It’s a sea of all-consuming indulgence,
A vast, pleasure pool,
And like a little cork piece
you bob on its turbulent waves,
You get heaved, bashed, thrown in air,
You gasp for breath with excitement,
But storms can’t last forever,
They have to stop and die,
Then you float lifelessly,
You pine for that high, that kick,
You feel life has drained out,
To be kicked by the storms of love
is what you view as being alive.
Love crushes you,
Consumes you,
It feasts upon you,
Dances on your head in wild revelry,
You become a stage
for its foot-tapping partying,
Its heels stomp on your chest,
Thump, Thump, Thump,
Your heart beats to its tunes,
Your soul sings to its composition,
Your eyes see its colors,
Your nose smells its fragrance,
Your fingers touch its curves,
Your tongue tastes its nectar.
It’s almost like a possessing entity,
Something that descends upon you,
Shaping you at its whims and fancies,
It’s not you,
It’s above and beyond you,
You realize it when it drops its spell,
leaving you like a garden
lynched on a storm’s path.
It’s a tasty addiction,
You are deshaped and deflated
once it abandons you,
You then hanker after the same shape,
You become a storm-chaser,
You run after another storm
to be jostled, pushed, pulled, ruffled,
Hoping you will get a fresh shape,
you allow yourself
to be hammered on the anvil.
The arrow of nostalgia
piercing through lost years,
Moving swiftly through cloudy past,
To hit home with precision,
To land at a moment,
A little dot in space-time fabric
containing a tiny slice of life
when we talked, held hands,
When just being together
was to feel full, rested, contended.
You left and I stayed
in the lovely orchard we’d built,
The garden, flowers, fruits, leaves,
where the soul now grieves,
Memories scattered around like
an autumnal drizzle of leaves,
And me like a gardener
hoeing, pruning, spading,
Working to bloom spring flowers in autumn,
Trying to undo the fall,--
the autumn that permanently
descended and sat upon the orchard,
Coloring it with yellow-brown colors of fall,--
Forever,
Toils where the gardener of springs
in an autumn-possessed orchard.
Why be ashamed and apologetic
about what you are?
Why try to be a fraction of your full self
to fit in the mold of others?
To gather fake sense of security,
it needs lots of explanation and effort,
By being a fraction of yourself,
you are like a fragile leaf on the ground,
lying there to be broken under others’ boots,
But by being your full self,
you become a green leaf on a high branch,
soaking sunrays,
kissing the dew,
and swaying to the free breeze.
I’d come closer by an inch
and you’d step back by a mile,
An inch of reclaim
paid with a mile of declaim,
More inches breeding more miles,
You vanishing towards the horizon,
Then gone,
Then your memories would recede
in the same proportion and manner,
That’s how time and space grow,
That’s how this cosmos expands,--
at my cost.
A mysterious longing
smolders through the day
and burns at night,
An exciting anticipation,
An unsparing desire,
The pores of your skin
humming with excitement.
A feeling of remarkable audacity,
which makes you unbothered about the
usual jostle and hustle of life,
Something looks straight into your eyes,
And you flinch, get tamed and surrender
to a gleaming, flashy star.
Your identity gets focused
in the chaos and hubbub of life,
You stand apart,
It even makes you feel proud,
even haughty,
to own this exclusive excitement,
You slyly smile,
A warmth spreads through you,
Melts the clods of uneasiness,
Overpowers your molecules of ego.
You flow,
You enter a spring,
A celebration begins,
Almost a rebirth and renewal,
You kiss the new sprouts,
You appreciate the flowers,
You feel the breeze on your skin,
Your eyes see the beauty around,
Your soul feels the all-pervading love
when your heart gets a sweet shove
at the mere look of your dearest dove.
