I submit to the sky

A sudden flash

of lightening pierces

the veil of a summer

night. A storm teases

the trees. Some street

lamps wink and fall 

asleep in the womb 

of darkness. Earth 

sheds its burning skin

for a day and the parched

soil swirls around madly

in the hairs of the passerby.

An uneven tiredness 

subsides and I submit 

to the sky.

(May 23, 2016)

Old Skin

Old skin, possibility is
a dotted line. Learn to 
write your name. But
erase it soon lest your
traces be heavy. Open
future is an undeciphered
script, the uncertain has
its trappings. (Sometimes)
it is beautiful.

(24 May 2016)

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

Old skin, clouds are a
guest to the summer
night. Flashes of lightening
an interlude to their
love. You a drifting 
passerby. Collect the
fragments in their pauses.
This instant is alive with
the possible.

(23 May 2016)

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

Old skin, murmurs of an
instant are not rumours.
There are clouds passing
nearby. Finality dissolves
(sometimes) when you
stop parting shadows.
Wonder!

(23 May 2016)

Slow

All seen is a waiting for 

the yet seen. 

Slow!

The veil is fragile. A 

drop dissolves, 

the dew

splits. 

A tiny crack is all you have

 anticipations galore. 

Slow!

You are not enough in the unedited time

I know the desire of the slow time that escapes the moment you come craving for it, the desire not to be consumed in the speed that surrounds us in the every day talk, in the desire to render visible ourselves for the consumption of the other; otherwise how do you make sense of what you did with the passing time. There is a question that lingers, often unasked, often concealed, what do you do when you are not working? What is it that consumes your day? A question hard to answer if all that you have been doing is living it, soaking in the pauses that it offers, the lingering scent of the passing time wrapping itself around you, entering the interstices you dared enter not for you lacked the courage all along, raising uncomfortable questions that you always desired to escape. It trickles down in nano seconds that you can count. The relative unease that it brings, the desire to fill it up as soon as it empties itself in the new time, unacknowledged, unremembered, unseen. You want to push through the mass of lethargy that you think has surrounded you, but the only action that you can breed is an escape from the questions, the doubt is all that escapes rather than haunting you to another sleepless night. You wrestle with the question, juggle with it for a while, but then you pronounce the fatal word futile. That thinking is futile when so much remains to be done is born at that moment, that boredom is another lost opportunity to wriggle in another word on empty spaces of paper, that tedium is just a laziness that you have reluctantly cultivated, a cloak that you need to shed. The longing that comes, the anticipations that could not be bred, all this is desired to be shed, for reflection demands a pause that you are all ready to sacrifice, for you are at the mercy of speed that you can never fathom, nor match but merely surrender to. You are always haunted by your own abilities, and tormented by your own lacks that this speed feeds on, that you are not enough nor in an unedited time, nor in the edited time of your pause. 

Lost children of slow time

Often when I have tired myself from the easy distractions of the cyberspace I ask myself- what now? The distraction has somewhere entered not from the desire to know all that is happening around but somewhere from a deep unease within. Somewhere the narrative out there is quite familiar but still a desire lingers in the corners of the mind that something is happening where I am missing out, some information is trickling in which I should know, that I belong to a time where I should not be, and I need to fill in the gaps of understanding from the ever trickling news, be it in the cyber space or in the lives of the people. There is always a desire to escape the ennui and the repetition of life. But often when I wonder is there at all a repetition? and what is it a repetition of? Perhaps it is easy to escape from the room and walk around aimlessly, looking at the setting sun, the round surface of the moon, listening to the birds and the craziness of the traffic, there is the profound unease still to gape at your cell phone, to catch the on-going world in the contours of the black screen, somewhere out there something is which is the source of unease, but the fulfillment itself brings further questions: where to next? Reflection reminds us day after day that we will not be surprised when we enter into the realm of this real, that the news, and the happenings that we trail are somewhere what we expected, often it does not alter our perceptions, sometimes just makes us immune to them, sometimes in the garb of sitting deep within it just riles us from what indeed demands our attention, we miss those pauses, those silent edges of happening, those lying at the margin, those that have only sufficient space to be relegated to the invisible.

For long today I had walked trying to read and decipher the words that had been long gone, somewhere in the certainty that I had found for myself. Somewhere in the surrounding that I had created for myself, between news, cricket, talking to friends, going on walks, occasional exercises, somewhere it was all an attempt to crave and gain that certainty which makes work possible, where we know that nothing unusual will happen because we have debarred it, we need it in moments of stress, and suffering, that something that gives meaning. But around those very same meanings a lot is getting lost which we often get numbed to, where we fail to pause and reflect on the blackhole that we are entering silently and that keeps consuming us, leaving no time at perusal, for we are lost child of the slow time.

Ruminations of a lighthouse

'Wait for the disproving earth to fold, the unruly clouds to dissolve, the rough sails to melt, and unforgiving hands to rest. There are forgotten winds too',speaks the lighthouse to the lost oars.