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.