Still, Life

It was a birthday.

Flowers came in forgotten colours
Yellow-pink lilies, yellow gerberas,
Red roses, purple orchids
Sunflowers.

In my diurnal oscillation
Between stillness and flow
A pause unrushed, tender,
Of old affectionate faces
Flashed mellow, slow.

In fatigue of losing ways
On present, absent everydays
I looked for a yellow canvas,
Imagined a birthday poem
Scribbled somewhere
Then adrift, by life's zephyrs. 

These are autumn evenings now.
Through fruitions, precipitates,
I desired your chaos and calm again,
Hesitant, in light and shade, I did still wait
Someplacetime else on earth
Where without you
The day did not end.

-----

Untitled

Blood smells a bit like fish and familiarity

In a way men will never know.

Pain crawls up and shackles her in silence

For five days she is 

A seasonal river that flows to let go.

Crimson looks like death; and intense life

In a way no man will ever know.

Only she who was born

To live many lives in one

The first flood, the falls,

The fruition, the flow, the fadeout...

To her,

Blood smells heady

Like the fragrance of yesterlife,

At its poignant best

when it is time to let go. 

Cwtch

...

An embrace.

Loving, protecting, safeguarding and claiming. With intimacy, earnestness, ownership. A safe place in two peoples' hearts.

So I ask her again. Do you know what is that thing which will heal ? And let you breathe a bit. You've been holding that breath for too long, do you realise that.

Have seen fuller eyes but not ones that can brim so much and still hold for hours, years. She is not with me, or anyone. Looks away with hesitation, afraid of resting eyes on something forbidden, reliving ununderstood words, uncertain what to feel.

A silent hour between midnight and dawn. Even when broken by life, scattered in space, at this hour, seeing the sky always makes her dream. She closes her eyes.

Isnt it quiet. The city sleeps early of late. Fatigued around each other all day, in and out of rooms, companionships, pretences. It is quiet, and flute plays in a soft night raga with muted tanpura underneath.

The moon is crayoned and calm. Sometimes behind a cloud in usual transience. Stars are sparse, her pole star unmoved at his distance, always giving an illusion of looking at her.

She feels as if each of these, soft light of the moon, skin touching hair caressing breeze, the sky the quiet the darkness this one solitary magical moment in time, every element of creation perceptible to her senses is nothing but bits of him.

The flute is without an end.

I ask her. Do you know what is that one thing which will heal ? And let you breathe a bit?

...

Avenues

Sand and cement were in abundance. Only if they knew how to seek a little space, and how to take the shape of four walls, there might have been a home.

Alas they didnt. Instead, layered over soft earth to create two avenues, along which, these two souls, went on travelling forever.

Two avenues therefore.
Spending lives past each other, carving each other out, finding ways through each other, letting go of each other often... to be lost in unfamiliar parts of the city. Meeting again at sunset horizons. To be lost into each other like two blending colours of dusk.

Thus met the two of them as well. Not when thirsting, not when forgetting, but only when their paths chanced to become one for a little while along the journey.

Every few years, the avenues would freeze and so would their tired feet. At that frozen moment, one, or perhaps both of them, would pause to think of the home that never was. It could have been ... why did it never. They would look at their own trails in bewilderment as if throwing the very question at two indifferent Möbius avenues -

Why did it never ?

They gazed hard and long at the road as if to force a foundation and make a magical home emerge right there from nowhere.

And implausible as it may sound, that makeshift home would then appear from someone's impossible dream. And the two of them would sit and smile and talk and go about their day as if they have been living in that home forever.

...

[Adaptation of an excerpt from Amrita Pritam's "Yeh Kahani Nahi"]

I love you

Like a bluebird

Flying in and out

Of morning rain

Three words...

Come home

From a faraway isle

To you again

Perch awhile

On wet cornices

At window pane

Rest at night

On a roof skylight

In starry skies

Three words...

Like a bluebird

Here now

There then

On your shoulder,

In your hands,

Now home in you,

Now lost again.

...

Yellow Fever

...

Fever makes my body
A bit like the mind -
Tender.
Sensitive.
Flushed.

Pain numbing throat, ears
Be like chapters
If you focus, you read and learn
A thing or two.

The clog that hides in sinuses
Apparently indifferent
Merely look for paths
To elsewhere, elseone.

Throbbing of veins in temples
Waves running through the head
Pulsating assorted pains,
Connect me to my sheaths.

When sleep eludes,
I play a game of questions
To peel off the tangible
And find out who.

...

This. Journey of delirium
Beside an open window
Of an unhurried train
Yes I see you pass
In shades of chrome
Of mustard fields
I turn my head
And look behind
You are nowhere
To be touched or seen.

Traveler,
Remind my fevered body and mind
To look for you between the sheaths ;
To look within.

...

Desiderium

You will be fine

As you have me inside
Not the me of the world
The one to whom you surrender
Your self your soul
For reset and redemption
One that melts an exterior
Showing a shining core

Do you know
Your heart shines
Like a searing burning star
Like a lighthouse
For miles and millenia