I hope you weren’t imagining a future with me
for I had no true vision of that future,
or whether I’d live long enough to have one.

Rendition of deficiency ..

2009-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Do you smell sweet-sick flesh out here, moths and lust?
skeletons hanging like scarecrows, their jaws framed into grin,
outlines of hazy dreams, a shadow, a pulpit,
a ragged tree and endless miles of self-churned mud

this is my world, my poetry, sporadic murmurs of "fuck"
strewn without heat, drowned by wave after wave of
swelling phrases, enjoining, parsing, rushing, flooding
language is bottomless, dark pool out of which

I rake spectral cinders of my thought, a blank mote in blank
muteness, grappling at nothingness I had aimed high,
addiction that had come with wanting to serve poetry,
then wanting poetry to serve me when a flurry of volcanic words

spewed out from my fingers, rage of crapulent antipathy
surmounted and my keyboard rattled, when it snowed outside,
the sight of letters dancing on the monitor was better
than a shot of whiskey, restoring my blood to pump again

you chew these discourses with angry lethargy dear reader ?
lurch past something you ought not see, this lengthy poem
makes no scrap of a difference, you plunge no further under its spell,
before exchanging even a word here we've reached the stalemate

publicness has eroded my intensity, you snare library mold,
words everyone else has forgotten, my biggest flaw?
absence of a living spark, so I’d become fire, as fire,
my only wish was to flame, to deplete, to develop,

dazed and burning I’d blackened my soul, thrown my notebooks,
vocabulary and keys that abandoned me in presence of desolation,
the fire laughed and devoured, it reminded me of
something nighttime; subterranean and clandestinely crude

a room full of shadows, more unfortunate than that lurid first failure,
from which appears no escape, this knot in stomach, I’d known before,
somewhere and somehow I’d failed there I have failed here,
in my own territory I stand defeated; Defeat is a habit too.

Metaphysics

2009-09-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

Paltry squalls of rain spatter on panes
warming under the coverlet I switch off lights
hunger fighting exhaustion, both in combat
with the images of Y’s body
the combination of Y and X
has placed tremor in my heart,
where love postulates fearlessness
I know Y isn’t like X,
and that X is now loyal to someone else
all men aren’t like the men
I knew in high school,
college university work or net,
however their presence remains alive,
full of potential for illusions and betrayal
“Expectation” pushes at our backs
like deflection forcing us away
until it prods us into limbo
that perhaps is the only explanation
for what happened to X and me,
just as it may have happened to A and B,
the same will happen to Y and me,
inseparable as we may seem
destined to diverge from this union
it’s the law of motion, science of separation
we remain lonely in proportion, while
seeking refuge in wineglasses, kisses, shadows
letting all our notions of permanence
and posterity wait for the future
as rain whips the window-glass,
nodding; thus I fall asleep.

the delicious blur..

2009-09-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

through milky rain
of moonlit night
glaucous glimmers
from your eye pupil
enigma like
gliding drowsily
crushing yet intangible
settling tenderly
on moldering hearts
spread in their
damask chastity
a hint of rococo
within roseate tinge
every trace of gray
disappearing
ruddy streaks
on my pallid cheeks
the blush of
passionate kiss
when words cease
music scarcely begins
your half-closed eyes
look into mine
and life becomes
a delicious blur ..

Escape..

2009-09-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

The supreme solace is in suffering and the sole sapience is existence. When you forget to live and long to exist you’ve found your hell, which is more intoxicating than a potion of absinthe. Life keeps inventing something that would eventually lead to death, a long way to freedom. You do not fathom it in its arrogance and its pathos but you keep on trying. In this manner creation lures you again, with enrapturing hopes for the future which shall never come, and lulls you into dreams of more than mortal ecstasy, so while you listen to life’s siren strain, you sigh ..

Nebulous time, moments between
sleeping and waking engulfed me,
for a split second I was born again
as a graceful gazelle, a humongous
leap could alter present time, and
another better season could follow,
then the second past and I was me,
trapped in life, a time which,
goes on and on …

Reality this morning corresponded uncannily to a nighttime dream that I frequently had. The universe seemed contained of these moments in this room and the room was filled with music. I watched as my body began to quake and I saw my head snap back and my eyes roll in their sockets. My body froze and wriggled as if in a death-dance. The muffled half silence took on an underwater blur. Sounds lost their origin. It told me in some odd way that soon the pain would be cut in half. Why could I not make the first leap from my place out there and plunge deeper… ..

when time appears to loose it’s motion
when mind and body seem to drift apart
a rippled serenity, an eternal melody
free of our masquerade, our own lies,
reveling sublime joys which fears nothing
wishes naught, resents none, and
sinks deeper, into a delicious stupor…

There was an elusive figure dancing just in and out of sight. Certainly it was there, enjoying every minute of distress. I savored it too, not only to discover the strength and weakness of my own being but because it tied me to the only feeling that remained in the small world. Escape was the only thought, I didn’t want to be touched by any other notion. And then .. sunlight penetrated through the window .. clear warm sky crossed with broad swaths of illumination and a gibbous moon fading at the horizon, which gave enough luster for me to gradually gain a sense of the space I was in, although I lay just beyond tapestry safely silhouetted in the darkness, and life seemed miles away from there…

passage

2009-08-26T07:45:00.000-07:00

I awoke one night
to a quietness and stillness
I had never known before
the pigeons in the balcony
were not stirring,
the night-guard’s cane on ground
did not crackle,
the roaches did not come and go,
and even the ghosts
I had shared the room with
slept in silence.

It was at such a time
I had imagined
I would slip away to freedom,
a time when all the world
had their heads turned
the other way.

I peeked out
contemplating winking stars
in clear part of the sky
they were supposed to
guide me away
how ready I had been,
at ease, legs powerful,
heart desperate to stop
under another moon.

My eyes scurried into
the filth of the cavity,
drew something out,
something on life,
I wasn’t looking for life,
I was after extinction,
I shoved it back.

Death seemed to have
its own life
so much life that
it could come down,
walked over
and placed itself
over my body
fastening itself.

Death in its melancholic
regal cloak, laughing
exactly resembled life
I had witnessed in
great trench of weeping
I had found my death,
not the illusory land of
error and miscalculation,
but the real and true.

I had a zest for
enlightened extermination
No wonder I touched
the glory of my wounds.

Elysium of love

2009-08-13T05:16:00.001-07:00

Hallo, wallow, keep off me, we were no fucking lovers,
we were rivals, competitors, though we slept together,
dropping rough stones of rage in errant desires
it struck deep, it had lodged itself, I swallowed it down.

We practiced hate, both explosive and the effusive.
It kept us entertained and passionate for two hours.
He hadn’t lost his girth or his hair or that dark gleam of his eyes.
Tears swam into my eyes, burning there.
It was admirable I maintained that shield
without turning brittle behind it.

That monstrous burning, released me, kissed me
The first rush of adrenaline was gone, in its place was an innate disgust
for anything that crawled or skittered.
The acme of wickedness! He and I
circling a blizzard of marvels and shudders.

A daredevil glittering delirium stewed about us.
No one was permitted to enter though we weren’t alone,
spectral renegades flew from corner to corner.
With him I had fancied self-obliteration’s a cinch,
why annihilate myself while he ran freely about us?

After those infernal months of spinning like a little stick
in the glorious whirlpool of a cerebral orgasm
its better to get vainglorified, I’d let his hisness drive him nuts
my myness would to be shipped off on a quarantine
one long overdue and well timed.

(Un)rhythmical Life...

2009-07-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

(i)

Euphony..

Life, that meager cache; I can get back to it,
unsympathetic, it appeals to some perverse streak
to seek out the very site that aroused bitterness,
an irony you can not fathom, no matter if I explained.
This intoxication is brief - a seduction, an illusion,
never lasting; then to be engulfed by oceanic rhythm of
denial and rebellion, volume upon esoteric volume,
the limitless kingdom of beats - not one of which
I wish to penetrate. I am a reckless poet,
I can be a woman of caprice, attachment to
a chimerical life is an explanation I was,
for all my mistrust of it, willing to accept.
I supposed it took me in fleetingly, like
optical illusions, where an image metamorphoses
into a different image, you cannot hold both images
in your mind simultaneously. So why run at all?
why run ever again? when you have no destination,
there is but a finish line. When you come to the end,
you’d find only yourself. The same unchanged.
The more you move on, the more you arrive at self.
I am not running any more, I am not hiding from life,
I believe I am waiting for it . …

****
(ii)

Strains..

What seemed an impregnable cache, immune to theft
was stolen, it was my rhythm, not your poetry,
my exegesis of symphonic life in that parallel music;
shall we speak of universals and eternals?
I lost my way during several attempts to find it.
The world is composed of sins, ruled by instincts
deeper than lethargy, virtue is vapor, more perplexing,
you are all around me in its bodily reminders,
the heaps of notes, cramped odors of obsession,
in the intimate intrusion of the massive bed,
where I’d lain with harmony in a hot drive
to dissent, to subvert, to fly like the bohemian
from what had passed for usual wisdom,
denying tedium, denying the given, the received,
the begotten, the whole solicitous silliness.
Behold! how these strings, wan and magical
flood the sinews of our melody, it was then
I’d caught, vibrating under your cajoling words,
an unsaid, electric burr that seemed to echo;
I had served my purpose: good-bye.

****

Tomorrow morning I am leaving with my parents for a small vacation on the hills. I’ll be back in 5-6 days. See you then.

Epistle

2009-07-27T02:34:00.000-07:00

You would never stray
from the path we'd both started on
leaving me to rub smudges
from a name that we share
for I am a storm
when I hadn’t been crashing
I had been brewing
inside you
this interlude we see
is a natural corollary of analogy
the logical ghost which follows impulse
if it can be shredded and scattered
lightening meteors are everywhere
corpuscles are both causes and effects
nothing has chassis or stasis
reason itself is merely a flux
passion seeps and seeps and never sleeps
and you, even you can be spurred
it isn’t love that has wronged us
we had run away from love
and my love
my silhouette is at all cost
guaranteed to linger
it is a force not a thing
a function that extends through the space
and therefore,
even if not wholly understood
it could be after a fashion,
trusted.

Note : I barely had readers even prior to this longish break and I never liked moderating my meager comments. However certain abusive comments have forced me to resort to comment moderation. Bear with me, if you can.

Duet (continues)

2009-07-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

between passages of
subterranean calamities
sits a sibyl,
her voice,
a large cascading thing,
every inch of you
in her swelling voice
she reverts to harmony
usurping your words
to invent rhymes and stories
the tune is thin,
unclear and strange,
of unrecognizable scales,
there is no orderliness
it wounds and wounds,
a wire spiraling into abyss,
this is what she wishes,
to be formless
like this tune, wayward
no one to predict her;
no one to form her
the author of the duet
is grafted on her lace
the moment she is free
she would tear it off
from then on
she is all impulse.

Note : These two duets are the parts of a prompt session me and a blogger pal were having, wherein he started with Duet I and rounded off with Duet V. I wrote Duet II ( of hate - the previous post) and Duet IV ( continues - the current post) of this series.

I like this more than the previous duet 'coz I wrote this in one hour. One of the quickest stuff I ever wrote!

Duet .. (of hate)

2009-07-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

torrent; rivulets collide on panes,
within, two wayward tributaries
coalesce into one decisive stream,
words we wonderingly recite,
ornate, now and then boldly archaic;
have a lingering stately pace,
on occasion halting altogether,
like a turn in dance, or rest in a march
it’s not the July torch spilling sweat -
it’s our conflagration, invading,
heaping up a pyre of love
in this room with the shut door,
out of which stutters the unsteady
nightly tappings of a duet,
spiteful mutterings and garbles
replace the coarse lovemaking;
we invoke secret spells, maledictions;
when the guttural tardy thunder
miles away, throws us into a daze
we leave; as numb as
a walk away from the funeral of
someone we dearly loved -
bereft and spent.

That's all you are...

2009-07-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

This feeling, it came to me one afternoon,
I was caught in, the manacles of language
there was no theater but our ingrown proscenium
my ears secret labyrinths, your eyes secretive,
your velvety touch weightless, lit by
a tiny jewel in my annualry, treading phantomlike,
leaping from its tender perch
into the dusky corridor my lips
tunneling deeper and deeper
until I sank into the darkness of your mind.
I wasn’t watchful. I wasn’t suspicious.
I wanted your hands to keep close to me
the soft translucent web-skin between your fingers
to fondle…. I wouldn’t name what.

Aptly naming, is knowing what it is
exorcising and possessing, all at once.

All masks sunder or else all sport masks
In a bristling of remembrance and representations,
the past was the present, the present was past,
the meaning of one thing, was the meaning of other,
all meanings were one and into this cauldron of all-ness
a recognized evil burst, wearing the mask of you
behind it a cavalcade of upheavals unmasked,
a torn scarlet dress, dead dreams, soot
the lover who was not a lover.
And you; always you.
Invader usurper thief. All one.
An odorless odor, a fume adrift aslant
inside me, fiercely rotating lost runaways,
swallowed by oblivion like whiskey in the throat.

