Xanadu

I hesitate to follow a ritual,

To touch my bare feet to the stone.

The cold seeps in through the air, 

And wetness from the skies allure.

Abandoning promised paths for wilderness,

Lights fade out into the consolation of the night.

To listen to the footfall of anxious thoughts,

Their arms wrapped around the stubborn barks of trees.

Fear walks upon this dark hour shadowed by lovers, 

And she spreads her legs for the fury of doubt.

Together they attempt a dance of seduction,

Each eating into the other, forever coupled like murder. 

To wrestle the power of their mighty poison,

To spread instead, the dark ink of faith

On the thinning sheet of patience,

One turns to certain mortals and their immortal verse.

What must have Klimt felt once he looked upon his entwined lovers 

wrapped in their yellow bliss for eternity,

and realized that every kiss henceforth would be but a pale imitation, 

a foggy dream that disappoints, 

ever cursed by his own Frankisstein. 

Such is the truth of the ever-thirsty artist,

The inked desire at once becomes a fatal Xanadu, 

And life always occurs elsewhere, on the other shore.

Art beckons her voice,

And life falls short of the echo.

Nocturnes

And again the habit of old showers
Draws one here to the grave,
Also the touch of sprinkling leaves.
A faint tune resounds down the walk of memory,
As the river gurgles
Of a circular dream, still wet from last night.

Away they float towards a common cause,
On a sheet of icy water laden with the promise of time,
With a mirror of musing clouds for company,
Sharing their first kiss and their last dance.
In murky yellows and rushing reds they spin on,
Carrying with them a trembling word from me.

Elated skies open up in further joy.
Waxing gibbous, that ancient nocturnal lover,
Raises her face, ever betrothed to her beloved earth.
If only I could witness their capricious journey,
Or fade, away, into the drowning ocean,
And sleep, sleep, my weary head upon your thirsty shores.

The grand orchestra of Nature plays on,
And I wonder how one can speak of love.
One oft finds the word too vast, too feeble,
Like a beaded thread under a mountain.
To even have lived amidst this music,
Is to have loved and died in one eternal moment.

Back home,
Chopin's nocturnes are played as if in final farewell.
And the abiding thunder in my mind
Pursues as if in a trance, its tender melody.
If one could choose a perfect moment to walk out of life,
This night would be the flower I'd pick.

Promises

Dignity is uncertain. Belief, even more so.
Hope lies floating on the sidewalk,
Whilst you ink another confession
Across the restless walls of your mind.

You are trapped inside and out,
Complicit in a habit you wish would die.
The threat of dawn is a distant knock,
This deep night is hardly diminished by streetlamps.

Faint voices from fading mirrors
Alludes to a new clarity through tears.
The hush that follows a passing car,
Has come a long way from home.

Stare, stare for too long at any word you wrote,
And it doesn't feel yours anymore.
Only a vague incomprehension remains,
And the anguish of a ticking clock.

Ember

The air is pungent, like the bite of a berry,
Frosted, thick with the dark of shuffling murmurs.
A hollow shadow follows from memory's cove,
Betraying the nebulous doors of time.

I ask for a surveying kindness,
To yield and lay upon the riverbed.
Forbearance is a mighty forest in spite of the moon,
Even the night must lose her way sometimes.

Oh to forget and be forgotten,
If only for a moment, to sit and to perish.
To dance and fall off the edge like an ashen fruit,
Or to pick up an arrow and shoot.

Oil and fumes and tide and wine,
All rise above the lidded skies in proof
Of violent sorrows and hours upon the earth.
Hence this too shall be a passing eclipse.

So an eager leash of prayer flags as tether,
Into this ocean of despite I plunge.
Kicking against the swell of darkness and death,
With a single name to the embers of my heart.

Because water is too small to tame my fire,
Because silence runs deep and my love, deeper still,
Because a poem of love needs no approval,
Because my song for you knows no ending.

Library

Sitting by the framed music of her window,
The church bells knell the evening lights.
Just as flocking wings gather in a litany,
We ferry our drooping shoulders home.

The throat is parched with the dust of time,
And the gaze returns from the inward mockery.
Far ahead glazed the sempiternal dance of the wine-drunk tide,
Mimicking the pale fires of our battering hearts.

Scratch the bottom of language,
And the flood runs out of water.
The walls breathe and shift in silence,
Blindly clock the noise, softly hold the voice.

They who dwell beyond the hour of sleep,
Of whose feather, a lightness sought,
Of whose youth, a sweetness fraught,
Buries a longing in your homeless soul.

An intruder upon this ancient covenant,
I lower my eyes to the prevailing sanity.
The insouciance involved is a pretence,
Must I continue or sigh?

June again

Flickering ghosts of an adventuring spirit
gave me rite of passage into the unawakened dawn.