We are basically
a very lonely species,
Loneliness pervades our being,
Maybe we love being lonely,
And to keep its bitter-sweet charm,
we allow interruption to our loneliness
through love, affection, friendship, relationships,
But we know we have to
get back to be lonely again,
We are ready to pay the costs for it,
We squander away love and friendships
to buy our next installment of loneliness.
Mostly, we are viewing ourselves
in terms of what we are not
and what we couldn’t become,
In this way,
we are simply repulsing life,
We deny our very own little reality,
our existence,
our life,
our twinkling little puddle
under the starlight,
We ignore the wild flowers
that offer consolation
if we had given them a little bit
more than a cursory look.
The conveyor belt of pain
carrying the weighty stones of despair,
The bond of happiness dry and dead,
Soul aching with sorrow, anger, even guilt,
Body’s cells colonized by fear,
Going alone and forlorn,
Feeling resentment against a world
where everyone seemed to have worked out
how to be successful and happy,
Everyone except himself.
Slowly receding from all possibilities of life,
Silently stepping into the pool of non-existence,
Taking a revenge against life
by retreating from its false promise,--
the lollipop of hope,
Presuming life had been repulsing him
by burning and charring his aspirations
not only of fame and grandeur, but even
the little things that come naturally to everyone
whether they seek these or not.
His eyes like tall arched windows,
Face like a weather-beaten, mossy stone façade,
Body like an ancient battered brick structure,
A shattered star being sucked by a black hole,
Utterly frightened of life,
while all along he imagined
himself to be scared of death,
Haunted by the feeling of being incomplete,
Full of regrets for not being able to
welcome life as one should,
And that in a way
was an invitation to death.
Regrets constantly chiming in his chest,
The chances he squandered brimming his mind,
clouding him,
turning him blind to
the options and choices that had been beckoning,
trying to draw his attention.
Now, to forget the fear of life,
he decides to die.
A suicide.
A shameful exit.
Life can be tricky,
if even about the simplest issues
you are too frisky,
Prudence is to be at ease
with situations and time,
Complications then wouldn't chime,
And days would pass like a free rhyme!
We are not a mistake
to be corrected,
We are just humans
on our correct path;
just needing sometimes
kind, loving, caring words
from our fellow travelers.
The sad musings of a lone pine on a weather beaten ridge:
Where have the birds gone?
Too many of them used to roam
the sky over my head,
And play, love and make nest
at their joyous best
among branches mine,
Now my pine's soul doth pine,
Yesterday, I saw a bird couple too sad,
Are many of them dead?
I ought not have a sad tear in my eye,
Nor a pining heart's sigh,
My roots are now the soil
that fuels the fresh leaves' toil
for new smiles and fragrance,
Much of what was once above
is alive now below!
Past and future
are parasitic in temperament,
Always seek to expand, grow and stretch
beyond reality,
beyond practical limits.
The poor ‘present’ is a casualty,
It’s like a pointed peak,--
small but high, lofty, uplifting
where the upslope of future
and the downslope of past meet,
intersect and forget their tension momentarily,
And that’s when we actually live.
In childhood, we’ve more of ‘present’
and hence we’re lively,
The youth’s a run for the future,
As we walk, we leave behind a trail
and future shrinks,
past stretches,
There comes a point
when all we’ve is the ‘past’
in our old bones, dimmed eyes,
Again we arrive
at a phase of dulled, dimmed present,
Just a grave to look forward to;
few surviving memories
in the tiny vanishing puddle of life,
mired in mud,--
a few fishes flapping sometimes,
The past meaningless
and the present
almost a curiosity about death.
That’s how I gathered her,--
a sad pile of
shards, fragments, broken pieces,
But that’s love,
Broken pieces feel like
soft rosebuds in your arms,
They bleed the skin
as you press with gentle warmth,
You become a maker or mender,
The broken pieces get together
and acquire a shape in the kiln
of your care and share,--
a lovely woman in your arms,
full of dreams and desires;
strong, confident, vigorous.
