...to the new year

Dissemble the words you collected the year past, piece together the slippages, the silence, and the un-thought pause. Parse through the sentences you spoke, the voices you heard, the hesitations, the curiosities, the wishes you desired, the bits unspoken, the memories you could not stitch. Peruse your dreams you kept at bay, the sleepless nights of wandering, and the soliloquy of all passing hours. Trace a boundary to the solitude you refrained from and the meetings you betrayed. Caress the seasons that touched your lips and fainted with an unbecoming promise. Touch the curves of the words, of all misgivings, you noted tirelessly in your diary. Treat the winter of longing with a hibernated bliss. Disentangle the year, one piece at a time, like discarded clothes on a dreary day. Renounce and then collect all that is left of the renounced year. Coalesce the things we broke, not all that was broken needs fixing. Some we will discard, some we will go back in search of. Begin the new year in a zeal that it deserves. You will be old in your newness, and new in your oldness; a delight as pure as the spring air; a delight, as the poet said, we must risk. Happy New Year.

Every night, tonight....

Tonight somewhere far from all our confusions we will taste failure and return home subdued, defeated, carrying like sisyphus an unknown load. We will harness for the moment the time that divides itself in seconds and stare at the old wall clock perplexed, the azaan and the church bells disturbing the reverie that we will enter, perhaps we will wait for an uncertain knock on the door, but nobody will come, as usual, in this empty house..we will track the dust as it spreads over the fingers that caress the bookshelves, feel the touch of the pollen and let out a reluctant sneeze, perhaps the spring makes demands on the body that we will deny and walk into parks with golden yellow leaves and violet flowers, the bright red of amaltash and the dusky orange of a sun burning itself out, we will not enter the house till the remains of the day sieves itself of the colors, we will enslave a bit of us in this time and return missing the part that never made the whole but merely suggested a timely goodbye for us to rust among the concrete piles of this city...we will await the rains, and bide our time trying to fake another beginning where people lay their fears across coffee tables where nobody listens to them and merely messages are exchanged in conversations turned futile, we will serve unlimited bottles of wine for our new found freedom and be turned away from houses for the money runs thin....there is no sunshine worth remembering where the sweat that lingered on your brow failed the wind, its a city that perspires at its margins, in crowded trains turning people everyday, in bumpy taxi rides smelling of cheap petrol and the chaotic traffic lights jumped by people returning to alien places called home..perhaps the night will deliver where the day disappoints, the moon lingering thin in the polluted sky, the stars a dim reminder of misty valleys, the yellow street lamp the lone witness of your return..you will tread your shadow for a while and come back home to sit on your computer and gaze for long on the screen, shuffle through windows and absorb the loneliness of others poured out in a moment of ecstasy or perhaps you will sit down to a diary and record your writing of a failure that you never sought as a child and turn to the poet for practiced words that do not make your dictionary..another day you will seek familiar images, another day is an apparition of non-existent things. 

October 24, 2015

Broken silences

Sometimes its not good to shelve silence for words, wrapped silence is a gift that breaks a promise you made to yourself. But often out of a boredom or a desperation you want to hear your own word as an echo, to part the air of noise that hangs lazily like the pollution in hazy cities. Before you begin to speak, you discern each noise on its merit and place it out of a memory; memory has a small place for what happens everyday. It merely archives those unknown to you, for what you knew you go searching in the shelves and you find it lost. You want to scream and recover the day, but it distances itself like a hurt lover. But slowly with a temptation of a child you partner the voices that surround you, the tap on the keyboard, the eerie noise of the lamp and the slow whirring of the fan, you see the spider crawling but register no sound. Here is the time you want to put on a tune that you wanted to hum, but no tune comes to mind, none that will save you from speaking. Fallen, defeated, and tired you put a hand on your lips, drink a sip from the cup, curl up your nose to see if it can come to the rescue, take the finger away from the typing board and caress the lips to silence them. Here comes the scream....then the silence pervades.

Where should one look for words?

We have been told that we have to keep waiting for the idea to come, keep biding your patience, keep staring at your blank paper for time, keep scribbling down empty words and then strike them out like a fierce enemy…and sometimes the ideas come in the midst of it all and sometimes it does not come at all, for days and for hours and you die in ennui, you wait with something else in your hand, you keep reading and sometimes the idea does not come at all. But for ideas to come you have to keep looking for them, not where people look for them, look where people have discarded them, look like the gypsy does in the garbage dumps, look for dead words, for a writing to begin so many words have to die, so many words have to be discarded, words which like lovers were making pronouncement of their love, hoping to cling on us for eternity, they have to be left alone, they have to be stacked in numerous diaries for some other time or for never at all….and yet when you look at the dumps, you start discarding some too, for some one to pick up, not on your words but on your discards…read the originals, see why a word was discarded, what could have been done with it, see the word to its ultimate destination, why when it started it could not reach where it wanted to go, what stopped it in the hands of the writers and why do some words just travelled together? What kind of stories did they tell each other or where they like mute companions on a long journey just admiring each others’ beauty like a couple who meet for the first time after numerous correspondences, after knowing each other for a long time? What did they do to each other? Did they get to know each other much better or did they leave it for another time? Did that time ever come? Or where they like mute strangers just sharing the early morning news paper and in being polite asked you if you would like to have a cup of tea or share their morning snacks? Did they talk to you about politics or ask you where you belonged to and what did you do in life? Did the words come alive when they wandered outside the windows of the train or did they complain for the train running late? What happened? Or was it all being scribbled in a diary which no one will read or they kept their neck lost in the pages of a book?

