Not yet ready

 

Soiled with shame,

Scratching the crust of grief

on the skin

to make it a live wound,

most of us are not yet

ready to heal;

just not in acceptance

of the idea of healing and wellness.

The killer kindness

 

Sometimes

pitying eyes

hurt more than

hateful

and angry words.

The war

Some fighting

to douse fire in the belly,

Some in the mind,

Some in the heart,

Some in the soul,

All fighting for food, knowledge, love,

And these sire a concoction of ambition

to breed, greed, anger, fear, insecurity. 

The eraser

 

I’m in enchanting fascination with life

when you melt to joy in my embrace,

Pleasure swimming on the wings of

freedom in my rushing blood,

Joyfully the sun setting around me,

The light in your eyes

dwarfing the looming darkness around,

Your touch crafting a sweet tenderness,

Excitement pulsing through

our shared identity,

The expansive sweeps of time

narrowed to the tiny

curve of your lips.

 

Now when the fairy lights are off

and transitory rewards gone,

If an eraser must be

for all those moments,

let it be a soft one,

not hard like wire bristles,

I hope

that's not asking much.

The frozen world

 

Holding your memories

is like embracing a pillar of ice,

It won’t melt,

Rather the holder’s flesh will freeze,

The iciness with a mysterious code

where one gets sucked

into its voluptuous embrace.

 

Walking with your memories

is like passing through a kind of

lavender-scented glacial landscape,

Driven into a scented icy mirage,

Where the heart gets frozen

with pain entangled in it,

A frozen heart inside a frozen persona

in a frozen landscape,

And life and living

shrinking into invisibility.

 

Me frozen here

and you flowing there,

An ice wall

separating our different worlds,

The storm of pain

now freezing and settling into

a dull, persistent ache

in a frozen heart.    

Friction

 

A frictionless life

is no existence,

Because without the rub of pain

was there ever any gain?

The stress, the tension, the pull, the push

keep us touching life’s surface,

They are the agents of survival

guarding us against doom and decay.

 

The friction between

our dreams and reality we face;

between what we fight for

and the result we get;

between smiles and bitter tears;

between love and hate;

between giving and taking;

between dark and light.

 

This friction is what

keeps the chariot’s wheel moving,

This rub between joy and sorrow

creates the spark,--

the spark of life,

This grazing between what is

and what we desire

fuels the palpitation of life

in the tiny point of our existence,

It propels this little heartbeat

in the bosom of vast cosmos.

 

This friction is our causal force,

No point in hating it,

Come to terms with it,

It’s like accepting the grounding gravity

without which flying is meaningless.

Ganga garima