Merely another bruise in the house of bruises…………

****

Thanks to Ashen Glow – for remembering my parent’s anniversary along with her Birthday. It helped me kick my present hibernation ..

Thank you also to Untouchable Earth for the The Premio Dardos Award when I was away. Sorry for not responding then.

***

I wrote this piece yesterday, after latest fiasco. How I manage to get into the same old blah is beyond me too. If you wish to know more .. click here....

Now that I’ve written something after six months I felt like resurrecting my previous ‘home.’ Primarily b’coz I don’t feel like posting frivolous stuff here as I had intended to restrain this page for ‘serious’(so I think) writing. I don’t know if I succeeded but I’d tried.

......

2009-01-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

Something unforeseen has occurred, altering my life overnight. Presently I am not in my senses to elaborate, just that, life has become unendurable. It’s oppressive to breathe in this atmosphere, as of now. It isn’t possible to recover, I don’t want to either, ergo I need to get out of this apartment, out of this city, to grieve my loss and labor to live with it.

I have to board a flight in 15 hours, I have to pack and leave. It won’t be the same and I can’t be running away forever. I’ll be back, this is my city, this is home after all, and there isn’t much choice however that won’t be happening for at least a couple of months. I don’t have an Internet connection where I am going but I’ll try to connect when I have one and most importantly when I have the strength to go through this existence the way I did, prior to the misfortune.

I thought of scribbling a note before packing away my laptop for 3-4 people who’d always been kind to drop by this space and inquire about my well being.
Please be safe, be well, and be happy.
Until I see you again..
with prayers…

Supernatural Tang ..

2008-12-30T01:34:00.000-08:00

Oh, there are other lovers,
scandalously talented than you,
their unashamed display of superior airs
are consistently awarded
with my favored times.

Un-heavenly morsels, ever-fucked
possessing no wisdom on
crucial contours of anatomy, who
contemplate tricky peaks and skirts
as just a series of wrinkled uplifts
on a flat plane.

They flip pebbles into cosmic waters
to observe the turmoil that ensues
hunting for sex as if for a vortex
to drown themselves in

And in searching for them
I am of the same heedless spirit.

Ruminating by the light of moon
bright enough to give configuration
to aspects and intersections below
I render the void I want.

I entreat perspectives, not an indication
for probable fields of fire, no line
or shading, no subtlety or fidelity
no interest in panorama yonder
its starkest strategic features.

In this dark windless region
beyond atmosphere, it appears
moon could lead me astray
there would be steering
and propulsion mechanism
surely for use

once that is in place,
sentiments safe from meteorites,
in their rugged sheathing,
the moon could be chased down easily
through dead reckoning.

si(mp)ngleton's blotter

2008-12-14T01:48:00.000-08:00

Despite my secret suspicion that summer would never end, winter did eventually come trickling in, with it, the time of frozen words. They had given expressive shape to my inarticulated despair but the shocking realization of helplessness drive me to the episodes of wild and reckless rage. Nothing is more uncomfortable than silence when speech is expected. I poke somberly through the content of this dead machine, various sites, the pages I relished reading, unfinished stuff I’d once written passionately, most of which appear beyond my taste. Then I just stare at the monitor, listening to the sound of the birds chirping outside and the rustle of leaves. At length slowly the light begins to fade around me and I remember the book I’d been reading, which lies yonder in the darkness. Muttering scraps and bits of poetic afterward like sparks flaring in a dying fire I turn, and start to back off, tardy at first then with gradually rising haste, until my wobbly steps are clambering along through the accumulating shadows.

Love.. where is love now? After a long pause of hesitation I decide to read that book. It’s a love-story of Empress Noorjahan a.k.a. Mehrunissa and Mughal Emperor Jahangir, a historical love-story or somesuch. Love is all about scheming, plotting, betrayal and blah .. Why should something that ancient take me back to my very own sins? Everything putrid in the past just jumps off and falls away. The ‘exs and ys’, what happened and why. Who want to bite into you like you’re a fresh cool plum and after they have bitten sucked and chewed they expect your juices to come back and stay sweet. All their falseness was real or was there an excitement in creating this effect. I’d probably never know the answer and as though what had enthralled me from the start was the question. Ugh. I need a muse. I gaze at the poor penciled words, same and different, like a figure in the wallpaper and outside the pigeons twitter down the sky and up singing the old skyey sounds of spring and where was love.

It can be found again. Towards those to whom I feel no strong sentiment I gravitate where sentiment exists I run. There is the dense kernel, the compacted core, and how to set loose the chain reaction is the question that tantalizes me, how to produce the illuminating explosion without in the process mutilating oneself. Impossible.

Its almost easier being down and alone than when you’re up and no one’s there to share the view with you. Maniacs like me are supposed to be famous for expecting disaster around every corner from good luck, but now I do have my hopes up, a little whiskey would have this mess straightened out by the next weekend. I need some distraction. The ache isn’t as sharp but there is a warm throbbing that comes with my heartbeats, which are faster than normal maybe because I am smoking practically one cigarette after another.

Aimlessness thrills me. A slight shift in the breeze could fix my direction or alter it. It might as well be the enigma life presents or exactly what am I trying to tell? I know, nobody can really figure out. Nor can I. But I’d try again ..

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time..."
John Keats
"Ode on a Grecian urn"

**

Before I end..

Here is big thank you, to two wonderful bloggers for some more awards..

Sashu for the Butterfly Award

Rakesh Vanamali for the Butterfly and Proximidade awards

Thanks a heap guys and ..
thank you, each one of you, who still visit this dead page off and on.
Apologies for not responding on time.
Peace.

Arrival..

2008-09-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

As one hour becomes the next, one day another, spilling into weeks, I feel drugged by too many incomprehensible verses I had posted lately. There is a ragged overlay of words and pictures disturbingly adhering together in my mind. I had only to nod and arrange these articulations in my gravest expression in order to carry on the masquerade of being a poet. And gazing altogether unaggressively at me are these liquid ruminations with that bottomless eloquence which is all opacity for me. Weary from this run, exhausted, I don’t wish to scribble every thought, which demands repetition. It is like I have cotton not in my ears, but in my thoughts.

It’s a regular cycle, after couple of months my rage and adrenaline fades back, I feel spent. Thereafter I vow not to get sucked in again, to instead go on but these vows fall away like cool ashes the next time I see the bruised and broken evidence of one more day. I envision summer sun, perforated with heat, glowing orange. I want that fireball to be inside me, incinerating these black clutches. Then I’d start writing again..

For the moment …
I wish to thank

Scarlett
Vinay
Man in Painting

For their kind gesture of bestowing some wonderful awards.

Man in painting had conferred Arte-y-pico award, long ago. Quoting from his blog – "This award was created for bloggers who inspire others with their creativity and their talents, also for contributing to the blogging world in whatever medium."
It has to be passed to five others. I apologize for not doing the needful. I read barely 4-5 blogs regularly and vice-versa. They are the ones who inspired me to write and improve and passing it on to them would be as absurd as - ‘Dhoni giving an award to Sachin!’

Vinay and Scarlett honored me with ‘The Brilliante Weblog Award.’
The name is self-explanatory.
Again, this award should be passed on but almost everyone I read has already been given this award.

The best part about getting these awards is the generous words of appreciation written by these wonderful writers. It indeed is a very special feeling. I’d cherish the lovely words especially coz it comes from ‘special people’.

A big thank you, to all of you.

**
presently..

"Beyond myself
somewhere
I wait for my arrival."
- From "the Balcony" by Octavio Paz

In the candlelight...

2008-09-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

tonight against sterile walls, I’d cast
wild unfettered shadows, vaporous ghosts
variously interlocked, and at odds,
materializing voluminously

asymmetrical pairings
suggesting duality and correspondence,
any two taken together, tantalizing
in unharmonious apposition

apparitions reminding me of myself,
a parody of powerlessness, each of us frozen
by the reflection of malformed mistake,
that is the other..

the rest of me, the completion of me,
the ones in whom, I seek refuge from ‘self’
my alibi, my future, in whose service
I repudiate my identity

I’d hug my shadow, and see instead
laughing at me behind the illusion of
my very own form, pouring forth,
my worst enemy; me...

The Sham Poet

2008-09-06T04:04:00.000-07:00

Her poetry, an echo of cry, made years before,
within her, she simulates an imaginary scream
vacuous diatribe of poet, nursing her sickness
with hurt and gloom, a satisfying mourning
in counting and contemplating, all those lost
in short life, an excitement of extemporizing
everything and everyone, beginning with ‘the I’
dropped and resembled, mosaic of smithereens,
cemented, sutured, wired, bolted..

She could retrace scraps, arrange artistically
forgotten façades, shadowboxing none deftly,
amidst an inchoate dimming consciousness
she has visions spotted with soot, the real ‘I’
came and went, like a recurrent dream, while
under disguise of poet she watched intently,
the suppositions spawned, sufferings spilled
studying her, with coldhearted fascination
of a strategically-set spy….

the Dream is Over..

2008-09-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

You were stream, running through valley or plain
tumbling over rocks, like an artery or a vein
bringing an immobilized land to life, implying
existence, embedded like the heart of

a separate source of life, without you
my farm was inert, stilled, were it not for the wind
in the trees, a noise from the sky, utterly silent.

Interposed between my denuded self, and its
clamorous longing for obliteration, a devotion
linked me to this talismanic image, out of
an innocent future,

obscured, masked, uncreated,
as much me and mine as my poetry,
my childhood or my intensities.

In the tangible world, near your flesh,
a flurry of images, slow comforting sex,
orderly thoughts of ‘morrow, next day and
the next, mundane details of daily routine

one of those visions has settled familiarly
in that raw contact, a morsel of intimacy
momentarily being absorbed into your being, as if
they weren’t appendages but the very incarnation of
a whole warm wonderful body ..

Since the impassioned vulnerability of this aria,
I’ve learned to mime; these words are no longer words
stained with my blood but words I repeat and rhyme,
meaningless without function, like

the sole archaeological evidence of a fairy tale or
lasting imprint of the fetus, blankest watermark
devised for masturbatory fantasies
that shall follow henceforth ..

chimera

2008-08-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

along muddy, trash-strewn lanes
past taverns and hotels, I linger
whiskeyed eyes peering through
tree-lined boulevards,
fogged over windows up on heights
where exists a large mansion,
betwixt darkened verandas
little plays take place
in the alleys of my mind

there are three of us,
a family, you, me and our love,
playful, affectionate, mournful,
prattling, hushed, I dart ahead
like a honeybee tasting modest delights
in the strange sanctuary of darkness
afloat on stilled black waters
drifting in slow aimless swirls

thus we wander, left and right
around boulders and bushes
cuffed, rolled, embraced
whence fire roars all the way
in a curled conflagration,
burning ancient sins, until at last
nothing remains of you or me
except a smoldering pile of char

enflamed dramas, send me reeling
back to toss and writhe in my cot,
crying like a baby in swamp,
I’d sleep all my life, assaulted by
night exaltations, morning terrors,
while someplace far off,
you’d careen about the skies,
a wandering star or comet
due to return in a distant future.

Fucktastic

2008-08-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

neither lewd nor respectable, in
short enough distance from you
to appear suspiciously intriguing
despite my teasing proximity
conspicuously puzzling centrality,
evanescing, a struggling stammerer
still subduing the nemesis syllable
not a stone-throwing lover, but
a word-throwing poet, unlike you
soft, sentimental and ineffective,
I'd leave behind paroles, besides
a delightful playful word itself,
the sonic prankishness of
two syllabic pops and closing click
encasing unobtrusive twin vowels.

You were Fucktastic

implausible...

2008-08-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

I am in these verses,
improbably evolved into somebody else already
there is little left for me to imitate or fantasize
the temptation to quash oneself, become imperfect
a sham, looking like myself
sounding like myself, even laying claim to
convenient scraps of my stories, and yet
beneath the disguise of me, someone entirely other.

Speculate, will you? speculation requires
a gambler’s taste for running a risk
daring to tamper with the taboo
which has marked my own past
try your luck, make your mistakes, overdo, undo
follow an imaginative line that yields nothing,
then something might creep in this mess,
rounded, pointed, structured
projecting the illusion of having been
spontaneously generated, coincidental,
untidy and improbably probable, as love.

How violently my mood wavers
radiant with a crude forcefulness
anguishing heartache stricken minutes later
it might subordinate you to me,
everything exists in generous proportions
an infatuation with the exciting fullness of
a wavering presence, which made you visualize
bold carnality with mists of innocence hanging over
that might enable you to go somewhere
for it is only in part the urge to suppress
the sudden-lit fire, to feel against your palm
beneath this soft plump mass of flesh
the power of my heart.....

