On writing and the angst of the words......

There is a feeling which escapes me as soon as I start on its trail...like stairs which disappear in small alleys, sleeping and yawning out of non-existence, yet reaching somewhere- we don't know where and to whose last house on the street...the trail creates its own path when the feeling escapes and sometimes I just feel that its a trick with words which plays out on the paper, its not me who writes but a trickster conjuring up images which I have not lived or which sieve through numerous stacks of books which stare bored in my direction and deceive me to a trail where one is caught in the absurd...the situation is not mine, the moments are not lived, the days emerge out of nowhere and the people dissemble their masks to wear another one, yet they are all very present there when I sit and write like a possessed idiot who garbles his own thoughts to escape them and just to take someone on the journey without announcing the destination...some do join, fellow travelers who want to be lost, who had already known that the destination they always cherished was the one which will throw them apart from the world, the reaching itself was a discontent, the pain which illusions create when they start living......in those moments one just lives when one has created rather than live to create.....the words seem to have broken the chains of memory, the dams of meanings and flood my papers seem to be coming from far and not from me- maybe here is the tiny gap which exist between those people who trick you with words, for they know at times even don't know whether it comes from them and those who know the words are coming from far and the only sense they will be able to make is when they have fully appeared on the paper. Both are not present in the moment when it writes itself and opens up its tenuous relationship with the writer, both chide us, bore us down, want to know their meanings, their appearance and their authors and their authentic experience of being, of why they are placed where they are, why they sit around with a word they don't like, why appear at a moment where nothing has a meaning...in a certain sense writing is to escape the existential angst of words, to give their absurdity a meaning and to conjure up an existence for them where they feel homeless, always willing to escape their temporality .....its in these moments where I know what I feel and what i set to write has been discarded, has been betrayed many times over, sometimes slaughtered and maimed on pages reeking and smelling of dying carcasses and corpses carried by the same words, all quizzically interrogate me as to why I had to enter their domain and why I twisted them and turned them apart where they are not to be....and these turnings themselves gives me a poem, a writing which I dint live but where and when will i live them or will it be something which does not exist always appear in the writing is to be seen.....

My rainbow

There is a weathered rainbow right across the horizon where the vision fades every day. It hangs along the mountains collecting fragments of colours and yet always remaining incomplete in itself. Rainbow always reminds me of train journeys which always failed to complete, the destination arrived before it was supposed to and yet one fails to get down. The journey, I forget to ask all the time, who started it and who was it travelling across the panorama of the mountains, blank fields, bridges, the steel frames- like unwritten memories they just space out themselves in unknown corners of the body. Each vision an awe, each sight a recollection, each bridge a surprise, each sound a melancholy of lost colours. The destination never arrives in the sight, its just the feel and the sound which warns us of the arrival, reminds us of the collectibles left scattered on the seats, left behind on the way in the weariness of the journey. Its these fragments which build the rainbow I see everyday before the moon peeps out, knowing or feigning its own loneliness in the journey where the stars seems all so close yet moving farther away, some already dead before any eyes could touch them. Like my half formed, half dying rainbow most of these stars are already dead and yet we never feel the strangeness of being surrounded every night by the dead. It only enchants us and wants to embrace us and we struggle with the ever growing mystery of this dying beauty. Are we also not the same? Dying all the time, in time, across time, burning bridges in memory, turning away from the past just to be us or be the normal person on the street. We escape the reality that we are one of them, just buying ourselves more time to be ‘someone’, that somebody we don’t know yet and maybe will never be able to know. Was it always a false start to begin with or are we all creatures of false starts, every start a wrong one, every start taking us away from where we want to reach or think we can reach. The destination is covered in mud and forgotten moss like a stone flirting with the coming waves, yet left thirsty to the next wave which touches it but never satiates it. The stone erodes away leaving some unknown being of itself as if living its time, living its own ‘shelf life’, obscuring its own being, not asking questions why it is there? Do destinations ask questions why they are pinned to the place? Why they ever engrave themselves on a map- be it the mind or an empty space on this earth?

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.