Here the silent valleys lay in pure being,
In deep evidence of blue eternity.
Here false sentiments fell away in defeat
To the thundering echo of life.

What then to be afraid of?
My heart was no longer overcast.

So there we were, surrounded by words,
Yet struggling to taste the right ones.
Poetry stood in amused witness,
To this clumsy story spilling before their pages.

Timidly we approached the tender space in between,
That holy kingdom so far eluding our clutch.

I confess, I was too afraid to touch,
It felt like a dream that would dissolve
Like a tablet in a glass of darkness.
So I let myself melt in the safe folds of distance.

The dampness of my feet barely registering,
As I stepped into puddled pools of shared whispers.

As with the gradual etch of time on stones,
You were engraving a name inside my fortress.
My disobedient soul rode dizzily into the rain,
And our footsteps danced to the pace of my heart.

Between the fugitive words and the insobriety,
Something escaped our lips - a kiss, though we didn't touch.

Outside I could taste the ocean in my mouth,
As the daring brush of a shoulder drove me delirious.
Blindly we walked past the opaque city lights dancing in mischief,
Our souls sighing in a beautiful melancholy for things we never lost.

I'm glad we're still walking, deciphering each day,
The wonder has only deepened with time.

Funeral Lights

A tree is falling,

Slowly, roots tearing away at life.

The aged bark grunts as if in submission,

Nearly a century spent under shower and sun.

Dismantled, bloodied, she lies in wait,

Her lofty shadow attempting a fading escapade.

The wind sweeps away her last echoes of rustling as if in farewell,

And a long forgotten name falls from her lips.

Her lovers lean in to touch her ebbing light,

Her leaves weep for you the tears you cannot shed. 

Even the sun dips his face behind the horizon.

You remember the funeral, you know you are drowning too.

Alone she makes her journey forth, towards darkness,

Clinging, against confusion, to pictures of youth and life.

Stars, and wind, and the music of rain,

And you are caught in the corridor of sorrows left behind.

Ashamed to go home now,

You fall at her feet just like the rest of her sighing lovers. 

Here lies a grave of dreams imploring the world to remember,

And you, an unworthy witness to this story.

The city lights come on as if to blind one, 

Dotted windows of mocking cheer, 

Piercing honks and passing cars, rattling your insides.

The world is incapable of mourning. 

At the brimming tides of Nagaon

The unbounded joy of the surging waves,
As if they couldn't wait to reach the shore.
They remind me of my own eager footfalls,
Each time I set forth to see you.

When at last they merge,
When water and land consume each other,
Like lips meeting lips, or like book meeting reader,
Thirst and satiation become one.

As the waters sweep over me,
I try and clasp their memory in my fist.
But as a dear old poet once wrote,
Time shall have its fancy, tomorrow or today.

And so inexplicably I find myself deceived.
They are gone all too soon, and I am left
With the residue of their love story in my palm -
A murky map of abandoned dreams.

So too are the homeless debris of my mind,
Like ghosts fading into the ocean.
But before I am allowed to mourn, they return,
New waves promising new dreams.

And so we play our respective roles,
Mortal souls in an immortal story.
The sun, the moon, and the waves indulge us,
And for a moment, we like to think our footprints won't wash away.

A Bronze Dream

What do you seek in these words, dear one?
The ebbing of vague hopes,
A life resting uneasy upon jagged edifices
Of empty consolation and forgotten vows?

A life perhaps deceiving itself into sleep.
Dreams of never waking,
Dreams of life itself being the promise of a dream,
A life spent thus in dreaming.

Sometimes you stare into the mirror,
Hoping for recognition,
Hoping to find a face that abides,
And you meet a stranger in your eyes.

Like young pebbles waiting to fall into the stream,
I float without knowing how to reach the bottom.
The wise waters whisper a bronze story in my ear,
And I am reminded of enduring sorrows and abiding pleasures.

In the soft shadows of this restless night,
I look for words to bring your face to light.
(But I realize I am asleep,
And Chuang Tzu's butterflies mock my dream.)

Far away in the silence,
The moon glows of your face in the forests deep.

Chasing tails

The unbearable silence of this evening,
Calls out your name in earnest.
The world seems to sigh along in unison,
As if they too were part of my yearning.

The distant echo of a passing train,
Reverberates a dismal tune of hasty farewells.
The clouds too relent and mourn with me,
I ache without knowing why.

Words fail, memory lies.
The only truth is painted outside the window.
The purple hues of the stoic sky,
And the burning lump in my throat.

Why knock on an open door?
Why wait for a dreamless sleep?
Who understands the sorrow of rain?
I ache without knowing why.

We hurt, we heal, we go forth again.
Moving forward is such an illusion.
Haven't we chased our tails around the same sun for ages now?
A few revolutions around a floating ball of fire,
That is the entirety of our story.

