शायद

सतह पर फैलता है शायद कुछ और
इस इंतजार की इन्तहा है शायद कुछ और
वक़्त रुक जाता कभी कुछ और
साँसे लेते हम भी कुछ और

on hope and poetry

How does poetry emerge or how does it manifest itself? This is a question which I have been grappling with, even while writing or even reading good poetry and I just have not been able to find the reason for it all. I hope to reflect some day when I feel confident about myself and the writing which I do, because though the words do speak to me, but most of the times they elude me and some times you only see their traces and a few symbols around.

This post is simply meant to put things into perspective, to put memories in their place and to put words to where they belong. It is about 'debts' through their manifestations and also through their absences. Generally speaking I feel that poetry emerges out of a conversation, a conversation with the self, with the other and maybe sometimes with the other which has just housed inside the inner essences of being, not to be separated, which works at times as the alter or which sometimes walks with you as your shadows or sometimes it caresses you in the sublimity of presences.

The last poem, if I say that I do write poetry, or if it is just a pretence which I have carried all along, which can be manifested in the overly complicated usage of words which sometimes meander across the pieces of paper just to be lost as a tapered stream in the desert. The desert seems to be devouring it all the while, but maybe the essence of this writing itself is to be lost, to be heard only by losing all its essences. It can be manifested in one of the attempts I made to convince myself that all was not lost and maybe that I am not living in a paradox, a paradox which I might be facing but which I dont wish to see or to be more gentle to myself a private space which I have created to myself where I wish to retire after the drudgery or life and its struggle just leaves you with enough strength to look back, to collect some traces, to collect some shells from these immense coastline of life. Now the attempt....

Fragile conceptions, malleable beliefs and brittle loves

mellifluous presences, inconsolable griefs and detrimental destinies

soporofic ambitions, insoucient desires and craven idleness

sullied hopes, recalcitrant memories and recluse dreams

why write when the pen does not talk to me,

words don't feel for me and the paper refuses to cast me in

These are more about words, rather than a poem trying to find its way through the reader where words speak more than the writer, and here I think I build a pretence that its not me but the words speak but most of the time I know that its the writer who himself is speaking and maybe his whole existential situation is laid bare when he is writing here. The question which always stares me is about transcendence, transcend my own situation to which lies beyond and maybe let the words do what they seem to be capable to doing, rather than me always making an attempt. These are difficulties of writing and these are my difficulties, when in the exploration of the banal you sometimes turn profound or seem to turn profound.

But let me do justice here and why did I start to write this in the first place, it is not to explore what has been done in the passages above but to do some thing else and this is my contradiction and my problematic that whenever I sit to write with an idea in mind, it some how tapers out, takes its own course to emerge as something else. Still I insist to say what I will and what I should.

The last poem hope, was not completely mine. The last three lines have been written by someone else. It was my poetry in search of some completion, maybe even in search of an ending or of new vistas. I myself have troubles with putting an end to what I write and sometimes I feel the last three lines might be the most beautiful things which could have been said, which I in my own world some where could not comprehend. Somewhere I could not comprehend the simplicity which lies around us which is quite beautiful and which needs to be contemplated upon.

So where does it leave me. It tells me something, that we need a dialogue, a conversation to transcend our immediate and maybe even put some lost colors to our words and also to our existence. I would wish to thank all through this space who have been behind and keep on encouraging me to put some words to where they lie, which I try to do in my own way and most of the time I do fail. But these conversations do help me, they do allow me to reflect, to ponder and create a world in which I feel am at home and it seems that all might not be lost. Though this home alienates me at times, it presents before me essences which I would not have cared to see. I think I have said a lot and as always am struggling to find a completion and ending and so would have to leave with something which is abrupt.......

Hope

  Standing on the shores of time,  oft i wonder flowing with the breeze of the hour

 where have the ships of the future set forth to,  where are these sails destined to.

 Looking at the endless horizons of hope, where hope rests like a cuddled child

where the drowning sun stands in idyllic beauty, faking the enchantenment of eternity

Do I need to hear of the stories untold, or the past unseen

do I trace the imageries of messianic beauty or let my senses exult

Let me go beyond the freedom of the free, where enchantenment lasts no more

the spirit evokes no memories,  where emptiness and nothingness are not the mastery of the idle  

Where the tree from my window tells me that I am a part of wisdom and that I have to run after it no longer

where love surrounds me and everything seems to be talking and passing a lot of radiance

Today I feel I should stretch my arms in happiness

and learn great lessons from the most simplistic things that I see around

...........................................................................................................................

