We are 'Us' through...

We are us,
Through our senses,
Our perception of realities.

Were you deaf,
You would never know,
The overpowering pain –
Of a grief-stricken wail.
The contagious mirth –
Of cackling laughter.

Were he mute,
He could never really convey,
While empathizing or dissenting,
Even while gazing and smiling –
The significance of sentient silence.

Were she blind,
She could never receive or perceive,
The sudden magic of blue-bells,
The wild red of setting sun,
The winking slant of waning moon,
The subtle shades of a look –
Lust, longing, love, helplessness.

Were I bereft of intuition –
The smothering scent of spring,
The sudden aloneness of a moment,
The studied silence amongst twitters,
The watchful gravity of a gaze,
Would fail to merge…
The slow fear of an unanticipated intimacy,
Would escape me...
And in the wide wingspan of a single point in time,
I would fail to be afraid.

Yes we are us,
Through our senses,
Our versions of realities.

April 24, 2010.

Losing Integrity

Into the noticeably detached otherness
Of hitherto well-cherished relationships,
We breathe in and breathe out remembrance.
Frantically groping, catching
At sand slipping out of our useless fingers.

Sometimes, we all have to live to watch
Watch love as we knew it, fade away
Watch bitterness replace remembrance.

Self-awareness is such a bitch,
It makes you watch your cruelties.
It makes you want to die,
End yourself before
The inevitable execution of certain deeds.
It captures your video, as you hit the ground
And break to pieces, at the bottom of your mind.
It shows you the end,
The sordid unhappiness of the long wrong road
The only road ahead.

It makes you question your integrity –
The only treasure you (think you) own.

It eliminates alternate possibilities,
Decreases probability of probabilities.
It slowly seals the crevices of light
That once lead the way to your dreams.
It makes you see what you want,
And then shows you what you’ll get.


‘No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You might find
You get what you need…’ *

April 18, 2010.

* The Rolling Stones

Adaptation

Something is different
Unfamiliar here.
Like the clouds,
Floating so much nearer,
So much more snub-nosed,
Than those back home.
They don’t puzzle my sight anymore…
Jus' like I no longer perceive,
The illusion of flat-walled-ness
That the subway stairway
Used to present,
The first few times.

I have to wantonly yearn
To withdraw…
From some nook of my memory attic,
The subtle difference
The careful distance
Preserved,
Etched on a tablet.


If only our interpersonal familiarities,
Were as adaptable
As the mutating antennae
Of our physical senses.

Apr 10th and 15th, 2010.

Salt

Days are evening gray
In sullen rains –
Bored rivulets laze sinuously
As the dissolving soil
Thickens them into muddy goo,
Making it harder,
Harder to walk,
Harder to move forward.

Beauty hasn’t been enough lately –
To startle me,
Take my breath away,
Lure.

Salt.
That’s what it abruptly came as,
To my imagination –
The taste of skin.

My hand holds my hand,
Stripping off all color from star magnolias.
Nothing chases me down the road,
Work, lab, phone calls…
Nothing draws me out of this corner.

I am braver though, than the rest
I seek redress in petty poetry,
In carving crooked half-clothed verses
And plastering them
Like neon signs
On a flashy bar entrance.

I am braver though, than the rest
I allow my hand to pull me out,
Through my hand and sit,
Cross-legged, face-to-face
And look on into darkness,
Meaninglessness of life,
Through the holes in my eyes.

I am braver though, than the rest
Than the best
I will fake a smile,
Fabricate a reason…
I will hide the secret well.

I will let the veil stay,
Covering the meanings they think it hides
I will let the veil stay,
Lest they see their frightened faces
I will let the veil stay,
Over the mayhem of men in mirrors
I will let the veil stay
I will let them pray.

April 7th, 2010.

A Small Matter

So small a matter.

I lie hunted and crouched, in this dark corner of existence… by slick, merciless, blood-shot loneliness.

I perceived two faces today, an unseen one tattling, and a guilty one confronted. The tattler confounds me for its (seeming) pre-meditation; the guilt-ridden from its inability to transmit comfort (what it seemed to want to offer). I writhe in this corner and the air spatters me with nameless emotions that jerk around and squeeze my being.

So small a matter.

Months… yes, after months, I suddenly remember dying… dying back in those times when matters weren't so small. Being near-dead is hard work, full of suffering.
That’s what people do to you, even those as insignificant as lunch-time friends, few month old passers-by.

And haha… So. Small. A matter.

Perhaps…. That’s why nature comforts. It never says anything. It never deludes you into a comfort zone and later jerk you around. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t fuckin’ lie.

April 1st, 2010.

Ugly

‘Reason’
What a cheat this concept is.
It deludes you,
Into thinking, that like apples,
People fall with gravity.

People fall,
They jus’ damn fall.
Taking me down.

Why?
Why each time someone falls,
Others get sucked in
In the dimple left in space?
Perhaps the common air we breathe,
Perhaps our invisibly chained conscience.

Dropping down from the trees,
This shallow land of trolls,
Is somewhat ugly.
They told me to ask not,
For whom the bell tolls
It tolls for me...

April 1st, 2010.

Unrecorded

Some infant verses, shut-lid and crying,
Are left un-recorded –

Like Kublai khan’s magic,
At the pinnacle of a dream,
The rhythm shattered by the waking,
And I die.

Phrases framed in the swirling crowds
Of a trashed walkway,
Vanished in the quiet peace of my room,
And I die.

