Don't come to me yet

Days on days I have spent

fortifying my silence, I have

covered the leakage of words

with memories, with images dying

covered in a moss on graves forgotten.

I have long written my silence, for you

to open the wound of words; in the small

openings of the wounds, the crevices of my

shelter melt in this writing. Don’t ask me to

open the door, not now! Come when you have

harvested the grief, tied a wound, uncovered

a shroud and turned a sword of your words.

Don’t come to me yet, my words will not

speak to you; they wallow in silence.

Let language force itself through this

blackhole, let it emerge unscathed in the

lost songs of memory, washed ashore

on rivers of blood,and wander and fall of the

edges of dying, decaying corpses with names

long forgotten. Let the language first

throw away all the labels and numbers which identified

You and me, let it grasp the memory of the home

You never returned.

आज पूरे दिन

आज पूरे दिन पागलों की तरह पढता
रहा, शब्दों ने जैसे घेर लिया था मुझे,
वो मेरे भीतर पिघलते रहे और मैं
उनसे कहीं दूर डूबता रहा, जब पार
न पाया शब्दों से तो आते-जाते आवाजों
से दोस्ती कर ली, उन्हें अपने भीतर
सिमटता देख ही रहा था की कहीं दस्तक
सी हुई। सामने तुम खड़ी थी, मै निर्वाक
तुम्हे देखता रहा, तुम हँसी, शब्दों को सोफे
के आस-पास टूटने दिया फिर पूछ ही लिया-
इतने दिनों बाद आई हूँ, बैठने को नहीं कहोगे?
वो कॉफ़ी जिसकी बातें तुम करते हो, वो नहीं
पिलाओगे? मैंने सोफे पर ध्यान दिया
वह तो कब के भरे हुए थे शब्दों से
तुम्हारे रंगों की छटा अभी तक फैली
हुई थी, कहीं कोई रिक्त स्थान न पाकर
मैंने कहा आज खड़े ही रहो मैं तुम्हे
बताना चाहता हूँ ये कॉफ़ी कैसे बनता हूँ
मैं। तुम कब चुप-चाप इन्ही बातों में
गायब हो गयी पता ही न चला। अब फिर
बैठा हूँ मैं इन किताबों के बीच यही
सोचता की वो बातें कहीं इन्हीं किताबों
से चुराई तो नहीं जिसमे आज तुम मुझे
ढाल गयी थी कभी न मिलने के लिए?

Untitled 2

With a poem of lost songs,
I bring them all to witness
in a verse I will never
write, untie their time,
with a testimony of
loneliness, and a hope
of solitude, a vision for
tomorrow. I bid adieu
to the history of voices
unknown and silent.

Untitled

Across bridges in those
fragments, I make my
own time, unravel unwritten
archives and slowly write
my own history, heroes of
whom no one knows, of
people lost in silence; they
waited just for the one who
never arrived.

The familiar and the unfamiliar

There is always a vicarious pleasure in being in the familiar. It might hide, melt away, steal in passages in old books, or torn magazines, it might get lost in poems of years forgotten but the rupture in the familiar never allows it to disappear completely. Its somewhere there in the smells of a towel, in the memories of old worn out clothes, in stains on coffee mugs, in a face which we never saw, on a tree where we refused to etch its muse. It is always at hand, waiting to lay its grips, like a scorpion, like a death which repeats itself after every beginning, after every closure, after every opening. It just takes you in its arms when you had thought you left it far behind, when you thought that for once you won the game of hide and seek. Yet the torment of hiding, the torment of never being able to be found, the blackness of getting lost, the tower of silence weighs heavily on you, it starts from the eyes, then you hear its voice closing down, speaking of a forked tongue chiding you for getting lost in the wilderness away from the home you built, it settles on the skin, slowly carving its way to the nerves through the very sinews you had hardened in the unfamiliar...it settles as a foreign taste on the tongue, but slowly as the saliva gathers around it, it starts caressing itself and suddenly you feel the hunger in the bowels, the same bowels which had refused it...it cracks open the skull, teasing you for reasons for denying it all this while, it chides you, scoffs at you, uses expletives unknown for not letting it in...it has been waiting for you to come out of the door, the moment your feet discards the soil on the door mat it sticks to your shoes and stealthily enters into the bed, it discards its clothes in the shower and from the foam of the soap it rubs your body clean of the unfamiliar....it touches all those parts where the unfamiliar had settled, fights its memory, accepts its own lost friends in the unfamiliar, signs a truce with some and then finally enters into your nightmare. words after words you deny them, long running the struggle against memory, but now the familiar settles with the unfamiliar, both biding their time, to come to you, slowly entering your words, your verses, your poems, which no stranger can see....