Go figure!

metaphorical death

2008-08-16T22:17:00.000-07:00

Late summer and fall lie ahead, but will they be full of ghosts? That is the trouble with long summer evenings and the sparkling monsoon days, they are haunted. The question is, if worst comes to worst, what is the prospects of a new life in a new dead world, with this that or whoever. I struggle constantly with a rebellious spirit, my mind in a continuous state of disarray and brooding resentment, contemplating nothingness. Not for the pleasure of being alive and desiring, for life is all too often no pleasure whatsoever, but it makes you leap and rejoice for having had the opportunity once a while for existing at all.

It has finally come to only this, a tiny bubble of consciousness surrounded by thousands of sheets of virtual paper – these dozens of folders filled with disordered scribbling. The words come without warning and they chill my blood. Disheveled heaps of words, an incoherent jumble and snarl of truths, lies, memories, fantasies, adding up to nothing. They are said to me in my own voice, the sentences dripping into my ear like slow poison. To silence them I rouse myself into a fury, a literal blood-letting, making my whole body a visible and tangible shout. For as long as my shout reverberates in the air I do not hear them and I keep scribbling something. I take turns, exalted, depressed, terrified, lustful. A regular night of witches, devils, thorns in the flesh followed by contrition and clear sight. Followed, of course, by the old friend, morning terror. I can’t write.

And all at once, the terror has a habitation and name – I am having "mood swings" .. right that’s what they are .. Suddenly the morning sunlight becomes just what it is, the fresh lovely light of the morning. The terror is gone. Another week and lying in my bed, I become prescient and clairvoyant, orbiting the earth like an angel and inducing instant angelic hypotheses. I saved myself by naming this terror, knowing the worst of me, then naming it with ordinary names, English common nouns, smiling and moving on.

In times of ordeal one’s prayers become simple. I had prayed that I faint in a private place where no one would disturb me. I had closed my eyes and then there was a pleasant sense of being attended, strong hands laid on, of another’s clothes rustling nearby, albeit virtually. I wonder; did it break my heart when this latest illusion died? Yes. I constantly expected this death and yet did not anticipate it. There was even the knowledge and foreknowledge of it while it still lived, life still had its same peculiar tentativeness, living by the usual fits and starts, aiming and missing, while present time went humming and the foreknowledge that once the imminent collapse is accomplished, remorse would settle in and give past time its bitter specious wholeness. If only I hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed everything. I knew and still that time went humming. Then everything was over and here came the sweet remorse, like a blade between ribs.

I do not understand the principles of attack and siege, strategic retreat, counter-attack, and ambush. The sloping shadows, hibiscus blooms that had quailed and folded, it is all exactly as I had remembered and continues to exist. The delirium is over, I am still not in control of myself, marveling at and regretting the now dead excitement. There is also a compensation, a secret satisfaction to be taken in this death, a delectation of tragedy, a license for drink, few words for a new verse, a taste of everything for the taste’s sake.

What has been broken torn stained chipped smashed bent cracked pilfered what has to be repaired replaced repainted thrown out entirely; a total loss. I love nothing in the world so much as the sight of a perfect unsmudged carbon copy hence everything is repeated over and over again. Life seems larger at night, swollen with dark shadows and strange creeks that terrify me yet I can not help exploring it, wondering if there is anyone else like me, awake and catching glimpses of the unknown. Every morning there is this temptation to see signs of the end and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, with the spirit of the new day being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that … what?

***
pS : to be continued. for I am, presently bored of my poetrics.

floundering

2008-08-11T03:25:00.000-07:00

the night that followed
your arrival
I’d gone deeper
in embrace of death,
I was dying, or dead
with nothing left of me,
except a shadow cast
on the near wall

those words tumbling
like a death rattle, a last
prolonged exhalation
your visit sounded
a final knell, driving me
into purgatory, which
I neither had the courage
nor wisdom
to descry on my own

there is no forward
or back,
an ascent to heaven
or descent to hell
until I lose myself
and my thoughts
in vinaceous smell
stumbling backwards
in the flow of time.....

obscure longings...

2008-08-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

This is 51st post on Terminal Moraine.
I’ve been ‘blogging’ for over three years and this is the first time I completed 50 posts in one place! I had abandoned ‘my tryst with sins’ after 48 posts, which means that finally after three years of wallowing, I’m about to complete a fragmented century!! The quantity isn’t worth reveling and certainly not earth-shattering still .. its an event of sorts…
On that note, it’s kind of deplorable that most of my ‘old blogging pals’ got dispersed. Some are hitched or have lost interest or both. I do wish they come back .. but then as they say .. if wishes were blah …

I wanted to scribble something, a kind of dedication for my muse(s) .. who wangled me into being a poet(!) .. haah .. if at all I am one..
Perhaps it could have been better. I lost interest midway ergo I am posting it the way it is ..
This isn’t a poem . .just few lines for those beguiling stimulants.. who only complain ..
and so here is my quetch..

***

Comes again the longing -
all bacchanalian paraphernalia
plentiful, untouched, disorderly
the desire that has no name
it has to do with being
both seventeen and seventy

With winter sun striking down the backyard
or is it dusk in our garden, you beside me
in my arms a child to whom we would later,
by the crib, recite our poetry ..

Desire has a smell of
cantaloupes and honeydews
an attachment so rooted
it could not help branching
into affection both infernal and holy

****

Seduce, the resonance of this word
transpired on me
neither from pulp magazines or pornography
it befell through agonized readings
of your celestial poetry
it is facile to be intimate
hiding behind these words pounding
securing all our pores
the sun heating and drugging
our senses to cover monstrosity

in the shade and darkness
cool and clothed in our grounds
how do I voice a word
to lift that underside of love..
would you resolve in "three words"
this dilemma of insuperable integrity ?

commencement

2008-08-04T03:04:00.000-07:00

the wind that parted clouds
has opened the sky
melting in the sunlight
at this moment, all is change
transformation seems permanent

a promise of bridging dead chasm
between body and mind
then sundering the soul
eternal gain and irretrievable loss
to be parceled out equally

with simultaneous depression
and exaltation, languidly
for a moment or two
I've lost my ability to imagine
you reading these words

poetry therefore has briefly
come undone or has regressed
to a moan, and you turn into
half-forgotten incantatory chant
invoked to ward off my loneliness

Trance

2008-07-31T12:58:00.000-07:00

I share with you
prosaic summer evenings
cicadas in sycamores
a nostalgia for
the life never led
you, simply by the virtue of
continuing presence, enthrall me
as would any phantasm of life
enrapture a woman slumped
irrevocably into sleep

this may be purgatory
I take it as a long coveted
entirely unexpected reverie
the dream of a dream come true
and at the end of
this dream awaits
not an awakening, but …
an abysmal dream
or an elongated -
Silence, perhaps.

An Aimless Walk

2008-07-29T01:22:00.000-07:00

I'd sauntered these puddle-smeared pavements many times
Imprinting trails of treadmark, had long ceased to see them
Here is both cover and footing where I expect muck
My knees make musical rubs in the cool shearing dirt
Purple dust drifts and a sour raindrop splashes on my nose
The piles of brickbats scattered in the weeds are warm.
Overhead clouds wheel, uttering their musical burrs and rattle
Sunlight shatters like quicksilver against their orotund form
I could be broken, sundered, busted down the middle
Self-ripped from self, a woman pasted back together
Silence presses in and up, empty space on either side
Giving an echoing weighless feeling as if I lack ballast
A mystical element, which might any moment float upward
From the vaporous depths come floating great words,
Muffled sounds, wrapped in cotton, "I would save you
My embrace would settle this tangled contradictory mess
All you need is time and desire, a new day is dawning,"
Hush, for you have an infinite capacity to repeat dull truths
And old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery,
It isn’t the dawn that interests me; but the night…

snippings

2008-07-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

11 AM:

I’ve had my coffee plus bread plus vodka,
my pulse racing along at a merry clip, alert and shaky
despite all, love kindles, there were worse lives after all
it’s always possible, even in the ashes of our long-over lives
something stirs, a phoenix, bad as it is, lets get fried

I look at him, a preposterous fake house on a fake hill
dredged up from the swamp, the very preposterousness of life,
his callused fingers whispering in my palm, inflames love
we love each other for one night , singing songs
watching wheeling constellations, a perfect encounter,
not to be repeated, like the best last line of beloved hymn,
a graceful arc from the bright, or certain death
in the dark impenetrable mystery of forest.

11 PM :

My descent into sleep is contaminated
controlled by your words, my dreams shaped by them
the waking mind sculpted by artistry of your verses
in their convoluted metaphors and sublime parapets
moves love now, all day and night, tracking down its prey
suddenly leaping upon it with a brutal fury
rolling over, in soft rust-colored pine needles
burying its hungry mouth in the warm body

it requires no purpose or objective in this world
to be justified or desired, where we’ve fallen
amid groggy sated and confused, whispering lullaby words
let the soil below stink, turning into a scarlet muck
let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils replete
and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats
I no longer resist this love. I relish it.

ingeminating

2008-07-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

earmarked for death in this grotesque pandemonium
inept at descrying my way back to the surface
only light which exists here, is that of memory flaring up,
illuminating rough pictures and writings overhead
which you'd painted once, to invoke and placate me

I abide, gazing in wonder
turning first into warmth and recognition
then growing violent or somber, I stumble
scrambling my way along another shaft in this warren
until I see in its glow a mingling of shadow and light
it moves and dances

a miasma, gray and noxious
spreading into every corner of my consciousness
you are wordless, unnamed
when depleted, return
I would step out of these shadows
where in silence I labor my days away
and stand revealed

on sacrificial altar of memories, we’d lay together
fading as if we’d melt with the mist of the forgotten
reviving again with an intensity
my life like these words carry no meaning
whether I live or die, I’d remain
the emblem of your sins……

eyes...

2008-07-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

Everything about me is a bit of lie
except these eyes, wherein past
and future blur, the knowledge of
an impending crisis remains
they have paid for vanity and ignorance
for contractions, those stinging looks
tender tears, spiritual aspirations
and the lewd desires

narrating their fidelity and misfortunes
would require deeper dredgings,
a darker sense of irony
or perhaps it requires neither gravity
nor complexity, but another person,
who would see in them
a simple four lettered comedy
which is all, it might have been.

******

spying out of fear and intimidation
a howling lunacy, or human perversity
passion spills in the miniature streams of
ever changing channels, inches deep,
rippled and plaited on gray images
refusing to answer any more of your questions
associations, past, present or life to come
they would not apologize or verify
penetrate their obfuscating rhetoric, they don’t rip
all they carry now is a stone look, and yet
they are two virulent strains of a virus
to which only a few men are immune….

kitsch II

2008-07-12T00:34:00.000-07:00

Debris of life
littered with memory
shadows retreating,
deathly calm
blue and green from
depraved thoughts
sinking in darkness,
keeping memoirs of
sunrise close

this is usually
how I write,
out of sudden
wonder or panic
or a fucking
aspect of past,
the world lost forever
and my life
ending sordidly

dedicating myself
into destroying
what’d destroyed me
while making love to
ravenous darkness
is remedial coitus,
a camouflaged
narcissism or
psychological
aberration

I haven’t
had enough,
the medicine
exacerbates,
this writing stinks
just jargon
and craps
the prospect of
an orgasm
remote.

conjuration

2008-07-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

I play with the images
you’d set floating in my mind,
every little illusion casting
an identical shadow as we race,
surrendering to the delirium
of which I’d remain in control
knowing it’d be over soon,
that the world would become
frozen again.

I don’t even know what to say
at such moments,
however, you know,
"I love you," you say.
If something has to be said,
what makes more sense?
we tell each other
we are lovers, in love
even while my conviction
that we are on divergent paths
is revived from one conversation
to the next.

I wonder at the letters
I begin to write,
left unfinished
phone calls I break off
dialing before the last digit,
if this isn’t me on the brink
after a brief intermission
as though nothing has changed
and if I am not back
where I’d began?

"take this yearning seriously
you want me," you say
and I rush to see you
in solitude I ask myself
if love is really in question
if it isn’t vulnerability
and embitterness
the neediness to which,
I am attracted?

Apathy

2008-06-30T07:09:00.000-07:00

The yellowing sheets are spattered
crisscrossed with fragmentary outlines
stirring around dispiriting accumulation of
disconnected beginnings middles and endings
as regular tortures seem on vacation
when I drove myself insane
tormenting an intractable self into confession
by and large the usual estranged stuff
cleaning up the mess
making sure that love was stale
and there was nothing nourishing in memories
exonerated from this bruising combat
without a score to settle
without reparations due
without hatred boiling in my heart
is there a way of existing
that will make all this nothingness
truly nothing?

