...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