I know you will come

The curtain draws in fast,

I had only reached out to the

shadows as it melted in your hands.

As I saw you receding past my dream,

my hands, nimble yet weak, could only

fathom words; beyond which I was

fragile as the wind sweeping my hair.

The threads of the body had been long

laid bare, desires swallow the last

vigour; sapping the marrow under the

crumbling skin, the dust opening crevices

under ruffled feathers where the last

streaks of sunshine refuse to settle.

I know you will come. The shadows

remember you, the opaque painting,

the books, still keep searching for words;

they know your date with time, when silence

will descend with your steps.

I don’t know finality-

a man of numerous beginnings-

I have stretched this time from

its origins, for the beginning to be

caught in the moment you come,

and finality to dissolve in your

very being.

On writing and the angst of the words......

There is a feeling which escapes me as soon as I start on its trail...like stairs which disappear in small alleys, sleeping and yawning out of non-existence, yet reaching somewhere- we don't know where and to whose last house on the street...the trail creates its own path when the feeling escapes and sometimes I just feel that its a trick with words which plays out on the paper, its not me who writes but a trickster conjuring up images which I have not lived or which sieve through numerous stacks of books which stare bored in my direction and deceive me to a trail where one is caught in the absurd...the situation is not mine, the moments are not lived, the days emerge out of nowhere and the people dissemble their masks to wear another one, yet they are all very present there when I sit and write like a possessed idiot who garbles his own thoughts to escape them and just to take someone on the journey without announcing the destination...some do join, fellow travelers who want to be lost, who had already known that the destination they always cherished was the one which will throw them apart from the world, the reaching itself was a discontent, the pain which illusions create when they start living......in those moments one just lives when one has created rather than live to create.....the words seem to have broken the chains of memory, the dams of meanings and flood my papers seem to be coming from far and not from me- maybe here is the tiny gap which exist between those people who trick you with words, for they know at times even don't know whether it comes from them and those who know the words are coming from far and the only sense they will be able to make is when they have fully appeared on the paper. Both are not present in the moment when it writes itself and opens up its tenuous relationship with the writer, both chide us, bore us down, want to know their meanings, their appearance and their authors and their authentic experience of being, of why they are placed where they are, why they sit around with a word they don't like, why appear at a moment where nothing has a meaning...in a certain sense writing is to escape the existential angst of words, to give their absurdity a meaning and to conjure up an existence for them where they feel homeless, always willing to escape their temporality .....its in these moments where I know what I feel and what i set to write has been discarded, has been betrayed many times over, sometimes slaughtered and maimed on pages reeking and smelling of dying carcasses and corpses carried by the same words, all quizzically interrogate me as to why I had to enter their domain and why I twisted them and turned them apart where they are not to be....and these turnings themselves gives me a poem, a writing which I dint live but where and when will i live them or will it be something which does not exist always appear in the writing is to be seen.....