Counterfeit

2008-06-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

Pain, its imitation, seems to be in nature of crown
a spire, a halo, here not simply to grace or embellish
but to express, to symbolize, only a measure of
how narrow and cloistered my life has become
a hackneyed conception of self and yet enthralling,
with whom I can share the failure of the moment
and in whose rejection, I annihilate my own…

de novo

2008-06-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

Images begin to contract and then blur, at the sight of
trivial remains that had marked the passage of seasons
torrential washed concrete walls are immaculate, gleaming
as much with malice as with remembrance, some nails
were driven through them, no picture had been hung
in the empty backrooms few scratches, black scuff marks
allude to games, too bare to be faced, that is all.

In the darkness striped with light that comes through gaps,
amidst the smell of stale smoke, dirt, and fragrance of soil
I feel repelled at certain somber reverberations
yes again, the scuttlings and squeaks of rain
a contemptuous-sound-tinged coquettish invitation
mingled with individual noises of horns, vehicles,
children’s cries, multiplying to a steady rhythmic throb,
soft beats, vintage, a creation of sun and heat, once
we were audience to its drama and ode-singing chorus .

Inside the room as the evening grows teary
no abyss opens beneath me at the sight of emptiness,
the rain outside rises in its raucous crescendo, unobstructed,
falling with unexpected passages of emphasis, altering pace
and without being wracked too much by memories of
the handsome rugs, tables, dishes and chairs
once jointly owned by you and me, now yours alone
I furnish a new place of my own.

alter ego

2008-06-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

We might have separated as easily
as we’d come together,
that relationship never going beyond
leaving faint impressions, and me
content to be
just another of her failures, catching glimpses of her
in other people, picking echoes and fragrance of
an aborted familiarity
the months go by,
we remain together, wondering if
a lover would somehow resolve this deadlock,
or another vocation,
psychotherapy for both of us.

whatsoever little spirit smolders on
in me is visible, only on her
it provides for us
to assault head-on
what we take to be
our demons,
I can never leave her, nor she me,
not that is until
an outright disaster makes it simply ludicrous
to go on waiting
for the miraculous conversion of
the other.

when I throw open
‘em benighted windows,
stand in the breeze
preferring to breathe
fumes from within, I know
I can outsmart her
with the aid of logic, analogy
and assorted techniques of
condescension.

I had lit her once
held her tightly within lips
and with a flick of finger
I’d thrown her out
she wavered awhile
then smoked fiercely, combusting into
an ashy cylinder
scoured by the wind
I believed all these reversals, recoveries,
all this movement of hers,
to be the evidence of a game,
a petite specter
audacious and determined
I liked that idea -
she burnt herself out
I haven’t really,
not quite yet.

pS : this is the first time, I’ve scribbled something without a single drag of her , not that I’m trying to quit or something, just that its been raining and I’m too lazy to go out …
I know she kills slowly but then as they say, who’s in hurry?

putrefaction

2008-06-06T04:01:00.000-07:00

This vertiginous mood, transcendent heat, a life reaching its climax and visions of decay heaped on decay. The placidity with which I’d waited on events fading away in the daylight. I lay mummified on bed for hours at a stretch. Parts of me are built to be awake and yearning to be both absolutely still and moving everywhere at once. The most ordinary sound outside seems oppressive as a bayonet rending my head. Even a beam of sunlight filtering through drawn curtains, intolerable.

I neither act nor withdraw, I simply wait. I do wait. There is the twist. As the tart taste of past prickles my mouth, I am beginning to recover just a little bit of optimism. Perhaps the experiment which never ended, is only beginning, it exceeds my understanding. My self-dramatizing mind had waited for more excruciation but something is different which forces me to recall those other startling and baffling metamorphoses I had witnessed. In another transition, I must have changed already in ways I dont yet know but I have with me my solitude. In the silence I can hear myself think. I’m making an effort to see and hear beyond the quicksilver talk of my mind. It is the surface, which leads to depth, lurching into blackness and vulgarity.

In this feeble yet euphoric state I’d envisioned only general scenes blended from million repetitions. The accusations, the stuttered insults, the invisible blows of abuse and torment that rose up to my tingling, jangling ear. The shrieking fight over the mildew somewhere, which was grey blue and deathly. Certain dreams, where people hadn’t named names, they had merely shown up with bruises, and informed that they were sorry, slouched and grimaced in such a way as to exude, I hoped, regret.

That is gone. What has taken over is daydreams, suddenly copious, reentering the life I had lost, not that long ago. And the the knowledge that it’s too late and so the distress, settled, bearable, sans pain. I remember me as a palate of conflicting colors, crimson in love with splotches of green, ultramarine in spirit or permanently mauve, with dark toppings and hazy strokes. I wasn’t seasoned; few more colors had to arrive, grays and purples. I was a mess. I know I am exacerbated, reduced to precisely what I’d been leery of at the outset. Now I am something faded but perfectly acceptable. I see no color outside, only glitter and I have long since reasoned, I would likely prefer authentic enthusiastic meanness.

I remain an amateur at life, smelling like a walking cigarette, flushed, perhaps alcohol induced, relying on my skills of misdirection, awaiting symptoms of infatuation, which sends me into paroxysm of exhilaration. Then I would throw my head in musical bliss, pounding fresh melodies. Presently everything around me is in its natural order; a life basking in artificially created atmosphere, undisturbed by the sunlight on panes, the same dusty lamp glowing on the table. I do write, it has no conclusion but just dribbles off in much the same way it begins. My imagination keeps on getting noisier and noisier as I get quieter and quieter.

germinating..

2008-05-16T02:57:00.000-07:00

feculent atmosphere -
writer concocts a plot
musician devises
thunder-haunted backdrop
painter envisions a mural
together they etch
deep dark pools
profound as sleep
night or death.

when splatter falls short
amidst eloquent labyrinths,
quails to taper off,
as if through sieve
straight and thin..
in cessation
dribbles vomit out
pelting the asphalt.

in this silvery twilight
a golden eye enkindles
a cosmic embryo
in process of formation
brimming and suspended
a child’s face -
barest impression of
the face and soul..

pS :- I don't generally do this.. but I was looking at this picture and few lines resulted ..

monomaniacal

2008-05-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

"Nostalgia, subjectivism, inwardness is in self-indulgent doghouse. You dare ask me since when? I want to sleep. And get that bloody light out of my eyes."

"I am catapulted through this static wall into a clustered vastness, the notional void of mind, the bright grid of life placing around, like an infinite cage. It isn’t an atmosphere in which an octogenarian (well mentally) feels sexy.. but I try"

"You don’t waste time of a dying soul with disclosures, confessions, repudiations…"

"You and I are creatures of subterranean dark, the mist and the cold. We are time-travelers and suddenly the past is alive, the dead start walking.. cracked walls gleam. Those unlived lives are just a keyboard away and we’re off to another search. You pluck a tread and it leads to.. everywhere...."

"Exulting in existing ..? still fairly fascinated by the drama of your own fucking self…?"

"Look, I too am partially obscured but I’ve arranged a little diversion. Nothing in the world is ever lost and everything is somehow connected. Plug it in, hit the key and thousands of others lost to us could pop up instantly."

"If you have worked in memory which is life itself there is no integration except in death."

petrified

2008-04-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Today again I eavesdropped my pathetic life
I didn't think much about the way I failed you
about being such a mess,
instead just perched around, listening to my heartbeat
wondering if it might stop someday soon.

Now that it is all over, and
I rummage through yellowing memories,
fingers are always darting toward me, rolling noisily
I begin to count them
feeling dizzy and nauseated
I put them back for another day.

Brushing aside splinters, slivers, tears,
I watch the mindless machinery of
life orbiting in the day and night, and try
to envision myself performing
my trivial functions in it,
since you had gone away.

I am on track,
I never shattered in obvious way, or
exploded into pieces
I had come across traces of me here and there
I have a feeling that when
I finally reach the woman who dreamed
she might be dead.

jaded

2008-04-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

She recalled the tang in throat when her head bounced off. She was accustomed to familiar, secure. This moment appeared gluey, sluggish.

She tried capturing her face, retrieved chiseled lines that made her sad, so did her olive hands, ragged fingernails, crinkles on corners of eyes and news that life would go on and on.

'feel good' factor..

2008-04-23T02:40:00.000-07:00

Moments like these ... make blogging worthwhile.
I never knew my blog looks that pretty - the screenshot on her site definitely appears so. I have my doubts that I merit this generosity but it will keep me really happy for a long time ...

Thank you chewmouse - for this kind review of my humble blog on your beautiful page .. :)

Absolved

2008-04-19T02:43:00.000-07:00

The events I catalogued here are perhaps of
other people, I just hung around the fringes,
watching.

You could see the numbered pages leafing
inside my head, life is narrowing down.
I could predict.

It's a continual shoring up against one thing
or another, splintered parts, eroding and
crumbling away.

I’d come a long way from somewhere, untying
myriad caged wings, with me anything is possible,
even vitue.

--

There’s nothing else that I want tonight, except
a cold ivory touch in an ill-lit
corner, where

no game or ambush awaits me, as I sear
forgetting the sensations, flames against
pliant skin

tapping wet windy messages in numb eyes,
at once, brilliant and shadowy, drenched in
amplified smell.

off I'd go into the wild blue yonder, climbing
high into sky, down I’d dive, spouting a flame
from under.

then walk in the dark on dust and ashes, harking
for a name, my own, even here no identity shall
claim me.

Duality

2008-04-08T03:10:00.001-07:00

The party was nifty. Derelict humanity trampled his success, leaving him at twilight, in condition resembling prison riot. He felt torn between social discourses, grotesque impatience to ostracize.

"You planning litigation?"
He turned, readying a polite quip.
He was thinking absently, employment, freedom, hemlines and how she’d managed to find a lipstick that was hypnotic.

flimflam

2008-04-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

A cursory glance confirms; love couldn’t destory her. It's avuncular sort, the kind retired cricketers possess for bats. She resolves to dream of him, he is impishly defiantly absent.

She distrusts new feelings, like tickets to a circus. Amorphous shakes would tumble the detritus of a poet. She desires a ruse, are you her muse?

Rephrase

2008-03-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

Lets bury present in
malodorous muck -
that steaming bog of
vile licentiousness,
rest tongues in sheath
and use the pen -
to slash and parry.

Once we get started
these things are addictive -
we’ll sit in dark
everything out of focus
squatting in middle
playing with history.

All that vexes -
uneasy wheeling sky,
unsettling flecks of
three quarter moon
cresting the horizon -
resolving temporarily
as we turn scraps of
papers into stories.

My life that’d slid off
somewhere in the past
yours that’d kept
delaying its arrival -
in an empty space
they’d both converge
clinging transiently.

Aah the curse of
co-incidences –
surge the blood-lust
lure me again
on tricky streets,
point me out
and whittle me down
into kindling –

Then read and grieve.

Apropos..

2008-03-13T00:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, you were a lighter smudge
in dingy sky, whereby shafts tinged
the soiled chunks of
my life, the muddy footpaths, and branches
not that I blame you entirely
for perpetual gray fog,
it being, the winter of memories.

Now that you’ve embraced the drab,
color looks out of place everywhere
tomorrow, like the February sun
you might emanate lucidity without warmth.
the world reveals itself
in tiny increments, integrated tangibly
when ingested over time,
in this distant year, the month of March
has offered, the foretaste of summer.

The slide of winter into spring
had been imperceptible,
frozen gray, to gutsy gray,
buds impaired, no color anywhere
today held, just briefly,
a touch of magic-
that cannabinolic splendor of
the morning after sleepless nights.

Confabulation

2008-03-05T03:51:00.000-08:00

You may not find me ..
In ruptured images once beheld,
tortuous outlines of setting sun,
subtle interplays of elegiac poetry
or in tangled discursive reminisces
when you and I melted indiscriminately.

I am afraid one day
you would step back in murky
faint hues of obliterated past,
as our conversation continues
in certain grim spareness of
your immure papered rooms
though neither of us spoke again.

Oblivious of precedence
my words might turn up where
you’d laid them aside in midsentences-
on the edge of the bathroom sink,
hanging between empty cocktail glasses
and disks of sodden lemon
or crumpled among bedsheets.

The evidence against me..

2008-02-27T00:17:00.000-08:00

Scarlett remembered me for a tag -its an honour in itself. I can never get tired of praising her. She is special and I second all that Asuph has written here...

Coming back to the tag in question. This is fun as it entails digging forgotten gems (in my case junks) and as others have rightly observed – its like bottling the old wine in new flavor.

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given : family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like. Tag 5 friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

Yet again, I am late – though this required minimum effort in terms of writing.. finding the right post to match the key words was tough and 'linking' is still a massive task for me! Besides, I had caught the renovation bug all over again and wanted to give my old hut a new life and glitter :D Its fun playing with the template! Its too facile now and I’ve added all kinds of pictures on header footer left right center.

