Unfinished conversations

She wants to hold on to me like unfinished conversations, he thought. But those conversations are lost when the threads which bind them have been forgotten, new meanings creep in the midst as past slowly gathers itself in the present.Slowly you repeat the beginnings in your mind, day after day, hour after hour, as if in a mere repetition the conversation will come to life, you slowly gather her shadow and put it in the back of the pocket or an unread book, the book when it is opened, it is not the same page and the shadow slowly eases past the last remembered light...all the practiced phrases become a futile attempt to capture the moment and you slowly lose the company of words.....how long was he thinking like this? the cigarette he held in his hand was long burnt and he was lucky this time that it dint burn his fingers as he often used to do, the ashes had drifted on the open book sensing a wind behind which flapped its dog eared pages...the glass on the table had begun to form rings around its base and at the rim where his lips touched the wine of the last night, the sediments settling down as the left over wine had evaporated in the burning heat of the spring...it was unusual for this time of the year to have so much sun, yet the clouds alternated everyday as if keeping their promise with a tired sleepy narrow alley where he used to live...the plate on the table reminded him of the food he had cooked the day before, pieces of the yolk of the egg still sticking to it and the salt strewn around the blue plate as mocking stars on a moonless night.....

Seeing

You wait at the screen for words
to tumble, for faces to appear out
of a mask, for an emotion to
wrap its emptiness, for the
tragedy of a death in a
land unknown, for news
trickling down like brewed
coffee.

You wait at the screen, the
life passing by in small trifles
you never promised to do, in
small silences you never
bothered to hear, in pages
you forgot to read, in faces you
will never see.

Time empties itself in memory
as it eases past your sight.

Untitled

मैं कोई एक पल तो नहीं
जिसे तुम उकेर सको अपनी
डायरी के पन्नों में, मैं क्षितिज
पर अस्त होता हुआ सूर्य भी नहीं
जो हर रोज़ अस्त हो कर अपनी
समानता में भी भिन्न है जिसे
रोज़ तस्वीर में कैद कर कैनवास
पर उतारा जा सके

मैं तो हर एकांत में एक शब्द
का नकार हूँ, अगर सुन सको
तुम उसे तो ये अपने खालीपन
का आवरण उतार देना। तुम्हे
पूर्ण करना न मेरी नियति है
न कोशिश, जो पूर्ण है वह तो
कब का बिछड़ गया है और
जिसे तुम अपूर्ण जान चुकी
हो वह केवल सडकों पर
भटकता समय है।

इन सबमे कहाँ पा सकोगी
तुम मुझे, इनमे मैं कहाँ देख
पाऊंगा तुम्हे, रात
के ढेर को बांटती तुम्हारी
आखों मे एक स्पर्श
सा है ये जीवन, चलो इसे
विसर्जित कर दें इस पल
उस बहाव की फांकों में
जो निरंतर तुमको
छू  कर मुझसे दूर
कहीं बिखर जाती है

Existence

when your existence becomes heavy on the skin
of others, what do you do? Do you slowly wrap the
skin around with a warm blanket of your words
or tear open the scar the rusted kitchen knife gave
you? perhaps, you do nothing, take a word, tease its
meaning out and leave it hanging like wet clothes like
a flag post of all your failures, there it flaps its wings
in half mast itching your memories in their shadow.
perhaps you just wrap it around like a torn shirt
in your old rusted iron trunk and forget it for
a mourned winter when you will again hibernate
from love. Perhaps you do nothing at all, just wait,
a patience wrapping it arms like a shroud on your
dreams, the skin peels off in slivers like droplets from
leaves, the leave left thirsty for rain and you for love….
slowly you begin to forget her, and she you
your words which provided a cushion in
tired nights mean nothing at all, the mere sign
of your being, a tired memory of a lost battle
with happiness ..and you drool over
the taste of wine and the lost aroma of coffee.

Waking up

what do you do when you are surrounded by piles of sameness, with nothing left to choose between one moment of another; a moment repeats itself endlessly like a mechanical clock quizzically trying to judge you yet locked in its own sameness...you inscribe meaning into one moment and it spills out of the other; a moment which you dint know but which existed nonetheless inside you, around you even when words were failing to surprise you for the umpteenth moment when you wanted them to come to your rescue...every new word a tired memory of shed clothes which leave a shine on you only the first time when you wore them...one can just sit and discern the differences in the sound across the window, the chirping of the birds and the endless passing of people in cars and buses...beyond a point you fail to register for somewhere you see to have rhythm with them...the breath a tune of their fragrance, the time flowing in your nerves a faint remembrance of the silent shake in the building when a bus crosses through, or the movement in the eyelids just a passing everyday glance of the sea gull perched on a TV antenna...even the everydayness does not seem to surprise you when you wear it and discard it in the nights of the evening where a tired day sleeps like a child in a cocoon, protected from its own face and their own mischievous doings......