My rainbow

There is a weathered rainbow right across the horizon where the vision fades every day. It hangs along the mountains collecting fragments of colours and yet always remaining incomplete in itself. Rainbow always reminds me of train journeys which always failed to complete, the destination arrived before it was supposed to and yet one fails to get down. The journey, I forget to ask all the time, who started it and who was it travelling across the panorama of the mountains, blank fields, bridges, the steel frames- like unwritten memories they just space out themselves in unknown corners of the body. Each vision an awe, each sight a recollection, each bridge a surprise, each sound a melancholy of lost colours. The destination never arrives in the sight, its just the feel and the sound which warns us of the arrival, reminds us of the collectibles left scattered on the seats, left behind on the way in the weariness of the journey. Its these fragments which build the rainbow I see everyday before the moon peeps out, knowing or feigning its own loneliness in the journey where the stars seems all so close yet moving farther away, some already dead before any eyes could touch them. Like my half formed, half dying rainbow most of these stars are already dead and yet we never feel the strangeness of being surrounded every night by the dead. It only enchants us and wants to embrace us and we struggle with the ever growing mystery of this dying beauty. Are we also not the same? Dying all the time, in time, across time, burning bridges in memory, turning away from the past just to be us or be the normal person on the street. We escape the reality that we are one of them, just buying ourselves more time to be ‘someone’, that somebody we don’t know yet and maybe will never be able to know. Was it always a false start to begin with or are we all creatures of false starts, every start a wrong one, every start taking us away from where we want to reach or think we can reach. The destination is covered in mud and forgotten moss like a stone flirting with the coming waves, yet left thirsty to the next wave which touches it but never satiates it. The stone erodes away leaving some unknown being of itself as if living its time, living its own ‘shelf life’, obscuring its own being, not asking questions why it is there? Do destinations ask questions why they are pinned to the place? Why they ever engrave themselves on a map- be it the mind or an empty space on this earth?

उन दरख्तों के परे

उन दरख्तों पर आवाज़ के सिवा कुछ 

भी नहीं, आवाज़ भी एक सीमा है जो बाँध 

लेती है इंसानों को, कविता उससे कभी जूझती

कभी झुंझलाती, कभी नाराज़ होकर उस पार धकेल 

देती जिस पार कहीं कोई शाम का सन्नाटा या भोर 

का शांत छुपा होता, जहाँ कहीं उनका वो अस्तित्व 

होता जहाँ वो कभी नहीं होते , उन मानवी प्रतिबिम्बों 

का जो बिखरे आईने से हमे देख तो जाते बेचैन 

नहीं करते 

तुम चलना किसी शाम, दिन को टोकरी में बाँध कर 

एक कोने में छोड़ आना, खिडकियों पर से उदासी को 

समेट बंद कर देना किताबों में, रौशन दानों में सुबह को 

भटकने देना, आ जाना खाली हाथ, उन दरख्तों पर जहाँ 

आवाजों के सिवा कुछ भी नहीं 

शहर जब थक कर सो जाता है, ये सारे आवाज़ कई मील 

पैदल चल कर यहाँ आते हैं पहचानने एक दुसरे को, कहीं 

कोई खोया हुआ उसमे चेहरा ढूँढ़ते हैं, कहीं खोई हुई खामोशी 

तलाशते हैं, आ जाना तुम आवाजों के उस पार जहाँ केवल 

आवजों का खेल रोज़ होता है 

हम बैठेंगे हाथों की छुअन से दूर, बस महसूस करते उसे 

अपनी यादों में, कुछ बोल के परे उन आवाजों में अपने 

यादों में नहीं तलाशते, कविता को इस शान्ति में अपने चारों 

ओर एक दायरा बनाते देखते, फिर उस नदी में कविता को 

बहा देंगे

Fragments of a broken day

We live on the wishes of the morrow, collecting fragments like sands, every picture incomplete, broken from our own hands, and yet the pieces when they merge crumble in the sands of time, the nature beyond mimics our desire and stills time for a pause in our breath, like pictures captured in still camera waiting to tell a story, we merge the sand, making way for a river to flow....while it is just fragments telling half a story which is human....

Perhaps a story to be written has to go back in time, or rummage through the shriveled hairs of history, where among the freckled locks some dreams have disappeared...perhaps its time to begin from the river and turn its course, untangle the life which hung between memory and dream, between pain and ecstasy, perhaps the unraveling has already happened somewhere and we are all in search of the place, the future from where we want to return, to the place of our own .....

