Sunday, March 31, 2013

Existence


when your existence becomes heavy on the skin
of others, what do you do? Do you slowly wrap the
skin around with a warm blanket of your words
or tear open the scar the rusted kitchen knife gave
you? perhaps, you do nothing, take a word, tease its
meaning out and leave it hanging like wet clothes like
a flag post of all your failures, there it flaps its wings
in half mast itching your memories in their shadow.
perhaps you just wrap it around like a torn shirt
in your old rusted iron trunk and forget it for
a mourned winter when you will again hibernate
from love. Perhaps you do nothing at all, just wait,
a patience wrapping it arms like a shroud on your
dreams, the skin peels off in slivers like droplets from
leaves, the leave left thirsty for rain and you for love….
slowly you begin to forget her, and she you
your words which provided a cushion in
tired nights mean nothing at all, the mere sign
of your being, a tired memory of a lost battle
with happiness ..and you drool over
the taste of wine and the lost aroma of coffee.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Waking up

what do you do when you are surrounded by piles of sameness, with nothing left to choose between one moment of another; a moment repeats itself endlessly like a mechanical clock quizzically trying to judge you yet locked in its own sameness...you inscribe meaning into one moment and it spills out of the other; a moment which you dint know but which existed nonetheless inside you, around you even when words were failing to surprise you for the umpteenth moment when you wanted them to come to your rescue...every new word a tired memory of shed clothes which leave a shine on you only the first time when you wore them...one can just sit and discern the differences in the sound across the window, the chirping of the birds and the endless passing of people in cars and buses...beyond a point you fail to register for somewhere you see to have rhythm with them...the breath a tune of their fragrance, the time flowing in your nerves a faint remembrance of the silent shake in the building when a bus crosses through, or the movement in the eyelids just a passing everyday glance of the sea gull perched on a TV antenna...even the everydayness does not seem to surprise you when you wear it and discard it in the nights of the evening where a tired day sleeps like a child in a cocoon, protected from its own face and their own mischievous doings......

perhaps you wake up in the morning with a shadow of the dream still lingering behind the eyelids, slowly slipping down as the aroma of the coffee steals itself into the slippages of the dream, some splashed in the water as it rests still on the eyes, some clinging to the eyebrows, and some waiting to evaporate to reveal a radiant face of the morning. You wake up to a new day away from the dreariness of memories of old, as if you were a different person who was living in the remembrance of a memory, who was struggling the night before to un cling all, yet slowly when the rituals of the waking, of lying in the bed with a tiny wink of sleep hiding somewhere, calling you in the arms, the pillow crooning over your face, the blanket reveals a warmth lost to the night, the bed promises a new dream and the table lamp seems to be sleeping for ages, the alarm clock has long been tired waiting for you to be awake, it goes in its own slumbers, the night air is still fresh in the home, the shutters have not yet revealed the light of the day, the morning air blows outside the shutters waiting to carve in, waiting for the windows to welcome it...its an eternal play with its patience, as the sleep is the play with the patience of the morning to engulf it in your arms, but you have already forgotten the dreariness of the night...till it comes back when words start filling the gaps of the dream or a nightmare of the sleep, the words slowly move in to take their place where there were just images fleeting past as if on a TV screen, you could see the characters, perhaps you were one of them, playing a part which will never be replicated in real life as if fulfilling a fantasy.....yet the day promises a new beginning, but the old slowly becomes familiar as the smell of your own body, the bed, the blankets, the pillows all start to look familiar, the feel of the room suddenly dawns you back, stitches the slippages in time and fixes it in memory to bring all of it back to you...and suddenly what was a slow waking up comes like a deluge, the walls look the same, the fractures in the plasters reveals the same face, the moistness in the hands the same air, the mirror still shying away from its own face, the table lamp in the same position where you left it last night, the book still open with a character quizzically staring at you because you could not complete their story, they are waiting like us all to tell their story and it is like meeting a stranger on the train, before their story is finished you know the station has arrived and you have to get down, for that one moment you do not mind the train being late, you pray being lost in the story for the slowness of time, for the story encapsulates you and yet the train arrives on time and with a heavy heart you make the decision to get down, away from the story, somewhere with a promise to bump in to the stranger again...yet you know it will not happen, but you do not leave it there..you start the story where it was left, but now it is through another story, of another stranger, on another train , in another journey, the sojourn changes but the story remains..you know the story is not the same, yet you start from where you left the last time, because somewhere you want to complete that story, because somewhere you know that most stories have some similarity and you yearn for the familiar even when you begin the new, just because removing the old cloak is all so different and all so difficult .....

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

कुछ पल

कुछ पल अभी और
ठहरो, पिछली भूली
खामोशियों को अपने
इर्द-गिर्द शब्द बटोरने
दो, नए शब्द मत गढ़ो
अभी; बिखर जायेंगे,
बस इस खामोशी को
अपने आस- पास दायरा
बनाते देखो, पिछले कितने
शब्दों की रातें अभी उधार
है तुम पर 
उन्हें एक- एक कर
बस पिघलने दो,
उतरने दो इस रात में
अभी बस कुछ पल
खामोश रहो