Love first softly brushes,
then sadistically crushes,
Now it’s your turn to be broken
and spill out of her arms,
Get shattered and scattered,
Waiting for some enchanting
treasure hunter of love
to see the potential in the broken pieces,
To gather you up, your fragments
in her lovely arms,
Love will sprout again,
Giving you a new shape
in new arms with fresh charms.
If you allow loneliness to push you,
it’ll gorge on your choices and confidence,
It’ll corner you like a little mouse
shivering with fear,
seeing snakes and cats
in all that which moves around.
Loneliness is the crazy lover,
It’ll pursue one, always,
That’s its nature.
Whom does it catch?
The one who can’t outpace it.
Who are its prey?
The ones heavily burdened,--
with guilt and anger of the past;
or foolish illusions of the future.
Beat it, outpace it, confidently,
Like unburdened, swift horses,
Light like wind,
Swift like arrows,
Clanking their hooves on the cobblestones,
Pacing to the tunes of the present,--
Now,
Not an alley, side street or crossing
misses their confident eye,
They make choices,
They are self-assured,
Loneliness lags far behind them,
The bulb of their presence
dispels the darkness
where the night-bugs of loneliness
sprout like poisonous fungus.
Little instruments of intimacy
in the vast machine of love,
Enjoying the soft brush of lips,--
a solid stone fort’s support;
a steely assurance,
Melting into each other,
Skins seeping into each other,
Leaving no further distance to be covered,
Making a single entity
in thoughts, feelings and actions.
Then the walls crept between them,
Big stony walls,
Intimidating blocks
separating them,
Dividing them,
Cutting them apart,
The jarring fissures,
The glue-work of abandoned love
seeping and cementing the walls,
The walls crept high enough
to leave them complete strangers.
They carried each other’s torn skin flakes
on their changed identities,
The dead flakes of martyred love
sticking as sweet-bitter memories.
They walked along the stony walls,
There are no doors or windows,
Nostalgic entreaties fail,
Hope is lost,
They know that
both of them died in their own ways,
Losing a part of the self
in losing the other,
Thus they moved ahead wounded,
Then drifted away even from the wall.
A collector of broken things,
An assembler of discarded pieces,
Making it a better world
without setting it as a goal;
just by being selflessly kind;
just a safe, secure bubble of existence;
being loving where
the outside strife won’t break in;
sometimes even giving shelter
to the people who shun love
purely due to the
fear of losing a loved one.
What is the purpose of attaining freedom,
if you stay locked up inside yourself?
What purpose your wings serve,
if you decide to stay in the
cage of dogmas, curtailing conventions
and belittling beliefs forged by others?
What purpose your mind serves,
if it’s fogged with the clouds of
others’ hate, greed and ambitions?
What purpose your legs serve,
if they merely follow the mass
sleepwalking after a hypnotizing manipulator?
What purpose your hands serve,
if they are mere instruments
to fulfill someone’s evil designs?
What purpose your eyes serve,
if you see just the craftily managed
scenes to pamper the little man in you?
What purpose your ears serve,
If they just drum to the beats of
jingoism, rhetoric and false narratives?
If you are such a person as above,
you die as a baby even in old age
because you left your senses unspent;
almost untouched and virginal,
Born as a baby and dead as a baby,
Where was life during those long decades?
I was sufficient already,
But then I began to see myself
through others’ eyes,
And my sufficiency crashed,
Something missing in this,
Something in that,
Sadly brooding I sat,
Pampered by fate
as its pessimistic, sulking pet.
Long before others,
we judge our own self,
Our own critical eye
cuts, bruises, lacerates, downplays,
devaluates and thumbs us down,
Showing us in poor light,
Long before the outsider’ shears
prune our self-specific, luxuriant sprawl,
we commit self-inflicted wounds,
And around these home-made wounds,
we keep building defensive ramparts,
Whereupon we stand like a hound
and throw catapults
at the imagined enemies around.
