shades

Orange is the color of wish fulfilment.
Yellow of laughter.
you must be taught to like the prettiness of Pink.its not easy.
Blue tends to hold on to forgotten loss. in soft tinges that dab the fringes. But purple struts proudly with remembered ones.
Stubbornness is the color of hot magenta. Sequined with faux stones and egos.
Contentment is chocolatey. not dark or milky. not cloyingly sweet. or delectably bitter. Somewhere in the middle where comfort sits.
Comfort is petrichor earthiness. Ochre.
Surprise is sometimes cyan, often lime. On warm evenings, it is amber.
Green is the arrow that pierces boredom. India green.
Boredom would be the sliminess of stagnant water.mossy and fungal.acid green laced with brackish spots of scratchy arsenic.
Security is the maroon pallu of mother's sari in which you hid from prying eyes and over eager but insincere kisses.
Mauve is gratitude sprouting especially in spring.
Humility wraps itself in peach.
Famished egos are the color of power. Nothing says power like black, except in the real world.
Hunger is dust.
Pain reduced over the auburn flames of rage turns burgundy. Dark. Viscous. Sluggish.
Sepia tones inhabit warmth.
Freedom is the color of simmering embers fanned to life.
Hope is now off white. Over use seems to have dulled it. On foggy winter mornings, off white also clings to despair.
Acceptance is the color of your skin and orientation.
Resignation is the color of the neighbourhood aunty's face when i tell her about us. Mixed with crimson consternation.
Control is the color of delusion.
Colorless crystalline dreams glisten in the black canvas of forbidden love. Loneliness.
Dredging out the palette, life
is the dregs of penultimate breaths.
And in one fell swoop, all is the color of silence.

in memoriam

i will forget your luminous eyes.
My own betraying heart
that at the thought of you
used to leave me in tremors.
That love bathed in spring sunshine.
That angry exchange of silences.

eventually.memory will fade.
like the colors have
on the wall we painted
with motifs whose meanings elude me now.
i trust time's pitiful strokes
to make our stories
Self contained anomalies.

And perhaps i will forgive.
And be forgiven.
For the horrors of my imagination.
But for now
let me carve this portrait
in stone
for the sake of a poet
who will soon forget
poetry.

reflections

the eyes are accustomed to darknesses
tinged with the whites of distant phones
and the dab of orange from the street
stealing through that little crevice
between the curtain and the rod that holds it.
There is the occasional blueness of
computer screens of night owl roomies
who will unsuspectingly turn on
the lone light in the room.
The blitzkrieg of lethal sharpness pierces you
As eyebrows frown, lashes quiver, lids roll unto themselves,
through scrunched noses and clenched teeth
you yell for a belated warning.
Once he finds what he is looking for, the light is turned off.
A casual apology accompanies it.
And ghosts of light dance before you
with the clarity of a water color painting
barely retrieved from unexpected rains.
That is what life is like these days.
That was what love was like when it visited
All those years ago.
A flicker. Blinding light.
Then ghosts. Love runneth over.