Talking about pictures -I’d unceasingly done tags but the only one I couldn’t complete was that of Punds .
He rarely visits – but I wish to apologize. I couldn’t take up.. though I love pictures (looking at them) I’m clumsy with the camera. I did not click any photo last year. Since eons I'm stuck in Delhi and the last picture I clicked could well be three years old. I do have a 3-year-old camera phone, which is never used for taking pictures, is seldom used for talking and is regularly used as an alarm clock!

Anyway, of late I’d been doodling poetrics hence the posts linked here are from my older blog.

Family : There are no posts on family per say but casual references which aren’t specific but are thorough. Needless to say, I am a pampered spoilt brat and love my family to the core. My parents and sister (& latest additions- her kids) are both my strength and weakness. The scrabble (originally posted on Sulekha ) which remotely qualifies was written when my sister was expecting her first child . That ‘event’ had generated a new sense to my blunted sensibilities.
Another family member mentioned regularly in various posts is - Don. Every phenomenal moment spent with him is incandescent with inextinguishable joy. He is my everything ..

Friends : I don’t have friends. In the so-called real world I’ve lost contact with everyone. I remember certain faces, livid, rapt in bemused oblivion, drifting into unknown. I’d sporadically cited two girlfriends in earlier posts though presently I possess no knowledge of their whereabouts. Friendship is perhaps an art or maneuvering wherein I have no glowing records to showcase. The world at large, camaraderie, hangouts, sociability and all drat are part and parcel of an alien world, which for me has abruptly become sardonic.

Whenever my sister calls, her first question is – "how are your buddies?" Which means – Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar. They are my best buddies . :D

(On second thoughts, blogging pals are my sole pals. Some of them have stopped visiting or visit occasionally – I’ll use this opportunity to tell them – all of them are/were valued! )

Yourself : I’m megalomaniac, largely an apathetic woman who at times seems palpating with the forces of life. All my posts are full of nostalgic musings, recollections and are an extension of me . Even the fictitious characters have my clamoring traits .

Love : Over the years of long spinsterhood, I’ve assembled an invisible ‘harem’ of had-beens and could-have-beens. I’d started 'blogging' in that jilted lover kinda state. The hopelessness of everything had emblazoned it with exalted tones of great passion. It was cathartic and I can say for sure - its over and done with! I retain a visceral memory of him- it persists as one of that reminiscence in which sound and scent are preserved but no objective context.

Twice since, I’d perceived I was close to ‘loving’ again but fortunately or unfortunately I failed! Though passion blooms rarely in my garden – it holds that midsummer fullness. I’m still searching – and waiting for the moment when from beautiful and wanton – I’ll turn handsome and acceptable ..

[My latest crush is the guy who plays Ram in the new Ramayan aired on NDTV imagine. (yeah - I watch it regulary) I don't know his name. I could say he is hot but in fact - he looks godly.]

Anything : My scribbles reflect the phases of multitudinous emotions that have assailed me off and on.. each one is special in its way but I’d like to link something from my first ever blogging site. This is the first story I'd posted online. Its raw.. it can do with some editing and more spice . .but I think this and this were some creative attempts that I could have improved upon.

I know most people don’t like being tagged. I don’t want to force anyone.
If I had my way –
I’d like to tag Punds , Dredger , Nidhi , Ashen Glow and Hotice .

If you guys are already tagged OR don’t wish to comply – take it easy – I can assure you its fun but the rest is upto you!

Note for readers - If someone is still reading, I encourage you to check them out. They are wonderful writers. :)

"A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day" [ED]

Seven kinds of nonsense..

2008-02-08T04:21:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I’ve become an expert on my myriad failures of self-knowledge. I did not intend to write anything and I am not exactly ‘writing’ .. I read few blogs after a long time today and wanted to post ‘something’. The inability to write speaks eloquently about my basic design flaw. The fact remains that our most potent and necessary dreams can derive from simple misunderstanding. I was slow to comprehend that my dream of becoming a ‘writer’ actually was a mask for more urgent need - to escape failures .. the insistent everyday failures .. from there on the pen, or rather the keyboard lay dead under my cramped fingers. It is as if all the letters of the alphabet, all combinations of letters into words, all the infinite possibilities of written language has ceased to exist.

What’s wrong in reveling in failures? Most of us remain children all our lives, perpetually attracted to all wrong things, repeatedly falling for everything that is cheap and superficial. I’ve discovered the intense pleasures inherent in defeat and I practice failure which forever shall remain my sole grace. There is perverse pleasure in pain, in suffering and even in humiliation. The need to make a romance out of ugly reality is a basic human craving and also the accompanying need to disguise whatever form of truth is scattered about us.. "Truth" infact is a windowless place where the light can come only through cracks.

Something else I’m blind to, seems to be loneliness, which we desire yet despair and that forces us to endure terrible humiliations and indulge into meaningless relationships. You had no life to begin with and the world is small, dusty maze of clapboard and neon, crawling with strangers and to most of us it yields only loneliness, however we may have swaggered down its avenues. There wasn’t enough life to go around with, whatever delights it held would remain the secrets of those who had found them first but if you are young, shy and not entirely sure what you were looking for anyway, it is a deary place. You can hang around blogs, chatrooms, or meander outside a pub and settle for insipid pleasures of sex and booze or you can aimlessly prowl through the dark back streets of real or virtual world, where all you meet as a rule are other loners on an equally aimless prowl. You can ask each other ‘what you want?’ only to be told that they don’t know.. perhaps cruise around for a while.. and so you cruise around, likewise though you knew from the onset that so and so was a horrible mistake to begin with and will only pile on your life of searing regret. You endure this as you clearly know the alternative – a solitary exstence. Soon, the customary small talk of cordiality and endearment seems inadequate, unsuited to the strange well-being you had become accustomed to in discordance. It concludes one day, as expected, leaving you naked, both literally and metaphorically, vulnerable… right there, where your thin veneer of self-confidence was stripped away, revealing you stark.. panic-stricken .. more lonely than ever before. Usually you get drunk, get sick and be thankful that you’d be hitting back alone with the promise of a different ‘new day.’

Your emotional life becomes ingrown. The orderly rotation of many careful moods is your life, or rather what your life has become. You manage it well, and it is only rarely, looking very closely at your face, if anyone bothers that is, one can see how much the effort is costing you. You go through the daily chores mechanically, sit alone through the weekends and evenings with a drink, allowing your mind to slide into a heavy, gin-fuddled confusion. Only one persistent thought comes through, a piece of self-advice that is as clear and cold as the drink that rises again and again to your lips. Hold on. No matter, whats in store tonight or tomorrow, just hold on.

The shape of every following day is an articulate statement of impending defeat. You can blame it on luck. Aah .. life screwed you and its luck which made you a loser but its something you wanted to be without knowing it. Regardless of your inclination to believe in luck as the prime determiner of human destiny, both good and bad fortune are largely an illusion. Most of us are uniquely desinged to mistake good luck for bad and vice versa. So, you stand among the messy possibilities with the look of someone surveying new fields to conquer and an odd mix of rejuvenation and relief. You can never understand what’s happening to you, and also lack the ability to sort things out upon reflection afterwards ergo you make same mistakes all over again.

The worst terror still remains .. of ending up all alone in the world, and so you keep on trying to smile. Others smile back.. will their smile of rejection always drop you into despair and their smiles of welcome lead only into new, worse, more terrible ways of breaking your heart? Duh? Now its going to be fucking straight, no more big talks, no romantic claptrap and fictitious heroes. Peel away those layers of self-deception and discover that you can swap this dreamy world with something that is more ‘earthy’.. within your reach.. if dreams give purpose and direction to otherwise mundane existence, why are they doomed to fail? Even the modest dreams fail like the grand ones.. from now on you’ll carry a stately bearing, determined that for the rest of your life you’ll keep everything down and quiet inside you so that neither of these stangers can sense your anguish. Casting aside your pusillanimity, you are eager to embrace the next moving creature though you wont let them 'inside' you, deep inside where everything you say has another side to it .. (like you expect, hidden somewhere is a secret, a philosopher’s stone masquerading as a precious elixir disguised as a dimwit.)

All isn’t lost .. loneliness is no longer new and bitterness is the fashionable mood .. you don’t ‘feel’ young and the ones around you can acknowledge that the rest of you is rapidly aging too. You still hope to find someone someday.. you sit there waiting, watching the fog grow thicker. In the trees along the trail, a vision you’d both praying and dreading comes. Somewhere there’s a blank inside, a blotting out, an ablation, though of what I can’t commence to speculate .. can’t even know if I’m making sense with this qualm or whimsically compiling my ignorance. One night when worse pain will set in, you’ll pretend to ‘settle’ with someone your so-called well-wishers had arranged for .. sooner or later you accept its good for you.. and why not? You’ll be together a pair of blanks. If you want to know the truth, it sucks. Plunge in pour forth. Together you’ll formulate a grand hypothesis explaining each other how emotional stimulation between two people initiate a cascade of signals that collectively may result in the bond known as love. You’ll stick around ..and you’ll keep telling each other that you are in love for both know that neither of you had nowhere else to go. ..

Nascent Breaker ..

2008-01-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

That ruthless voice
which had never bothered
to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric
asked me again ..
"where are your scribbles
that had no rhyme nor rhythm
and seldom any ‘content’ ?"

"You were mistress of
extraordinary loquaciousness
so perspicacious
so fluent
so rich with contempt for
every last human problem
you’d ever faced.."

"A clamorous countess of
endless ostentatiously
overelaborate sentences
write something, will you?
squelching jokes,
tedious anecdotes
anything would do .."

The impulse was overwhelming
to grab the laptop, slam it through
instead drawing back, reining in,
strategically speaking
softly I replied ..

"Days are shorter, evenings longer,
gossamer webs float through air,
cool breezes waft around -
days could be radiant
the nighttime coolness
has reached out
and touched everything."

"I do have thoughts
I do not think them
I had once channeled them
now my words spill everywhere
and lay lightly
on everything like mist."

The ‘voice’ turned low
it had quality of muffled shriek …
"You are not fighting
a world anymore
where they are out to destroy you
you are battling in the world
where you are alone with me."

"You are something
which suffered
a premature burial;
something accounted for
not 'present' though
I am certain you are aware of
the morbid irony in this."

Being angry at the voice
had previously felt better
ignoring had liberated -
it is no longer possible
to isolate that voice and me
or separate ‘me’ from person
in charge I’d always been ..

"Woman in charge
and woman deferred to
have only added to the pain
and surprise of being
the alien that I am …"

kitsch

2007-12-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

i)

Do not exhort me
to get on with
what you call -
my fucking life
I am sick of
just about
everything
except existing.

I wasn’t
seeking
a safe harbor
or allegiance
all I wanted -
was your simple
compliance.

ii)

Playing hopscotch
at death’s door
sniffing back
old miseries -
I go on waiting
for those
caverns of
comatose sleep.

In the very spasm
like misfired
orgasm
it seems to be
coming continually
though indubitably -
never comes.

Crustaceous

2007-11-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

Like the sky, pale as linen
I wish to hang low over horizon
and meet the blackened earth,
or like the setting sun
I want to dip lower and lower,
turning the western sky copper and gold
as shadows lengthen across the ground
creeping out, like grotesque monsters.

I’m looking out for that first person,
who wouldn’t notice my bruises and contusions,
and won’t appear the least bit tempted
to inquire after my puffy lip.

I’ll be the sparkling blend, of fortified beer and wine,
to be enjoyed in measured sips, and when you say
you want only a taste, you would have just that; in fact.

Risk is a wonderful stimulus
you can cruise around me,
this tender picture in it’s petrified frame
and have a kind of grip on it,
visually anyway, for if you trip
it is too complicated.

Expecting something within me
to break or bloom, I feel so holy.
This is how; reality punishes you for innocence
it turned me into, a crustacean.

Darkness...

2007-11-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

A thousand muffled voices within
had bid you begone,
the night when you’d disappeared
around that last bend in the road.

As the old ennui sets in again,
let me thank the brief flare of
your presence which emphasized
this darkness about me.

Emanating from a cavern wherein
discords wail, it jeers and sings
mournful notes devoid of hope
though it meets my mood.

There is no despondency
when I sleep every night
for the only stranger
I wake up beside, is me.

Permanent Pause..

2007-11-06T21:27:00.000-08:00

A so-called ‘well-wisher’ had sent dozens of emails through Sulekha and Rediff with links of certain bloggers who are recycling my poetrics into their own. One lady had copied a poem word by word . .and when confronted she apologized, saying that she had merely 'cited' my poem as it was the only ‘nice’ poem on my otherwise crappy blog but she’d lost my web address so she couldn’t link to me. Fine . .could be .. she removed my poem from her blog so the matter as far as she is concerned is closed ..
But there are couple more .. one person has twisted one of my poems .. it is all so funny ..
Yesterday I was bugged and fuming .. but do I really have the time or inclination to carry a tirade against these kinds? No I don’t. And in any case ..my so called poetries are nothing but crap .. so why should I bother .. ? Ohh yeah I’m possessive about everything .. about relationships .. and my writings . .but then it does boil down to some sensibility, sooner or later.
I have given up .. the way I give up everything else … I’m giving up this space ..