Daily like a prodigal child I dig up holes in memory, removing all the soil around the dreams and those of everyday happenings, hide them there to be surprised in the dusk of life, but maybe the dawn never came and the dusk already started receding in time, i fail to grope it, what if it never comes and I never uncover the lost secrets which I promised to me? I covered them in unwritten letters, in words among the trees, in silence among the wind, in flight among the birds, now I just stare at them like a lost vagabond, the baggage of recovering the lost is more and the future dies in the past, and yet they never come.....

 

Have you seen them somewhere staring out of a cracked mirror, have you seen them hanging out of the blinds of the window sills, have you seen them on broken discs of songs, have you seen them in reels of movies which don't play, have you seen them on the dog who lost a year, the man with the one arm, the widow standing alone on the dark alley with a bowl in hand which never fills up, have you seen it in the drunkard who crosses my street every night, have you seen them in the mother who lost her child and yet looks for her, in the torn pages of the book, or the lost ink of pages, or discolored currency notes, or in poets who lost the only poem which would have brought them to the world, or the girl who lost her love, or the beds which were never made for themselves, the plants which dry before they live, the coffee which smells before it is made....give me some fragments, i am lost in all of them and they in me and both in me, reconcile me to them, if you can do so, will you do this last for me? will those gods come down off their cross to give me just a moment in this being?

In the shadow of words

I am locked in the prison of words
like a shadow locked to its body, come
the night, the shadow separates its borrowed
tongue, the mirror refuses the body, and the
word cracks open its wound; beyond the cracks
lies a poem I may never reach.

The other silence

There is that ‘other’ silence which escapes us, it is not the silence of the ‘other’ where we are just left to grasp the meaning, to read through the pause which extends beyond its own granted time, which defies its capture, which resists our gaze in the words. This silence is within us, this silence is what dawns upon us when we are in the crowd. Suddenly in a room where words are being flirted with and the laughter escapes the monotony of presences, this silence slowly crawls along the edge of the seat, waiting to grasp us in the time when we are not aware of ourselves. Suddenly the known faces seem strange and you ask yourself, who are these people? Why are you here? What are these people doing at this moment and what is their cause of the happiness? This silence is banal, for it exists everyday but only appears when we let our guard loose. Suddenly you lose grasp of the words, suddenly all seems so distant and meaning does not make any sense. You just sense the room closing down on you, the ceiling collapsing down and you wonder why these people are not aware of the claustrophobia of words? Why can’t they see the void hidden in those laughters? 

The unknown face

Cities survive where people don't

so tread carefully where you leave your mark, a hidden time is lurking in the distance where you will melt as the last remembered snow, erase hopes of all immortality before it erases you, let the being chisel out an existence in this endless chaos; time warps itself in 'invisible cities'. 
Hum the forgotten tune, remember the last waltz you took, the last harvest is yet to dry out of hope let's come, you and me, with no desires to etch in time; lets unwind this clock, the pause in our breath is beginning to slow this time, can't you see? Just take another step, this last one, the cracks have begun to crumble under their own weight, preservethe breath for the last dream, it was enough being painted the unknown face in the crowd. 

Irony and life

The next step you take
will carve you in the determined
mould of time, for life
is an irony, peruses those
who steps in it with their
courage following them like
a shadow.

Every act, every step feeds
the shadow while the light of
life embraces the turn of hope
to burn it down in an unending
tragedy.

You who take the turn know
not, you who knows is lost in
the metaphor handed over from
history, action breeds counter-action
where every dialectic opens up another
where all survives where none do

Yet like Sisyphus you turn back again
and again the toiling masses stitched to an
imagined fate, revealing the 'bitter-fruits'
and the flicker of the underground which
glimmers our night sky 

Take the step you must for you have
a date with the passing smile uncovering
your lips, shared yet dispersed, of the time
when irony will reveal 'life'.