Special thanks to Manisha for the last three lines and thus completing this never ending poem.

19/01/2008

नींद

नींद जब बिखर जाती है आखो में

तब  एहसास होता है,  की अभी कुछ यादे बाकी है

Memories

When the clouds keep calling the beautiful day

When the red blue sky waves across the horizons, and

the chirps of the birds mingles with the innocent laughter

Treat the day as it dawns on you, with care, with solitude

Trust the breath as it tastes the freshness of the morning charm

Caress the dream as it touches you in the night of life

For, in the silent soliloquies of life , when the song descends

ever so heavily on you, piercing through the heart,

These will remain as sweet memories,

 ever to be cherished, ever to be forgotten

Forgiveness and forgetfulness

Perhaps this is what love is and perhaps it is more to do with suffering with the one who you love and caring for the one who you love...it does not live in living in those memories which we want to immortalise for ourselves but it lives in those memories which have immortalised themselves in us, that we constantly run away from them....what remains immortalised in us is the human suffering but that is what we tend to negate all the time and tend to forget it.

But maybe forgiveness is what it seeks and what it aspires for, by forgetting it we tend to create spaces for more forgetfulness which means more memories which means more the depth they seek within us...but forgiveness is about not making that self which is suffering to be elusive of us but to have an ‘intimate presence’ within us. Forgiveness is about hope, it is about care, it is about dialogue with the part that is stinking, that part which tends to rot.

The most interesting aspect of the rottenness is that it has been due to us because we have just thrown it away, because human beings have discarded pain it comes in myriad ways. it seeks new inlets and new spaces sometimes having a surreptitious presence.

Pain is also something which makes life beautiful because it opens up those arenas of consciousness which we would not have cared to experience, those areas which would never have been explored if not for pain.   but the banality of pain lies in its beginning, because in its beginning itself it is so overpowering that it does not allow us to comprehend it, to make sense of it. It just ties us with the object of desire, the process of transcendence always takes time to come but when it comes it is beautiful.....

Ignorance

Restlessness sits awkwardly interrogating confidence in my own ignorance
of lives not lived and tales yet unexplored
Reason seeks its own part, mitigated always by human desires

what is this emptiness of, a void of emotions perhaps
of selfishness perhaps not reaching out to dark, disorder of humanity
of 'bitter fruits' calling out for a taste

Everyday I tame this restlessness with paens for the beauty
but it steals through the dark of my eyes,
coaxing, cajoling , persuading me in its nightmare,
to taste the one which lay as the shadows of beauty

Imagining I perhaps, these were passing dark clouds,
 whose tears would reveal me bliss, but ignorance it was,
 to believe of frailty, one whose marks stamped everydayness.

Apology

Simmering within its own creations of black, my chasm
has again failed to reach out to the emptiness beyond
I can't hold my own emotions, failure has again tied me down

Intellect was never my own, what do I show
to the world waiting, cling perhaps
they do, to my own dreams
Liberate me, my nightmare tells me

All a lie, I tell myself
my hands shake, paint
they do, a mask for an apology
to protect masks, of years hence fallen apart

Farewell

While the gentle night still sleeps, let me awake in my new dream
while the stuttering sublime music bades me farewell, I keep to the song

I desired for the moment of coming, while the time bids me away
I dread to open my eyes, frightened that they will not see you
I caress it, plead it, stay, remain as my elusive alter

Its time to go, but I press my eyes....
Perhaps! it will pass in my dreams

imprints on the sands of time

It has taken numerous efforts to break out of the slumber of life to start writing, to fill in those moments and those names to where they belong. For me, writing as an act is both opening and closing oneself at the same time, it lays oneself bare to the outside but in this act itself it hides. Imprints is about the small whiff of air, which when present, makes itself felt but also erases itself for what is to come. It is about the day which goes past everyday without giving us a recognisation of itself, about the life which is about leaving a small footprint on the sands without even calling out to be recognised. This very act of erasure itself is its telos. But before the final act imprints is about poetry, about sweet and "bitter fruits", banality and the dark and disorders of life .......

Imprints

                          

Working with a sense of oblivion, mysterifying my own existence

 a sense of detached belonging with my surroundings

on the shores of life, cautiously yet tragically, I leave my imprints on the sands of time

 my last signs of existence, my last presence, my last interface with myself 

only to be erased by the washes of the hour, creating spaces for more imprints

for more souls to tread the journey, to roll over my own soul, to be part of myself

in the unending desires to be heard through the eyes and touched by the senses

but these waves are my own

dancing through its own madness, its own pleasant agony

it testifies about the feet which were mine