this is us part2

You send me poems with flavoured laughter,
and i long for autumn shadows where poetry
is more than graffiti on social media walls,
where its ferocity colours me faster than i can
name the hues, more vibrant than my vocabulary.

I sit down to write you a letter, the envelope ready,
To contain the breathlessness that needs must be
(Like those long nights blanketing our winter reverie)
trapping it in salival good old days-ery. but i get lost
in the history of the stain on my notepad, and the
feeling of home that is my fountain pen. By the time
i decide to forego salutations, always so formal, always
so empty, another sunrise taps at my window. i watch
distilled rays fall on the sheet, hitherto blank. Ink leaks.

when you get the post, would you know that i sent you
the best of me - a drop of sunshine, a smudge of home.
Will you hold it against me that my new poem is an ode
to silence, whose words have dug six feet trenches in my
heart, and found something there. i know that. for after all
these years, there is a new pattern in the way it beats.

Would you notice the stamp of a nonexistent post office,
in a country farther away than you are in my dreams.
I haven’t given a return address this time, though we
are closer than this skin to flesh, and maybe i will smell
the decay of poems that languish in your notes and spill over
into unsent letters,lying in the corner drawer of the guestroom.
Perhaps the pattern will change again. The heart will beat,
beat down on words, whose ghosts will find succour in frail
memories of you, going frailer by the season, and the blot
on my notepad will grow bigger, darker, murkier.

Then again, perhaps none of this will be our fate. And
the exotic essences of your delicious verses will settle
At the base of my tongue, and keep bringing me back
From the obstinacy of my frosty solitude. Inkless.
May your will be stronger than my fear. Amen.

about us

they leave it all behind.
your words,my scars,
(and the other way)
your hopes,my failures
(these remain exclusive)

My forgetfulness is only
the overwhelming memory
of all thats lost without ever
having been played.

it will not be long before
this house becomes dust
not long after we retreat
into impossible silences
and the whispers i hear
from across the walls
will be buried in textures
of pain and acrylic.

But when they write us
in their version, we will
be the stuff of happiness,
not perfection, but delusion
nevertheless.all that they
leave out, all the rest, that
is where you and i will lie
in the glistening truth of
anonymous resentment.

a place for silence

i know where this silence turns
for solace and even respite. To
conversations with those
who are not yet our friends
(who may never be)
and for that we shall always
owe them. sometimes one
needs that stranger, to play
a walk on part, not ask too
many questions, keep us in fear
of our reputations, or other
insecurities, that we admit
with surprising nonchalance
to be tastelessly clichéd.

Friends tend to understand.
And sometimes, thats exactly
what we dont need. Let there
be distance, judgment, roleplay,
illusion, and the magic of deep
shallows possible only in a non-friend.
here is to you, then. may there be words.
And may silences bury themselves
between the lines. For nobody to read.