To all those unknown people who were kind enough to copy me . .thank you very much. They say imitation is flattery too. Please be my guest and feel free to copy, twist, toss, tamper, turn all the shit that I’d posted here. I don’t give a flying fuck .. An added info for you – I’m a technical fool so I don’t follow the intricacies of catching someone through an IP address and all drat! Besides, I’m a recluse and I don’t have a single friend in the whole damn world who would give a fuck to all this nonsense ..
My well-wishers thanks to you too .. but please refer to everything that I’ve said above and kindly do not send me emails from here there or anywhere. I don’t wish to catch anyone.

And lastly .. a handful of blogging pals who once visited me .. encouraged me to write or improve. I may or may not post here again but I’ll remember all of you. I’ll not thank you coz on a post like this.. even that would sound sarcastic ..

Anyway, I have exhausted myself completely and I have nothing more to write. I don’t want to write a melodramatic good bye post coz I may feel like posting again, someday… if I’m upto it . .I’ll be back but all this copying crap has doused my creative fire, if any spark was left, that is.
All the best to you all ..
For the time being …
Au Revoir

Obnoxious ...

2007-11-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

There is no dearth of jerks on net. Or is it? My poem "Death" .. just underneath

was the last post on this blog for a long time, which was posted on 28th and to prove that I even got comments on the same day .. and there is a woman who has copied my poem word by word and posted it on her blog on 31 st August .. has given it a new fancy title .. and a comment says that she has been recommended for blog day or some such shit ..

Now how obnoxious is that? I'm fuming . .I'm literally fuming ..

Blah!

2007-10-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

Each day proves apocalyptic for some dreams
ruins a relationship, shatters few illusions.
Ever-fucked situations repeat themselves too regularly
to be a mental aberration, unless I am mentally aberrant
and unreality is going to worsen as life becomes unendurable.

Given my penchant for impetuosity, I do not grieve
those mocking look in your eyes, sometimes grinding, or a roar
which crackled without exuding genuine admiration
since there seems only an unsnarling existence left for me
whose waywardness constitutes its only authority
and provides its primary diversion.

--

Duh! wailing the wail that authenticates
the final act of a classical tragedy, I know
It wasn’t an ecstatic union, though I must be taught to renounce
the great narcissistic illusion of rapture
for I always am in love with
a shilly-shallying, namby-pamby,
fence-stranding, vacillating drifter.

Dash it- my nebulous nirvana,
you’ve got a mind, don’t you?
I hate the mosaic it makes, ergo
drunken eroticism is the only passionate life I choose
and shall reap my lonely harvest.
Yes, I’m more than ‘disappointed’
but you were so full with insinuations
and had other preferences anyway ..

Death...

2007-08-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

I’d lain on a weedy slope, tattered at creases,
and the taste of life, still sour on my lips ..
It wasn’t life I ached for, but the aftermath -
A languid surrender, which might pass for
vague contentment or something like peace…

He stood defined, silhouetted against pallid sky
looking down at me sans censure or approbation
slipping in slowly, a figure without shadow -
I sank deeply with no impulse for resistance
he led me into regions, of fabulous delight.

I felt being porous and the last that was left of
the whole concoction, which had once been
‘a self’ was running out then, drop by drop….
bleeding down into a creek, feeding a river
which sparkled gaily, in the monsoon rain…

Loudly and robustly, he’d joined me there
filling his lungs, as he soaked in the view -
"Beautiful sight, isn’t it?"
I remember thinking that, yes,
It was a beautiful sight…

I'd tried to smile, to breathe and stand
without clinging onto the stone wall
Now I’m prone to think
it was the velocity in life, which had undid me
the Old Testament decisiveness, of it all.

Beyond the trivial importunities of being
with him at last, was novel transformation
to function without appeal and evaluation
terrible swift words or reconsideration -
dreamily radiant, where all questions
are answered, and all riddles solved …

**
Note : Inspired by - this

Vagrancy...

2007-08-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

i)

I waited with precious little in the way of trepidation
piled reveries into the back of my grip,
and embarked upon a destination
as if I knew where it was.

A gloomy limbo had spread murkiness
in the tiny iridescent circuit, where
life had accomplished its esthetic efflorescence
though I was soothed by the notion
that beyond the squalid clutter of my heart
there were emerald pastures with rust eaten fender wells.

A sort of thing I'd occasionally indulged in
to look for a place on this earth, where it was possible still
to lead a life unilluminated by obsolete memories
unserenaded by familiar amorous songs, orchestrations
and uncatered by crude diets of vanity.

ii)

By sheer happenstance,
I wandered through you on an evening
with an uncanny knack for soaring
Reasonably certain of a point in an empyrean
I'd hinged open my mouth to speak
just when I lost both my gumption and my bearings.

On my trail back
all its length, the streets said nothing
though I could envision in a gap across the way
beyond the rusting downspout,
the bare limbs of a plane tree.

It seemed you and me, like ghostly lovers
had perpetually pursued, never clasped
and I saw myself forever fated into
repeating same gestures, proverbial words
as outside my shrouded sentience
life rolled away,
like a vast blackness blighted by lights
beyond the windows of a moving truck ..

Interlude

2007-08-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

The lawn was basking in last evening rays, which gave everything a warm glow. The speaker was largely unaffected but when she arrived, almost an hour late, there was a minor stir in the small gathering. She was bright and statuesque, all flashing in a shimmering pink sari, and she was alone. She seated herself so nimbly that the wooden chair emitted hardly a creek. However, she lost interest in the speech soon and looked around. The smallish garden sheltered from the sun, tended meticulously, was flowering, though outside the leaves were wilting and falling.

He was observing her with a twinge of desire, from a distance where she appeared unattainable. Scarcely, one is able to see that precise moment when fact becomes faith and people start to bend their finest loyalties to make themselves bemused custodians of the grave. He saw that moment now, in the profile of that woman, and he knew there was no time to lose. Her restless pupils, after a quick survey of the place, rested on him. They were suffused with such an ineffable sorrow at the unbridgeable chasm between them, that he looked away. He struggled with his impulses for a while but when he gathered the courage to hold her gaze she had shifted her attention to a young man, who was conversing with her solemnly. It was in her nature to be in love with someone, she had once described it as a disease. He was annoyed for being jealous and evaded her eyes.

Tardily, the torturous speech ended, they started serving refreshments and the group dispersed in scattered clutters. She was talking to the same man when he walked towards her and offered a faint hello. She turned and yet again he was crawling into a quagmire. Her black eyes reflected mockery and abnegation of one who had broken with everything and everybody. He could not leave without a last confession of his sins and prepared himself to face her. Her companion bid good-bye and joined other people who were promenading in the garden. He proposed a walk and she assented with the sweet serenity, which never failed her. It was useless to hide behind pleasantries and he decided to hit the spot, instantly.

They walked side by side as if they might have been accepted in the ark.
"I came here, only because I knew you would come." He was speaking out of a deepening despair, floundering. She wasn’t surprised, or if she was, she skillfully concealed it. All the wrong, hurt years of her affliction were proof against the miracle that she construed.

"I didn’t know you’ll be here. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking about you." She replied flatly with a curious air of pride. Sad thoughts, yearning and longings had taken a flight but somewhere there was a spot too sore to bear even the lightest touch.

He was convinced that there was a wall clear as glass between them and if they should fling themselves through it, it would smash and let them through. They had been hurtling past each other and he had made up his mind to exert the final blow.
"I'd thought if I ever saw you again, you’ll have a lot to say. That is why, I wanted to see you.. at least once." He murmured with no trace of shock in his sonorous voice and an intense look of interest in his usually dreamy eyes.

She considered that for some time. Once, she did intend to say a lot but without his angry looks and caustic comments he seemed less interesting and she was a tad disappointed. No man had ever attracted her at first. She always undertook a slow process with them, of erasing the first impression, or at least overcoming and correcting it. Behind the outer façade there was another façade which she usually liked. The man who stood before her now had shed both façades and she tried to hasten her evaluation, to strip away with all layers and catch a glimpse of his current motive.

"I’m sorry, but there will be no crying out, no vain appeal to the past, if that is what you had been expecting." She said quickly and the words lashed him with their irony, things staring at him vacantly from the depths of their mutual past.

"Why do you say that? I owe an apology though I assure you I never forgot you, not even for a day.. a moment.." He stammered and she sensed a rush of moisture in her lashes, a familiar wave of weakness in her heart. Popular sentiment had it that relationships ought to be between equals, but she had never known an equal in love. It was always somebody feeling more than the other, somebody protecting, somebody requiring safe harbor or permission or simple compliance.

"Assure? Did I seek assurance?" She said and simultaneously made a gesture to leave.

"Wait, don’t misunderstand me. I meant to come back, you know that. Why did you stop writing me?" They had exchanged notes regularly, passionately first but slowly their correspondence had become impersonal like news articles. He’d continued to write, perhaps to minimize his dull sense of guilt. He was secretly thankful that she had ceased replying his perfunctory letters, written with indifference.

"This is ridiculous. You had gone away and do you remember seven years have passed since then and I kept hearing about your relationships." Luminous drops of tears fell from her eyes, as she talked. Under the fluorescent lights, he thought, they magnified her eyes into immense pearls. She had dropped the mask of her light-hearted courage. It seemed that she had preserved with dogged, indomitable resolution and little hope. His eyes lit up in the radiance of fresh anticipation. The fact that he had never heard about ‘her’ relationships fluttered his dazed imaginations.

He could see she had changed but she was one of the women in whom altering years show what they had imparted and not what they had taken away. A closer look revealed that what they had assumed must have been estimable of its kind. Yes, indeed seven years had passed and he had had his share of adventure but each time he had returned to her memories, chagrined and grateful, surrendering to them, acknowledging their absolute. Those episodes had merely sullied the surface, never reached his heart and he wanted her to know that he was back, rededicated and more certain.

"Everyone learns sooner or later about loss. The absence of a presence can crush the strongest people." He drawled, sanguine deep down, that the whole creation had ground and wound itself down through the vistas of eternity to bring the two of them face to face for reconciliation.

She stood still for a moment; incredulity and hurt written all over face. There was something intensely personal and moving about her loss and the pathos of her suffering seemed to come from deep inside her slender body.
"When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of worth and if that person throws you aside, you believe profoundly that it is because you are worthless. That is a kind of death." Her words stripped him of every defense and once again he descended to the very pit of his sorrow.

There was a rustle of leaves under their feet and the smell of them, all sad, autumn-like but a scythe of moon was just appearing over the trees. The palpitations of her heart were unknowable finally, they would remain forever mysterious. He drew in the evening with a sigh and implored .. "Only if you’ll let me explain…"

Something in his voice suggested a blend of fresh grief and psychosis, which reminded her of that year when she had fallen in love with the comfort of their togetherness. A permanent relationship and same vague gush of adjectives. They contained a shred of truth, though wrapped round on impenetrable lies. His name had hung about her like a chord that continues to vibrate. All romantic moments are associated willy-nilly even if some are long dead.

"You don’t need to explain. I understand…" Her contralto voice had a rich thrill into it as she paused for few seconds. She knew that when with him, it would always be 'the past' that would occupy them. It would always be there, huge, obstructing, constrictive, and more plethoric than anything the future could ever conjure up. She wondered if beyond what they had already discovered lay more spectacular regions, waiting to be explored.

"No mater how great a love may be there comes a crisis that is just as much an enigma as love itself. You still love each other, but you have to part, or a new person comes along and introduces a new approach." She completed the sentence without any emotion, shrugged, and walked away.

Fiascoes...

2007-08-07T02:34:00.000-07:00

Embedded amid layers of
dusty twaddle, I’d found
another belief for life
that need not be reconciled
into our demeanor.

It was then I’d discovered
that profanity too had its purpose
what stayed was the knowledge
of leading a double life
one sealed from the other.

A halve fantasized love,
wallowed in complexities,
relished deceptions,
then a brouhaha followed
which chose you and failure.

A separate fraction idealized
glorious adventures,
sublime joys, delicious stupor
that wishes naught
resents none but sinks deeper.

Between body and soul’s
relentless funeral
I’d wished to grab
that swinish material
an otherworldly pleasure.

Former was the premise
and latter a pretext, though
I can engage no more
in futile perspectives
and possible allures.

I’m always tired, never sure
if I'd prefer to conclude
this treacherous encounter
as my luckiest moments
are in quest of failures.

frayed flame

2007-07-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve studied your love
as a diagnosis
and prescription-
watched it cascade
and break
in crested waves.

This raw concoction
fits more snugly
in the current tincture
of my moral spectrum.

Having been through
the most memorable
banal smut once,
I’m in that mood
which tempts to sin,
even the best of us.