...and it snowed in Rome

the snow evokes various kinds of responses….while I woke up with a start with a knock on my door, half in a dream, half in the sleep with the expectation of the snow somewhere couched deep within…to wait and see what the world was supposed to reveal on this day when the expected snow was supposed to arrive…but as with the start I woke up, the snow seemed to be like that…it was supposed to startle you, to awake you up from your slumbers of the various assumptions we had made about it in the space and time when it was supposed to exist and to appear….it was just to be an apparition, sometimes a lovable one, at times a strange one, at times of something or someone we never comprehend, at times it plunges you in the depths of the memory to remember the never remembered face, to create all the stories which might never have existed in the first place….perhaps we never expected so much, the news papers and the media started digging in the archives for the last time it snowed for such a long time and we were told it was 27 years ago, people started to look at the cameras whether or not it could capture the moment which was as transient as the look in the camera’s face, they started rolling over their foto albums to the last time when the house across to the street gleamed of the cupcakes which only adored the cream on the table sometimes sweetening the mouth, at times craving for the water to melt it away…..the moon had not melted for once and the cotton which had accumulated along the pathways, as if to clothe the world a new was itself surprised at all the colors it could never bear witness to, the sun had been gently covered under a forgetting where only the clouds used to play hide and seek, the chairs outside restaurants where there were rarely any visitors had their first guests, willing to wait for orders which never arrived, still sitting patiently maybe for a cup of warm long coffee and a smoke which would melt on the ashtray and mingle with the mist in the environment…..yet some memories of the snow managed to steal in those small glances, surprises, cheer,  squeals, frowns, anguish and a sense of irritation which just carved for only a moment a face like its own, where slowly but steadily in the very creases and wrinkles of the skin it was settling down, maybe to be remembered years apart when it will happen again…..it was kissing the umbrellas for those who never wanted to touch them, as a sludge it was settling down on the shoes perhaps telling us that sometimes its good to walk slowly, sometimes its good to slip and not fall to remember that all paths are not steady, sometimes the sludge we gathered around will never be cleared even if we don’t remember them……and yes the memories slowly also must have scraped through the tiny pores of the shoes where socks at once would emanate in a secret smell they never desired to touch and feel….some hands were trying to touch the snow, to cast it to the other though as much more lovely as us and yet with care and concern and yet when it caressed those hollows in the hands it froze together the more as if in a size of a ball giving us an immortal sense of creation of our own…rather than melting slowly in the distance, it kept freezing in time, it kept holding on to the only hope it never had…..and the trees were more than happy to bear a burden where they would hibernate from their little greens which was left and the brown ones just were left wondering for the leaves they shed last autumn for they too wanted to caress it in memory and in dream…….for once the world slowed down, the buses refused to run, the cars had their windscreens moving as trying to wipe out fastly the only nightmare they never guessed was coming their way…..the bells in the distance stopped ringing for the moment and watched silently as the world turned white…..the roof tops making spaces for the new arrival and slowly but with gentleness and all kindness refusing to allow space for eternity for new visitors came ever knocking on the door seeking spaces for themselves…..the woman on the street who always had the small paper cup in her hand with some 20-50 cents and some times euro coins in them had to huddle in the supermarket which was willing to provide space for the moment and yet it was bad business for her…maybe the snow took away the only way she could have had food for the day……in the distance, on the bridge when the snow playing with the winds were travelling hapahazardly knowing no destination tried to play with the face and plant a kiss on the brow but the cap had already opened its pores for it to melt in the head which refused to depart from its own heatedness and its own absurdity, but the bridge opened vistas and new roads where strangers moved no one  knows where, unbounded by destinies but bounded by the same destination, to only cross for a tiny moment and yet the only moment which could bound them together….and the snow flakes like cakes wanted to cover the only destination where human beings knew they moved, a sense of displacement, a sense of journey of removing themselves for here and now and yet couched in that presence…it tried to tear away the railway lines, tried to hide it away where all seemed white and the trains for the moments did not revolt, it tried to slow the time and bury the distance as if everything was to be found in this one moment….yes this was what happened when it snowed in Rome.