Musings from a city

# Porto is a surreal experience. The magic where it comes from: is it the narrow alleys, or the river merging into the ocean, the streets which have stories known or the heroic tales whispered or the stories untold? Can you figure it out in such a city? A melange of people from different cities? 

#The receding sea dries 
your hair, I had an ocean
in mind when I opened
my arms, but the waves
were rough for the night.

# Where does your eye meet the wind? does it see the parting of its lips when it whispers to the ocean? Does the wind hesitate before it parts with its songs? Was the free wind just an imagination of a caged mind? 

#I see the wind melting in the music of your desire, the river severs its melancholy in the babble which rises in the mixed tongue. the lone guitarist with cymbals carving a song, as the city lights descend for the moment under the lamp which rests in the shadow of my pen. The lights are yet to arrive in the window of words, I dust them everyday, recite it like small change, that drops in the coin box of the beggar standing by the sidewalk, the cyclist are unsure and the couples with hand in hands as I remember a story I shared with a stranger. 

# I drink this world around your shadow, it must not have been the same when you were here, people waiting and the glass is empty, the girl looks at me but avoids my glance, it was never the same. I was never alone on this table, if you cover the glances of the man sitting far away from my eyes, you will see he is not watching, no words attempt to reach me here, whose mistake was it that I came this way? 

#I dread to remove the napkin, the table is so full of words and all that is funneled through never reaches me, yet how did they pick up the paper and write a word on it? I can't decipher the silence from the other, my company with words disappeared the moment you left, am stranded along a highway which arches over a bridge, small yellow lights hanging by the side, a narrow sidewalk threatening to merge with the road, the train travels and shakes the bridge, yet it does not fall apart, never does, yet my legs stutter even when I had nothing to drink. the river lies thirsty in its bed yet merging in the ocean without a desire. Love would yet have come here if I did not turn the road into a song. 

A habitual day..perhaps!

Often when the melancholy door opens and stays ajar creaking in the chaos of the wind like the cries of the cat I sit their somewhere like an unclaimed piece of morning..i hear the theft alarms that sound late into the night as someone puts a hand accidentally or perhaps when a thief silently checks their own edges of knowing in the art of breaking in..the piece of morning, stale arranges itself around pieces of paper strewn around and a palimpsest made of speakers, cups of tea, some smelly tobacco and house as wounded as the heart of a child refused ..you trace a word on the open pages of the book, stay by it for minutes, keep staring so that it takes away the pain of looking, it takes away the pain of being for the moment, perhaps you wish to dissolve and know that it is not only you but someone from some other time, some other space echoes along, they are bouncing off their sounds waves, sending it out in unknown territory, to the vast emptiness that the mountains create..it keeps moving along for years, enters into many cracks, floats on the rivers, slips over the moss, drips down a broken hut, gleams for a moment on the morning dew, rustle with the wind on the wearied leaves, and comes home someday in another space when you extend the hand to touch it...the voices arising from the street seem familiar, not like the voices that criscrossed across the unfamiliar on shutter laden roads, but both are the same when you enter the dog days... 

treading down unknown spaces...

I tread down the space everyday, and let the work tire me down and the stare at the screen hide me into the oblivion. I just want to become another faceless person as I scurry for cover from recognizable faces. It must sound nice to cultivate habits that last, habits that begin to take over your will, habits that were once the product of those wills. It begins even before you anticipate the day and see its givings and wipe away the tiredness of the last night. Waking up fresh is a reconciled emotion, but you wake up to habits without knowing what the day holds and without seeing your own mark on the day..you hurry down the corridors, you wait along reluctant doors, you postpone your work to heal the tiredness but the tedium takes over, it swamps over all that you expect to achieve. You start to get irritated over those things that were supposed to get you through those days when you did not have anything and there was nothing which was being expected, you see them as intervening in your life and perhaps in the luxury of being that you were anticipating all this while but it all is a deluge which you were not prepared for, perhaps it was another walk into the oblivion that you wanted, perhaps getting rid of the tiredness is about being unrecognised, but you still put your self in that position where you announce your arrival and the being in the world, you stand unreconciled to yourself, a shadow of all desires, chasing oneself where one is not and cannot be ....

....the word survives all

how long is a time of silence? how long its memory? my words reach out in its faint being to traps laid beneath them, it trips over the landmine, it escapes unhurt under the fire, it breaths of smoke, it remembers the scraped time when mutilations where of order...but it reaches beneath all...it reaches untold, uncalled...it will keep reaching ..as long as there are words to write and to be read...as long as we stay as we are in love...in care...holding hands of the eternity ..with no promise of another time...yes with all the care these words live ....and yes they care...and will keep doing so...for it is love that keeps going all.

Immortality 3

...and someday I will 

become a forgotten 

memory, archived 

in tombstones with 

reluctant lilies squinting

in the murmur of the sun,

their desire to kiss

the wind, where ashes 

float from the last 

remembered hands.

When the pages of 

the calendar turn, the 

rain announces another

year of my return in the 

cracks of the old home

where the child in the 

picture refuses to grow. 

Another song will bid the 

year good bye to the 

dead, another repetition 

awaits the living.  

There is no memory in the wind

I taste the solitude. 

It's a house with 

many doors, none 

a paean of the

memory you so 

dutifully preserved. 

It's cold, the verses 

have gone silent; the

frost in the wind 

settles reluctantly

on tired lips. 
The air sweating 
time like mist on 
closed windows. How 
long will we brush 
the dust of silence
under the duvet? 
How long the dream 
be our sole memory? 
The smile I adorned 
was a stolen dream. The 
shoes have been discarded, 
the dust wiped out clean. 
The vagabonds of years 
past return home, the 
memory a deep 
longing;searching for 
places to hide.

आवारा धुआं

सुबह- सुबह इन सड़कों पर ये कौन 

आवारा धुआं फ़ैल रहा है, एक संकरी 

लकीर बनाता हुआ, अपने धुन में मस्त 

किस राह चल दिया है 

रुक कर अपनी साँसों को कभी सहेजता 

पल भर के लिए थम जाता अधखुले जंगले 

पर और झाँक जाता घरों में बैठे खामोशी को 

अल सुबह यही खेल दोहराता फिर थक कर बैठ 

जाता छत पर लटके बांसी पपड़ियों पर 

इन्हीं पलों में स्मृति कि दीवार कुछ कमज़ोर 

हो झरने लगती, उसके टुकड़े बिखर जाते 

बंद रौशनदानो में, कपड़ों में एक अलसाई 

गंध सिमटने लगती और एक उबास सी 

भर जाती अलमारियों में 

नज़र बचा कर कोई एक नन्हा धूप 

का टुकड़ा डूबता रहता तुम्हारे काँधे 

कि अलगनी पर