sepia love

the fragrance of an old memory
comes alive in sepia tones
across distances of love
a faint heart beats again.

Bouquets of your letters-
the hues of faded passions
sit pretty in a vase
next to the book case
peopled by your gifts-
yellowed tatters of our history
stare from each shelf
waiting to be repeated.

this is not a museum of love.
it is a moment in time.
frozen
until i let this grain of sand
slide off my palm.

you

you used to be the rain
i rushed out to soak myself in.
now it is but the onslaught
of unrequited loves of the world.
noisy anguished droplets of discontent
tiring in their constancy
unforgiving in their censure
rain down on my roof
while i wait
in unhurried anticipation
for their stories to end.
while i wait
for you.

i find you
in the minty freshness
of after rain.
you are the puddles
i jump and revel in.
sullied. But free.
wholesome in their splashes.
you are the newly sprung leaflets
on my bare branches
that dance free style
to the music of penetrating quiet.
you are the pigeons
come out of hiding
to reclaim their skies.
the open windows
rusted in the mold of the past
breathing in
the vast expanse of the new, the now.
you are the aftertaste of rain.
the intoxicating breeze
infiltrating my senses
making its way to my head
in a cold rush of gelatinous passion.
Brain freeze.

searching...

What makes us who we are?
 

I am a compost bin. The waste of years is rotting inside me and I have the hope of emerging a new man. A better man. It will take time, and many more new people, conversations and relationships will get thrown in, even as the old ones ferment. I have learnt to live with the stench. It has become a part of me. When they ask me who I am,I tell them, a dull fragrance of changing sameness. They don’t understand. I am them, I tell them. Unknowingly they are shaping me. As if I were a mound of prostitute clay free to be moulded by one and all. I have been twisted and turned to fit varying designs of expectations, and every cast has found me wanting.

I know now I shall always be inadequate for the ‘I’ is ever shifting.They tell me about essences. That’s what we are. Some unchangeable core that withstands time’s machinations. That is what I must get in touch with if I am truly searching for my identity. Excavation is the philosopher’s realm, and they tell me that I must dig deep for the answers I seek. But what if I am here merely to posit questions without the burden of having to look for answers?What if it is the questioning that is the most important, what if I have given up on answers which are at best rudimentary and consolatory? They say then I haven’t probed enough, and that I am afraid. I tell them, as politely as I can, for rage seethes within at their incomprehension, about my need for questions.They brush it aside saying peace will come with answers. Questions are bilious. And with that they erase my existence, for to me what else am I but a bundled series of questions?

I don’t need to be disentangled with your explication nor forced into a state of false supplication as you try to measure me out against compartmentalized tropes that we are taught to aspire to. I rebel against the singularity of being you ascribe to me. I am burning the map you gave me to chart out my life’s course. They smile, a frustratingly long while, before they speak. There is yet an orthodoxy to rebellion, and in burning one map you have merely decided to subscribe to another. Every course of action, every line of thought is always already taken, they tell me. Who am I? That will always be a cumulative disguised as individual.

And as everything decays inside me, I walk in an odorless silence, towards boundaries that need crossing. I will follow my questions into oblivion and become part of some other compost bin.

starry loves

Love was a feisty longing. I allowed her the nightly flight and she came back exhausted having danced with the stars on moonbeams. All day she slept in the cozy little corner I had made for her. By evenings when I used to come back seeking solitude’s solace and her company, she handed me an old memory and ran off for her own rendezvous. I sat with the little piece of jigsaw, trying to fit it in its appropriate time, place and person. Shadows graced me from the skies and I saw her skipping to melodies of her making.

Every night her little love story ended with a star that hurtled down with her. She wanted me to wish on her follower, and I wondered if someone had wished on me all those years ago, when I had blindly followed her to this little cave. I sat with her disciple once, at a time that was somewhere between night and day, dawn was threatening to break loose. Soon reality would turn him to dust that would float its way to the sun. But we got a chance to sit together even as our tired love threw us a few kisses and drifted off. I say “our” love, but it didn’t pinch anymore. I could see it bothered him. A spot of bother that wasn’t going to last I knew. For these little worries had not a life of their own. They dissipated with us. We had I think half an hour to ourselves. We didn’t talk of how we felt, or about that shared love. What could we have said. We looked out in silence, each in his own thought. And longing. I wished on you, I had told him. He could have pretended incomprehension. Our worlds were different after all. But he had nodded and said rather nonchalantly, “That’s what she wanted.” And the first ray of dawn had taken away all possibility of further conversation.

