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.