I won’t be a prisoner
though I accept your offer
and from these bundles
of negations I’ll fashion
a love that’ll temporise
the fresh dissolution.

Random Re-encounters

2007-07-19T23:42:00.000-07:00

By Punds orders, I’m posting another tag of 8 random things about me. It perhaps is a shortened version of 20 random things tag, which was making rounds, long ago. I’d called it Pandora's box then, but since then I’ve mellowed down miraculously. I need not warn anyone as there isn’t anything evil or sinful in these ‘facts’ which I sometimes wonder were fiction.

1) I was a darn naughty kid and kept my mother perpetually on her toes. Till class 4th or 5th I’d to be dragged for school and was famous even there for my notoriety. I could thrash any girl or boys double my size. Ma was summoned regularly by my teachers and principals to discuss a list of complaints. As my parents worked in different locations and that part of life were spent with Ma, we saw Pa only during vacations, poor mother could only convey my misdemeanors to him over the telephone or in letters wherein she consistently referred to me as a "problem child." Its funny that things that appeared so serious then, are now amusing, for both of us.

2) The best part about going to school was running away. I can write a book on ‘how to run away from school’. The best memories are from where I’d passed senior secondary.
On one such adventure, four of us, (three other girls, besides yours truly) had planned to watch a movie at Connaught place (strategically located, close by). We discovered that one gate was unattended, apparently, the gatekeeper was taking a pee break (or tea break). Our mantra was walk casually, confidently to avoid getting noticed. As soon as we stepped out, we heard someone hollering "hey hey hey .." we turned back and saw the watchman sprinting in our direction. He couldn’t have caught me even in his dreams, I was a pretty fast runner. I fled along with another girl. However, the two slow runners were caught and presented to the principal. Despite persistent interrogation, they refused to reveal the names of other miscreants (that’s called comradeship).

3) The then fast runner now needs painkillers to walk. I’ve screwed my health to that extent, which continues to fail. Probably, I’m still capable of keeping people on their toes with my mind-games. At least that is what my ex used to say. I’ve vowed not to mention him again ergo I’ll quote ‘somebody’ who had commented. "I fuck his brains out". In a way, its quite nice coz I'll rather fuck some brains than anything else .. as I’m sure I’ve turned frigid.

4) I refurnished my room, last month. I disposed my double bed and got a new single bed. I’m confident of sleeping alone(without a human company, of course) all my life so its one positive step, in that direction. The only problem is, Don(my German Shepherd) considers my bed as his own. He occupies a huge corner and I’ve to squeeze myself in another. Sometimes I find him sleeping soundly with his head on my pillow, and then I just sit on a chair, facing him and keep on looking, blissfully. I’m bewitched.

5) I’ve two pimples on my right cheek & another one on my forehead. I never had pimples as teenager and was so proud of my blemish-free skin. I tried almost everything and nothing worked. A couple of days back, I landed in a Shahnaz Husain store and hurray.. when I returned home I realized, I’d spent almost 10 thousand bucks for three pimples! Man she is expensive .. and for three pimples she makes you buy three hundred different stuff ..

6) I tried doing many things but I’ve this bad habit of abandoning them, halfway. I learned .. Kathak – 2 years, Guitar – 2 years, German – 1 year, French – 8 months, Persian – 6 months and it is all wiped away immaculately from my memory. It would be redundant to say, I can’t differentiate between Kathak and Kathakali, Hawaiian from Spanish (leave aside playing a single chord), German, French and Persian all sound, Greek. I regret not pursuing them, seriously as I’m too old to start it all over again and then I’ve this uncanny feeling I wont live long, the priority now is just one book that I hope to get published. At least one .. that’s my solitary dream.

8) My solitude is complete. I got rid of my so-called friends, well-wishers and this and that. I don't go anywhere and my cell phone seldom rings. To achieve this, I'd to get my seven year old number changed, which was divulged to no one. I don't wish to talk to any of them & I'm convinced the feeling is mutual. Its better this way and I’m enjoying my wonderful privacy. I hate bumping onto former acquaintances and greeting them all with the same lie "you haven’t changed" when both parties know the truth at least once for a ‘change.’ I like spending my evenings, with booze, shades down, dim lights and ghazals, all by myself. I’m in love with the voice of Munni Begum. Though anything and everything can make me cry, she is the best company for tears.

There was no need to write these Eight random things. One word describes me perfectly – "loser’ :D

The tag requires to be passed but no one cares for my effing tags. This would be the first time, I’m not tagging anyone.. I completed it sooner than the previous tags (if that's some consolation) ..I hope I’m forgiven.

Waterspout

2007-07-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

i)

If..
I had stopped you then..

The driving torrent, last night
that plummeted the awning,
like hailstorms -
could pause over me, like mist
and I would trust their shelter

I could float in thunderclap
with the leisure of a dream
hearing it, in all variations
as if they were leitmotif
from a symphony,
cosmic yet intimate

In the persistent murmur
of water, however
I only heard
your fine concluding high note
that had been sent afloat
to fade.

And then,
An enormous bolt,
lit up the sky
It became for an instant
sunset or sunrise?

ii)

If..
I let you go now...

I can see all hurt years
washed clean
the life I’d thought
forever closed, spreading out
its pictorial vista, with sheen.

I can look up
at countless raindrops
sense a touch of piety
as they fall over me
in their midnight gaiety

I can explore
an infinite space
amid myriad of galaxies
between two eternities -
one caught and held
yet already past
and the other,
still to come?

Or perhaps,
nothing is past
what was, will be
is waxing unbearably
and it is all -
one vast scroll.

au revoir

2007-07-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

It is all a puzzle -
falling in love

sensual bloom
alienation evolved
the years that passed
sans intimacies
and the present finale –
when silence seems obtuse
speech derisive
verbal good-byes linger
obscurely concluded
and the muted adieu leads
to shallow pool of speculation.

We can neither drift afar
from words already spoken
nor plunge deep through
into this silence forsaken -
but we can get domesticated
with the horror of our ghosts
accept its perpetual presence
and that will be the beginning
of a premature ending
after which there will be -

No going back.

Naught!

2007-06-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

It rains off and on and I don’t have much to complain. When the clouds gather, full of thunder, and hang low over the city, the view shines out in a clear golden light, an enamored domain, free of the storm and darkness of night. Only that when it rains, the asphalt full of ditches and pavements with puddles of water reflect pieces of my own self. In a myriad of reflection – a myriad of mirrors. The remains of the carnival called life, is a heap of rubbish but for me it is still a holiday – the private holiday of a hedonist. The way I live, makes me feel, I’m slowly committing suicide. You may not ask for death but sometimes deep within yourself, you long for an end. We keep existing in time, building and rebuilding on its ruins, but for how long can one afford persistent abandonings? I’ve commenced to imagine that there is a sweet smell of decay in my room. Even when all lights burn, my room remains in an unremitting shadow. I can only endeavor to resemble outside it, an imperfect copy of what I’ve already lost somewhere. I stand pure in this decay because our emotions are the rulers. They assail us like robbers, they mock all our resolutions. I’d rather say, I sense deficiency of a land, of a sure terrain, of a sort of permanent landscape of the heart. I'm trapped in my own complex feelings.

Day before when it drizzled, I peered out of my balcony into the coherent and unbroken vastness from horizon to horizon and detected only a void into which I hunted for distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around me with visible heat. It seemed that the shadowed passes around me could not lead out to those remote and sunlit azure hills but only look down on them as if on fabled kingdoms, across the barrier of possibility. The wind that breathed past me and moved the banal wind chimes hanging everywhere in my living room brought phantasmal sound of bells, and expired again, tired as life. In the patter of rain I could listen sober tenor of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred, chances lost, defeats accepted and griefs borne. The progression of sound going from lyrical to even quaint to even harsher. I’ve armed myself with patience and resignation, which is always there in me ready to immunize my failures and curb any desire. Beneath all this is a passive, unmoved repose, the will underlying all personal emotions, my inheritance.

What lingers in some of us, in me is a child but without any childish joy- a pampered, angry little girl, ready to pout if something interferes with my whims. Blandishments and promises will not lure me. I'll sit down expecting the worst. What is worst, is beyond me, but I bet life can devise something. I can not tell whether my reticence expresses coolness of feeling or suppresses happiness that probably I’ve just discovered. In posterity, 'the past', which only scratched old wounds on a tranquil morning, is now, ‘a present’ healing itself and pursuing me into innumerable depleting dreams. The worst injury, the worst betrayal is the knowledge of it. I betray myself, everyday.

So many incredible things have happened that I have become completely blasé. I’m no heroine of a romantic novel and it never was my ideal to die of romance but I try to delve into the worst of suffering, convincing myself, it is pleasure. Every morning I wait for the twilight when the sky turns deep blue with a wide purple channel through it for the night to come flowing in. I hear memory – voices quarrelling. And the talk too is nearly the same. The kind of things said before, repeated now; chewed swallowed. At times, I strain my name in the clamor, the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. I hate myself for being back again, from where I’d fled with a bruised forehead, all purple and gold. Those pages are yellow from age, spotted with droppings of ashes and traces of tears. I keep coming back because I’ve held those memories as a beloved locket; inside which is preserved a tiny distorted image of happiness. Perhaps, I need a deeper melancholy, a renovating anguish, an intolerable pain, a dark cave where sensation is drowned in the enormous, which wangles to rouse me, from the approaching langour of death. I might be buried but I’m fiercely alive and so I require a stroboscopic image pulsing to reassure me by subliminal tricks that though I’m nowhere, I’m home.

I keep pouring, not knowing whether I’m thirsty or to buoy my spirits.. I might be immersed in the vainest of passions but I’m only drunk with emotions.. I want to fall asleep quickly, into a place beyond sleep, deep and silent... grappling in the vague gray that transforms into a hollow blackness inside my head. Hmm .. I’ve had one drink too many, but I’m only a little exuberant, not drunk.

Some scattered thoughts

2007-06-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

I’m recurrently the last to respond to a tag. I don’t mind doing it once a while especially when I’m stuck in a writer’s block, at the same time I know, lot of us don’t enjoy this. The last time I was tagged I’d made up my mind that I won’t tag anybody in the future but this is different. I need to pick five bloggers for the ‘thinking blogger award’ and they are expected to do the same. I’ll like to clarify that the ones I’ve picked mean a lot to me personally, it’s my personal acknowledgment and if they don’t want to carry it forward, it isn’t an obligation.

Coming back to the point, Ano picked me in her list of ‘five’. Getting praised by a versatile writer, in full possession of her art and craft means much! I thank her again for the high praise and also for having me alongside Asuph ! I venerate him .. ahem and I won’t say more coz … never mind .. :D
So here is my list ..

Vi– A reflecting muser! It will be apt to bestow thinking blogger award on someone, who has named her blog – Still thinking! There's an easy charm in her writing. Her regular posts are terse and precise wherein she can open lives, explore ordinary relationships and still manage to penetrate deeper and reveal pulsation of love, emotions, friendship with absolute authenticity. Sadly she rarely posts her stories, poems etc and when she does, after few days, she deletes them. Her novella, Vishal that she’d posted on Sulekha was exemplary.
She is my dearest blogger-friend, one of the most wonderful person I came across over the net and I really mean it. I hope to meet her in person, someday.

Zofo - He has a magnificent love affair with nature. An avid traveler, the photographs he posts uncover some delightful pleasures and dangers of the natural world. The easiest way to head to the wilderness is, visiting his blog! He combines those images with the poet’s sensibility and the effect is uniquely compelling. His poems are passionate, erotic and usually with sorrowful and chaotic undercurrents. While reading him, I’ve often felt I was reading my own words.

Aakash– Another writer with a broad range of talent! He has three diverse blogs, all of a separate genre. His prose is spacious in scope, his poems are rhythmical, his writing in general, is rich in language. He is in command of an array of feelings. For a long time, I wasn’t aware of his poetry blog and marveled at his intriguing and lyrical tales. Quite recently I stumbled on his poetry page and was dazzled by his linguistic exuberance and technical flair.

Inkblot - She seems to me an intrepid explorer of the unseen & invisible because she is sensitive to many changes of colors unnoticed by an average eye. She primarily posts poetry and you can find whole fistfuls of masterpieces on her blog. There are abstruse allusions, casual, even cheeky tones, delightful wordplays, subtle exploration of loss, shapes of varied emotions… I can go on and on. Her occasional prose pieces are equally luminous.

Equivocationalist – I adore his style. His manner is playful and he is both funny and sophisticated. He selects words with a poet's precision and arranges them artfully which conjures up a vivid image. His vocabulary never dwindles to insensitivity. Those who think, I use ‘big’ words should visit him. I unfailingly learn a word or two in every trip. His sense of humor makes these ‘exercises’ quite enjoyable.

Phew! I'm done but taking a cue from Punds , I’ll like to mention some other bloggers, I admire ..