How did she have this kind of power, over mortals and immortals, across worlds, or perhaps even universes, to make them follow without thought, unheeding of one’s own life, longevity, consumed entirely by the longing that she was? It was easy to understand it when I looked at her sleeping. I could feel my skin burning. What dreams must she be dreaming? I had wondered through wasteful days. I used to feel no pangs of separation when she went out. I kept myself busy with the jigsaw, memory upon memory, refusing to fit in, overlapping, mocking spatio-temporal boundaries and expectations.

One night I decided to string up the bundle and hang it on the balcony. They shone with the star light that bounced off them. She had come back that night and got all tangled up in it. Suddenly the jigsaw fit and I saw the picture complete, after years. She looked at me, for the first time, in a strange helplessness. What did you wish for? she had almost cried. I undid the strings, let the memories fall and break down in an impenetrable heap. I half expected her to fly off to the moon, but she walked in quietly and wrapped herself in her blanket.

I stared at her in her slumber the whole day. She slept through the evening and finally got up around midnight. She stood watching me collect the last scraps of the night before. I asked her how she was feeling, and some more utterly meaningless questions that she barely responded to. The fire in her eyes had given way to deep dark circles under them. I wonder if I realized then that I had lost her. In hindsight, I should have. She chose to stay that night. And many nights after that. We chose silence to keep the longing alive. I didn’t know what she was waiting for. I waited in utter terror of the day she would leave. I refused to sleep. I played music for her hoping she would dance with me. She stared at the record with blank eyes that had deeper and darker circles under. We seemed destined to continue down that road. Fiery passions tend to end tamely, fizzle out in stereotypical ways. All I had to do was wait. Love was going to be a longing. A long unending longing. Raging on in embers. And I was preparing myself for it. After all there were no more stars to be wished upon.

bluish love

this tired blue love

in a dusty stinking corner

lies orphaned,abandoned.

if it had eyes to see

it would our desertion

if it had ears to hear

it would our silence

if it had a nose to sense

it would our putrefaction

if it had a mouth to taste

it would our bitterness.

perhaps it was good after all

there was no face

to go with the name.

too much shame

is sometimes

left off

without a word

on moonless nights

in dusty stinking corners.

falling/ fallen

something's missing

or someone

one can't be sure.

its a gaping manhole

and somebody's run off

with the lid

and i keep falling

into the grime and muck

at the heart of things

getting used

to not chasing meaning

(lofty purposes can go climb a tree.)

i need to find a way

to get out of this hole

or not.

in which case

any suggestions

to make it comfortable

are welcome.

'anybody there?'
anybody there?

echoes back.

conversations

Talk to me.

Keep talking to me.

You are not the comfort of candid conversation. Nor the reservoir of shared soothing nonsense. 

Why do I need you then?

Perhaps because You and I, We, have always belonged together. In our serious silences. In reaching out. Never. Always. In reaching in. Always. Never. We hide our little secrets and live out our lies. Saying what needs to be said – of lovely winter mornings that seem to give life meaning, not the foggy nights they followed and which we stayed awake through. Alone in sunsets, we promise sunrise to all and sundry. But ourselves. Patience, love, sacrifice. We have heard those and passed them on dutifully without having to believe. We belong for we can pretend and live it out. The choices we make are hungry sad choices devoid of conviction and rigged towards the repentant. We stand across unfathomable distances and know how unbridgeable the gap is. We belong because we have always known. The language of loss makes for good silent conversations. We belong because we have had those. And only those. The world mills around happiness. There is no need to find a place there. It is sitting at home, after the party is over, surrounded by the mess of others’ making, which is but my own, that I think of you. And that is when you have been in the middle of your own little celebration. We belong because our desires are ill timed, and our needs unfulfilled in one another. You and I together are like life. Predictable and reliable only in the promise of our instability and discomfort. Fierce loyalists of infidelity, we belong together. You and I. Let us go then.