And some in the quiet of setting sun
Carefully fretted and set free
Wantonly, to mingle with the cosmos,
Yet I die.

One such lost song came to me –
We were driving down that sun-lit road,
Slightly caked crisp,
In anticipation of summer…
I lost it in the cackle of day
I lost it in the cackle of day…

Grains of sand – scattered on the beach,
Irretrievable.

Mar 27th, 2010.

Logic

People un-policed,
Like in catastrophes
Are bereft of blame…
So police must be.

People, unafraid,
Like Nazis on killing sprees
Are stripped of shame…
So hell must be.

And if hell must be,
Then heaven must be,
And if afterlife thus,
Has to be…
.
.
.
Then God IS?

Mar 27th, 2010.

Walls

Let us build another wall,
A new wall to validate
The need for that other wall
Around the walled wall.

One hundred and ninety two -
That’s only the official factions
Who fortify and help sustain
The walling of these mended walls.

Jus’ because a woman’s water,
Incidentally broke
On a certain patch of earth –
It must proudly belong to you!
[or you to it?]

You there, off yonder canopy,
Here take, remains of a proud tree,
[I’ve heard them call it money]
And more of that tree, with my biography!

Cultivate a palatable ruse,
To let me in and someone out,
Or vice versa, or not at all,
Let your whim choose.

It is only a small matter,
Of ever progressing time,
Until mother earth crumbles
Weighed under six billion walls.


Mar 18th – 21st, 2010.

Spring is in the Air

For once, not out of weariness,
My mind chooses -
To be silenced, unbartered.

One should sometimes settle,
For less than an answer.

When contemplating compromise,
The sweet fruit of assumption
Is far more palatable…
Knowing, you know,
Comes brewed in hemlock.

Have you noticed,
The peeping of velvety fragrant leaves?
And how,
Habituated by protracted stretches of snow,
I had forgotten how I love colors…
Oh, how I love colors!

This lonely spring,
I shall wander in woodlands,
Drenching in the scent of pine and solitude.

March 9, 2010.

Flashback

How tenderly fragile -
Like a snowflake,
On a warm windshield.
I wish I could hold it,
Save it, word it, preserve it...

The fleeting glimpse
Of a passionately guarded emotion,
Tied intricately, inseparably -
to one garish message tone.

Feb 17th, 2010.

Bon Voyage

From a traveler, to a traveler.

[Somewhere on that long wrong road,
Away from home,
I’ve gone astray,
Have lost my way.

In my dream it rained…
Rain that carried the snow away,
Piece-meal into crannies –
The white white snow,
Losing its religion,
Merging into water.
The fair cocksure landscape,
Coloring into rivers of confusion.]


Some stretches on that road,
[That long wrong road,
Winding away from home]
Will be gray, others green;
And some will reflect,
The bright summer sun;
Mischievious mirages –
Full of furniture of home.

If you ever reach them, touch them,
Between your fingers feel them;
Call my name –
The smoky shadows in this strange land
Might then,
Be imbued with palpable substance.
I might then begin to trust,
The warm breath of a silhouette,
Forever following my feet.


Feb 13th, 2010.

What I Want My Words to Do To You... *

What I want my words to do to you,
Is to make you shudder and stop,
Each time you decide,
To decide my decisions for me.

I shall let tomorrow’s verses come to me,
Tomorrow,
And today, today’s.
Also, those of all lost yesterdays.
Feel with me, sing with me,
Of days gone by,
Days wished, willed but never had,
Days to come…

What I want my words to do to you,
Is to make you shudder and stop,
Each time you choose to tell me,
It matters less, that I be happy,
And more, that I obey.

Did you know that there are –
Big battles I can brave,
Wild wars I can wage,
Yet some small skirmishes I cannot.

Bend for me, please,
I cannot fight you...
In your love you, like an impermeable wall,
Separate,
My joys – half here, half there.
We both know what I will choose,
But can you save me –
From bitterness?
From loss; the knowledge of my loss?
Can you unwind the unwilled twists and turns,
Of my half-lived half-loved heart?

What I want my words to do to you,
Is melt your loving stubborn heart…
Through verses, to have conversations,
That age gaps and rusty communication,
Have never let us have.

What I want my words to do to you,
Is love me your way, but also my way,
To love the willful voice in me,
For it is me more than all else.

What I want my words to do to you,
Is love me enough…
…to let me go –
Liberated yet loved,
For all that I am.

Feb 12th, 2010.


* [The phrase 'What I Want My Words to Do To You' is borrowed from the title of a film by the same name by playwright Eve Ensler]

Love Song

Tumultuous heart,
Fanatic heart,
O do not thee thus wail!

Clocks rewind,
Winds sojourn,
Rosy cheeks turn pale!

At spring’s start,
If lovers part,
Sip hemlock from this grail!

Feb 7th 2010.

Without a Country

[Have you ever really thought through
The damage done by accepting
“It’s all in the mind” philosophy? –
How crippling is the freedom it affords.

All appropriate, seemingly true,
Indiscrete, abominable… suddenly disbanding.
All rights and wrongs merging meaninglessly
Into this immense void of personal preference.]


We are designed to survive,
We cling to what we need,
The rest like gills, evolve themselves out
Through the sieve of societal propriety.

Never wantonly aiming to contrive,
He has discarded too much furniture
In these long hours of functioning without –
Jettisoned cargo isn’t easy to retrieve.

So where does he truly belong?
Someone without any tangible definitions…
Someone free… – Neither here, nor there,
Such is a man without a country!

Feb 1st and 2nd, 2010.