perhaps you wake up in the morning with a shadow of the dream still lingering behind the eyelids, slowly slipping down as the aroma of the coffee steals itself into the slippages of the dream, some splashed in the water as it rests still on the eyes, some clinging to the eyebrows, and some waiting to evaporate to reveal a radiant face of the morning. You wake up to a new day away from the dreariness of memories of old, as if you were a different person who was living in the remembrance of a memory, who was struggling the night before to un cling all, yet slowly when the rituals of the waking, of lying in the bed with a tiny wink of sleep hiding somewhere, calling you in the arms, the pillow crooning over your face, the blanket reveals a warmth lost to the night, the bed promises a new dream and the table lamp seems to be sleeping for ages, the alarm clock has long been tired waiting for you to be awake, it goes in its own slumbers, the night air is still fresh in the home, the shutters have not yet revealed the light of the day, the morning air blows outside the shutters waiting to carve in, waiting for the windows to welcome it...its an eternal play with its patience, as the sleep is the play with the patience of the morning to engulf it in your arms, but you have already forgotten the dreariness of the night...till it comes back when words start filling the gaps of the dream or a nightmare of the sleep, the words slowly move in to take their place where there were just images fleeting past as if on a TV screen, you could see the characters, perhaps you were one of them, playing a part which will never be replicated in real life as if fulfilling a fantasy.....yet the day promises a new beginning, but the old slowly becomes familiar as the smell of your own body, the bed, the blankets, the pillows all start to look familiar, the feel of the room suddenly dawns you back, stitches the slippages in time and fixes it in memory to bring all of it back to you...and suddenly what was a slow waking up comes like a deluge, the walls look the same, the fractures in the plasters reveals the same face, the moistness in the hands the same air, the mirror still shying away from its own face, the table lamp in the same position where you left it last night, the book still open with a character quizzically staring at you because you could not complete their story, they are waiting like us all to tell their story and it is like meeting a stranger on the train, before their story is finished you know the station has arrived and you have to get down, for that one moment you do not mind the train being late, you pray being lost in the story for the slowness of time, for the story encapsulates you and yet the train arrives on time and with a heavy heart you make the decision to get down, away from the story, somewhere with a promise to bump in to the stranger again...yet you know it will not happen, but you do not leave it there..you start the story where it was left, but now it is through another story, of another stranger, on another train , in another journey, the sojourn changes but the story remains..you know the story is not the same, yet you start from where you left the last time, because somewhere you want to complete that story, because somewhere you know that most stories have some similarity and you yearn for the familiar even when you begin the new, just because removing the old cloak is all so different and all so difficult .....

कुछ पल

कुछ पल अभी और
ठहरो, पिछली भूली
खामोशियों को अपने
इर्द-गिर्द शब्द बटोरने
दो, नए शब्द मत गढ़ो
अभी; बिखर जायेंगे,
बस इस खामोशी को
अपने आस- पास दायरा
बनाते देखो, पिछले कितने
शब्दों की रातें अभी उधार
है तुम पर 
उन्हें एक- एक कर
बस पिघलने दो,
उतरने दो इस रात में
अभी बस कुछ पल
खामोश रहो

मेरी कविता

मेरी कविता एक निराशा है 

उन शब्दों की जो कभी जी नहीं 

पाए, रोज़ एक असफल कलाकार 

की नाईं मैं बैठ जाता कुछ हर्फों 

का  पोषण लिए और लिपता जाता 

जैसे मरहम पट्टी करता हो वो 

डॉक्टर, फिर रोज़ उस नासूर को 

बढ़ता पा छोड़ देता उसे अपनी 

मौत के लिए। 

कविता एक निराशा 
है कवि के लिए, वह जीवन जो 
वो कभी जी नहीं पाया; ढूँढा 
था  जिसे कभी शब्दों मे मगर कभी  
उभार नहीं पाया। 

असंख्य शब्दों 
की मृत्यु का शोक है एक कविता ;शब्द 
जिसे वह पोषित न कर सका, शब्द जो 
उसका साथ छोड़ गए, जो बच गए 
कोरे कागज़ पर वह उसके सुने जीवन 
के प्रतीक थे; जिनमे उन शब्दों की नाईं 
कितनी बार मरा था वह, की एक कविता जी सके।