Cheti – His posts are sporadic but of high quality.
IW – He is again, irregular but viscerally funny.
Merryweather – A tender poetess. She makes me ‘wonder’.
Dooka – I miss her dearly. I hope she comes back.

Basically, all who grace me with their visit are special to me so if I haven’t mentioned someone.. forgive me :(

This award was started here.

You have to award five others whose blog you think deserve this award.
Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.
Write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.
Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all — blogs that really get you thinking!

It took me a while to figure out html links. Thanks Vi for the help you’d provided long back. Thankfully the new blogger has made things easier for a dumbo like me. I hope these links work.
.
***
I'm not sure if I merited but the event of acquiring the coveted thinking blogger award almost coincides with my second blogging anniversary. In two years, I’ve posted about sixty write-ups, which isn’t remarkable in terms of quantity. However, as a yearly ritual, I read some old posts and felt, from a wild kid I’m beginning to sound something like a woman. I sense a perceptible improvement in myself, which is heartening.
I read a 55-word story on Asuph’s blog today and thought of writing my own story in that many words on this ‘grand’ occasion.

Thoughts, sometimes they are wide and practical, sometimes potholed and well used, sometimes deep and silent, sometimes mysterious. At times, indigo and burnt sienna, periodically an apocalyptic vision with mixtures of dark and gray. They change color as they rise and fall, they are never all one thing. Consequently, she decided to be herself.

It was on off-handed try. I promise to get better ;)

Retrograding Glances

2007-06-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

It is my story. Or perhaps, a part of it, is my neighbor’s. Forgive me, what took place forty-fifty years ago is clear to me like yesterday but what happened yesterday seems far away. It’s exacting to face the mirror. My face transformed into a stringed network of wrinkles while it waited for the joys of pubescence. That young girl, who stayed next door, was a replica of my youth. I read my own desires into her slender figure because as an erring mortal I could not be dispassionate. I solemnized my seventy-sixth birthday last month but even at this age, my life is not without it’s moment of unexpected excitement. To understand how completely the dead may survive, one had to meet me. I lived through her, in the outside world..

I occupied a four-bedroom dwelling alone, in perpetual darkness. During the day, intermittently, I fell into light sleep and dreamt I was falling into depths that were darker and tighter. Each time, it seemed I’d reached the bottom, the foundation collapsed under me and I began to sink again with greater speed. In the night, I sat on my terrace smelling the unknown past that had infiltrated the stale air. I looked at the neighborhood I’d grown up in through the tree leaves that had always trembled between my visions. In those times my adolescence came back to me with a sickening poignancy. I’d conceived that being the youngest meant, being the luckiest. Little did I know then, that this so-called luck came with a curse. You watch them all go one after the other and they never return. I comprehended myself to be no different from anything there that the wind was blowing on, my happiness of no relevance, in the dark torrent of nature.

The only ray reached my isolated dump when she came back from work, a few minutes. . preceding the sunset. She had left her parents and small town to chase her dreams; she said and had rented a flat in a house adjacent to mine. I don’t remember how we augmented fondness for each other and cultivated a queer friendship. I was her gray-haired friend and she dropped by everyday, prior to retiring in her own lonely chambers. . The light outside seemed brighter when she arrived and the rectangular patterns of sunlight wavered on the peeling wall, swirling, as though they mirrored the rushing waves of her young heart. Those days, she flashed with prismatic fires as she had found what she’d been looking for. Her man, who was: ‘half saint, half demon, half air, half shade horned like a buck winged like a bat, with the mind of a scholar and heart of a highwayman.’ These were her words or my own, I’m not sure because I’d known a man like that. But that part can wait..

All was well in our world, Rekha’s and mine. Yes, Rekha was her name, till my childhood friend, Shikha, returned. The very same day, Rekha behaved erratically. She kept clenching and unclenching her hands and when she spoke her words were slurred. She enunciated that she could not stand this prosaic city with its noise, hurry, dirt and greed for money. Then she stated something about her wretched love. The entire romantic claptrap wasn’t worth a penny so another philosophy followed. Those ‘romantic loves’ that our poets laud with such lofty phrases actually ruin lives. We were bubbles of the same ocean, moss from the same swap. If we could not love everybody, one should not love anybody. Finally she broke down and all this boiled down to one plain and simple cliché that the man she was so earnestly in love with was presently dating her best friend.

I'd grasped that much of the love of our time is sheer betrayal. It is often hatred too but I did not know how to console her. It had put me back to an epoch, which I had thought of already belonging to an eternity. My own feeling was that the greatest virtue would be to abandon the body and all its iniquities. I wondered if the fight for survival could opiate her as loneliness had opiated me or she still dreamed of glorious adventures. She retreated and I was contemplating her case, when Shikha called unexpectedly. I had to accede though I did not wish to see her. She’d married and moved to Australia almost fifty years back. Her residence close by had been locked for past twenty years since her parents passed away. She was their only child and visited them occasionally. Though she had lost her husband long ago, I’d cerebrated she would never return. She had been implicated in one of the most painful experiences of my life. The embers of our friendship had turned into ashes, now cold, and blowing on them would neither revive nor extinguish anything.

I waited for her, pondering, what scared me more. The prospect of her being as old and wrinkled like me, or the fear that she would still be the beauty, she once was. She was a few months older and we’d grown together. I was vivacious, a lovely leaping gazelle and she was the lilting incomparable serene beauty. Together we could set any place on fire. The delicious irony was, we fell in love with the same man, Neel. It started as a joke. We’d met him through a common friend in a dingy theater, where he played Shakespearean characters. His pep, his oozing passion, his diligence and effectiveness had cast a deepening spell on young girls, who imagined themselves as Miranda or Rosalind and since then he figured amongst our favorite evening topics. We discussed his aquiline features and fantasized about his muscular body. In that dewy age, he wasn’t any less than an indolent starlet from motion pictures. I’d stealthily started meeting him and we’d even tossed ardent protestations of love at each other. I pretended to not care but I was afraid of losing him. Amidst this Shikha confided in a delirious tone that Neel had proposed to marry her. I noticed that she had flowered into writhing sheaves of blossom, which left me whimpering. I felt cheated and gave her an exaggerated account of my rendezvous with Neel. She listened quietly while tears glistened in her large eyes. We never mentioned him again.

Shortly after, she settled for a marriage arranged by her parents and left the country. We drifted for a long time, down the languid current of reminiscence. I sat unmoved though she tried many times to push her way back through the overgrown channels of past. I cruelly and willfully smashed up the charmed world of love and admiration around me with my incessant cynicism. I’d lost interest in Neel and never cared to inquire his whereabouts. But he remained with me, a word, a name, a guilt in my conscious. There wasn’t enough of me to die then but so I wished. ‘I want to die!’ how often do we say flippantly? Now I don’t need to say that. It is in the proximity.. I can sniff it.. and I’m petrified. How do we know what happens after death? I really hope that death is the end of all our nonsense. Ten years ago, someone apprised me, Neel expired mysteriously.

****

It was really late when Shikha came and enclosed me into a tight but chilly embrace. She appeared an image of despair. She was now a tall wrinkled bony woman, another version of my stout and furrowed form. She smelled of rosewater and carnations and smiled the smile of those who had long since discovered the vanity of all human endeavors. She oscillated between outbursts of light-chatter and periods of taciturnity when she seemed lost in her own thoughts. We discussed almost everyone. Her parents and mine, my brothers and her favorite cousin, their children, our common friends, carefully avoiding the topic of Neel. A sentimental apology toward a memory already classic was vacuous.

The breaking down of the barricade of reticence between us had discharged buried emotions. She exited but beside her, my private injuries paled. What was the difference between us after so many years? I had lost my vivaciousness, she had lost her beauty and we had both lost our youth. What had the years given us in return of what they had taken away? Some relationships take decades to develop subtle glow. It seemed we were close.

Meanwhile Rekha had transformed into a perfect specimen of lady talkers who vex you with no ideas and try to protect you even with one moment of silence. I’d believed that the present generation would’ve developed new attitudes between sexes. They would no longer demand faithfulness and would be putting an end to jealousy. It disappointed me. What was there left to preach her? nothing but silence. While with Shikha, our eyes met in a lonely simple way such as had never happened before. Tardily, it became my daily routine. A couple of hours after Rekha’s departure, Shikha breezed in and we plunged into reveries of childhood. We dined together and took after-dinner strolls. At times we passed a crematorium which waited for us and our ambitions & illusions.

Our favorite spot was a neighborhood park. On one such night we sat there mutely on a bench. That night had an aura of cosmic change and a hope that I’d never forsaken arose in me. Suddenly I discerned that the ground heaved up and the streetlights intertwined, elongated and foggy. The park began to circle like a carousel. We spotted our proverbial man but his cheeks were sunken and a sickly pallor lay on his face. He looked as if he was on the verge of sleep, his eyes were those of basset hound and his silver eyebrows grew in fat tufts. Soon, the difference began to disappear, as if some hidden power were quickly retouching his face to the image, which remained in my memory. We sat and observed, gripping each other’s hand, waiting for that moment to pass. I perceived a morbid and uncontrollable fear of death stating out in the form of a pair of dreadfully familiar ghosts, one clutching my hand and the other playing spiteful tricks and filling my nostrils with insidious dust. We were frozen for hours.

Finally the sun rose, like a coal glowing on the heap of ashes, casting a light, scarlet as the fire of hell. Shikha silently nodded to me and walked toward her own building & I dragged myself home. I felt drowsy and comforted just as I experienced after any kind of misfortune. It was, as if I’d been delaying the funeral of a death that had occurred long ago. The burial was over and now the process of grieving for my lost years could begin. I was ready to abandon the daily drudgeries, the joys and catastrophes of fools. I dozed off and my eyes would blink open, stunned by a dream I instantly forgot. Gradually, things stopped bothering me. I fell into a stupor for hours and was awakened by a thunderous pounding on the door. There stood Abhinav, my nephew with a small suitcase. I had so much adrenaline in me that I sensed no emotion.

I steered him in and looked at him questioningly. We exchanged few words when I heard another knock. Now Rekha popped in with couple of my neighbors. I felt so addled that I forgot to be surprised by that invasion. Rekha vanished for a brief moment to fetch snacks and drinks from her apartment while others asked aberrant questions about my health and well-being. I retained the impression of nocturnal horrors and answered in a daze. One of my neighbors, enjoined that he’d telephoned Abhinav after discussing with Rekha that in my interest I should be admitted to a ‘home’, as I needed help and round the clock vigilance. I was informed that I wandered in the night at odd hours and had spent the last night alone on the bench in the park. When I protested that I was with Shikha, Abhinav asked, who Shikha was. I reminded him of Aunt Shikha, about whom he had heard from family friends and had perhaps seen her too. He frowned and held my hand gently. He uttered it wasn’t possible and then divulged something that I already knew. Six months ago, in a distant country, Shikha had passed away, in an old age home.

Anamnesis

2007-06-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

It is not the season
to lie beneath a mughal boulder
with your eyes on the sky
letting the cosmic harmonies rush through you
Nor the time to seek effectual solace
of whiskey and soda
and evoke a memory
to dig details of a crumpled past
beyond which there seems
no present hope of penetrating

It is time to remember
those moments spent with you
as a cruise almost chromolithographic
in vitality of reflection
an epoch in my growth
a verse that gains in perfection
in magnitude
in meaning
as one brings to its interpretation
more experience of life
a finer emotional sense

I’ll remember you
as merely one more grain of frankincense
in the altar of my insatiable passion
as one more testimony to life’s strenuous renewals
of natures secret to draw fragrance from corruption.

I’ll remember your kisses
their crisp and homely flavor
as a native dish -
one of the domestic fusions
for which the exile palate is supposed to yearn

I’ll remember you
quite simply
for I loved you
and it was the last bitterest price
I'd paid to learn
that love has a price
that it is worth so much
and no more

I’ll remember you
but on a long day
when the rain will plunge us both
Into our own separate dreams
I’ll nod and turn away

with that refusal of intelligence
which perpetually asks for more
which makes no contract
with the self of yesterday
which is enticed from its old purpose
by the guiles of the next best thing
it is a poignant case, but a common one
and the next best thing
usually wins............

peccadillo

2007-06-08T03:47:00.001-07:00

Do you sleep that sleep
of conjugal indifference
as you were drawn toward
that luminous intemperance
where life is a peaceful act
spent in the close-packed
shelter of matrimony?

Are you content
In this austere beauty
In these primal sensations
of colorless well-being
as you’ve swallowed
the last noxious draught
of what they had termed
a filial responsibility?

Or you still retain
in its ineffable hue
A background azure
of intenser memories
the grotesque visions
from love-affair absolved
of marital contingency?

For wisdom my friend
though you pretend
can no further extend
than this first heaven
and from there on
everything is lust -
masquerading as divinity.

I can solely offer
my bare self
for here at least
life beats, as it is –
not brave and garlanded
but naked and grovelling
diseased and dragging
yet lifting its head
to whiff infinity.