4:00 pm, 24/01/2013

Rome 

Writing a poem

Writing a poem was rummaging through

Words, looking for them in the discarded thoughts of the

Beggar on the corner of the red light, in the lighting of the

Smoke in an unknown bar at the end of the street, in the

Frowns of a lover with love unfulfilled, in the empty

Meanings of the street sign. Words; look for them in the

Garbage dumps, where people leave them like unsmoked

Tobacco, like an empty bottle after a heavy night of drinks; look

For them like the destitute looks for a home under every ceiling,

Under a deserted shrine; in a forgotten death. Look for them

Like a beggar rummages patience in empty garbage cans

To turn over fruits of leftover hands, yet day in and day out

They keep turning over. Keep looking. 

Untitled

I see a lingering doubt

in his eyes before 

he knocks on the door,

flirting with the boundaries

of his language, his words 

undo him

He hesitates, a perennial

call for rescue slanting 

across his body, a writing 

where he does not belong, 

no one comes to 

tease meaning from 

his mumbled phrases

I hazard guesses as if 

playing a game of 

darts but the arrows 

never hit home, perhaps

the target was as 

thin as air, his 

invisibility 

unseen in my 

hermeneutic

world

How can banal words

be lost in translation? 

Musings from a city

# Porto is a surreal experience. The magic where it comes from: is it the narrow alleys, or the river merging into the ocean, the streets which have stories known or the heroic tales whispered or the stories untold? Can you figure it out in such a city? A melange of people from different cities? 

#The receding sea dries 
your hair, I had an ocean
in mind when I opened
my arms, but the waves
were rough for the night.

# Where does your eye meet the wind? does it see the parting of its lips when it whispers to the ocean? Does the wind hesitate before it parts with its songs? Was the free wind just an imagination of a caged mind? 

#I see the wind melting in the music of your desire, the river severs its melancholy in the babble which rises in the mixed tongue. the lone guitarist with cymbals carving a song, as the city lights descend for the moment under the lamp which rests in the shadow of my pen. The lights are yet to arrive in the window of words, I dust them everyday, recite it like small change, that drops in the coin box of the beggar standing by the sidewalk, the cyclist are unsure and the couples with hand in hands as I remember a story I shared with a stranger. 

# I drink this world around your shadow, it must not have been the same when you were here, people waiting and the glass is empty, the girl looks at me but avoids my glance, it was never the same. I was never alone on this table, if you cover the glances of the man sitting far away from my eyes, you will see he is not watching, no words attempt to reach me here, whose mistake was it that I came this way? 

#I dread to remove the napkin, the table is so full of words and all that is funneled through never reaches me, yet how did they pick up the paper and write a word on it? I can't decipher the silence from the other, my company with words disappeared the moment you left, am stranded along a highway which arches over a bridge, small yellow lights hanging by the side, a narrow sidewalk threatening to merge with the road, the train travels and shakes the bridge, yet it does not fall apart, never does, yet my legs stutter even when I had nothing to drink. the river lies thirsty in its bed yet merging in the ocean without a desire. Love would yet have come here if I did not turn the road into a song. 

A habitual day..perhaps!

Often when the melancholy door opens and stays ajar creaking in the chaos of the wind like the cries of the cat I sit their somewhere like an unclaimed piece of morning..i hear the theft alarms that sound late into the night as someone puts a hand accidentally or perhaps when a thief silently checks their own edges of knowing in the art of breaking in..the piece of morning, stale arranges itself around pieces of paper strewn around and a palimpsest made of speakers, cups of tea, some smelly tobacco and house as wounded as the heart of a child refused ..you trace a word on the open pages of the book, stay by it for minutes, keep staring so that it takes away the pain of looking, it takes away the pain of being for the moment, perhaps you wish to dissolve and know that it is not only you but someone from some other time, some other space echoes along, they are bouncing off their sounds waves, sending it out in unknown territory, to the vast emptiness that the mountains create..it keeps moving along for years, enters into many cracks, floats on the rivers, slips over the moss, drips down a broken hut, gleams for a moment on the morning dew, rustle with the wind on the wearied leaves, and comes home someday in another space when you extend the hand to touch it...the voices arising from the street seem familiar, not like the voices that criscrossed across the unfamiliar on shutter laden roads, but both are the same when you enter the dog days... 

treading down unknown spaces...

I tread down the space everyday, and let the work tire me down and the stare at the screen hide me into the oblivion. I just want to become another faceless person as I scurry for cover from recognizable faces. It must sound nice to cultivate habits that last, habits that begin to take over your will, habits that were once the product of those wills. It begins even before you anticipate the day and see its givings and wipe away the tiredness of the last night. Waking up fresh is a reconciled emotion, but you wake up to habits without knowing what the day holds and without seeing your own mark on the day..you hurry down the corridors, you wait along reluctant doors, you postpone your work to heal the tiredness but the tedium takes over, it swamps over all that you expect to achieve. You start to get irritated over those things that were supposed to get you through those days when you did not have anything and there was nothing which was being expected, you see them as intervening in your life and perhaps in the luxury of being that you were anticipating all this while but it all is a deluge which you were not prepared for, perhaps it was another walk into the oblivion that you wanted, perhaps getting rid of the tiredness is about being unrecognised, but you still put your self in that position where you announce your arrival and the being in the world, you stand unreconciled to yourself, a shadow of all desires, chasing oneself where one is not and cannot be ....

....the word survives all

how long is a time of silence? how long its memory? my words reach out in its faint being to traps laid beneath them, it trips over the landmine, it escapes unhurt under the fire, it breaths of smoke, it remembers the scraped time when mutilations where of order...but it reaches beneath all...it reaches untold, uncalled...it will keep reaching ..as long as there are words to write and to be read...as long as we stay as we are in love...in care...holding hands of the eternity ..with no promise of another time...yes with all the care these words live ....and yes they care...and will keep doing so...for it is love that keeps going all.