And yet we wrap our bodies and minds with fairy lights,
Carve symbols celebrating our mortal resilience,
Our dream being to dazzle through the eternal darkness,
Shine our way through life,
And go shining into death.

After Music

Somewhere within me,
I hear a shadow weep.
A little life is still left beating inside.
Today I feel an urge to feel.

Somewhere a mute violin waits,
In search of a forgotten chord.
The faded etching on the ageing walls
Speak of memory and patience.

A plaintive strain brings me here,
In search of an old answer.
Sometimes I fear a rebuttal,
Cold and stinging, like the slap of your ire,
From my own fleeting shadow.

When I step out into the sunlight,
I hope I find the tune that will lead me home.
In between the farce and the silence,
Somewhere, I shall find the etching,
On the unread walls of my soul.

Sunset blues

From the distance I thought it was a grasshopper, bright green and throbbing with life in the twilight. As I went closer, it turned out to be, of all things, a lonely okra, the lanky vegetable. But who knows, perhaps in another world, I thought to myself, it might as well have been a grasshopper. In fact, in the few seconds when I spotted it from afar, it really was. It was as real and alive as the barking dogs at night. The secret of life perhaps lives in framed moments like this, a broken shell of half-understood meaning. The rest is an overwhelming empire of mystery; we will never know more. Memory plays with the knotted threads of our desperate minds, and our minds never stop craning their necks to glimpse the illusory precipice of some transcendental epiphany. Who knows, after I had walked past it, the bored green plant might have spread its wings and taken flight. 

"Suffering is one very long moment", says Oscar Wilde. "We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return." I pluck at the melancholic strings of my forlorn mind this evening, seeking the pattern to understanding its language. The only constancy in my world has been this inevitable return of melancholy. I now greet her like an old friend, letting myself drown in her unfathomable silence. I watch as my own dismembered sorrow finally leaks from my eyes, threatening to drown my vision of the world with it. As if in a trance, I absentmindedly track the pace of its slow fall along my face. When we are lost, we are free. Free to even follow our tears as they make their way into a world beyond these skies and oceans. But the contour of this route is circular. Life is one continuous concentric spiral, centering around the axis of death. We are free only in so far as we keep meandering in these coiling circles. At times, our narratives might expand and give in to new spaces, and at such times they seem to offer the hope of an exit from this circuit, but in truth, the circle only gets bigger. There is no reprieve but to keep going, keep forging ahead despite our burning soles. Perhaps Valery was right. "To live means to lack something at every moment." So we have to keep craning our necks into the distance ever more. A tangled tapestry of dreams, fears, sorrow, curiosity, beliefs, nightmares, love and tears on this tiny speck of a planet out in the infinite emptiness. A tedious task this, dear Borges, planting my own garden and decorating my own soul. Where is the music and where are the promised flowers?

Sometimes I stare at a blank page, its white surface endlessly stretched out before me, and I wonder if the ghosts of unwritten stories are having their secret meeting under this veneer of blank innocence, strutting in all their elusive glory just out of my sight. The words I crave to tame, to conquer, lie at the bottom of some distant well in my consciousness, crafting their strategic escape from the unbuttoned confines of my mind. Stories age, but they never die. The fraying fabric of words illuminating the ancient dance of Time urges me to mimic its capricious spectacle in all its lyrical madness. And so the words resting on my lips this evening seem weary, as if they had travelled a great distance to reach the cloudy shores of my mind. I write now to cherish the spirit of this resolute journey, if only to falter at the threshold of their coherence. The scent of mint leaves from next door interweaves with the molten pot of brewing doubts in the chambers of my restless mind, and as I look out of the window in desperation, a lazy grasshopper comes to rest on my window sill, snapping her wings rhythmically, as if warning me not to mistake her for a vegetable again. I wonder if I'm a dream, trapped inside someone's sleeping world.

Sleep

We toss and turn,
Deeper under the layers.
Restless breaths and reckless dreams,
Burning madness of the night.

What came before us,
And what is to come after,
All point to a larger indifferent story -
The unceasing symphony of stars.

In trying to keep up
With the withering trickle of time,
Are we all lost drops of fire
Consuming the silence of the dark?

Or are we blind travellers,
Wrecking each new leaf,
Amidst whimpering groans of hunger,
Abode a crumbling vessel?

The sorrowing face of the sun,
Dips again into the healing colour.
Many lives to touch.
Many deaths to go.

The View

Sometimes,
As I stretch out on the tickling grass
And look up at the stars,
I wonder.

How it would all look like
From up there.
Stretched out on the infinite sky,
Watching this dance of madness -

Wars, tears, bloodshed.
Lies and deceit, honour and love.
Broken homes and shattered dreams.
A newborn nestled in the nervous arms of a father.

The first language,
The last breath of a dying parent.
The music of butterflies in the rain,
A friend in pain.

The fire of success,
Wandering and forgetting.
A playful note from a lover,
Found tucked inside an old book.

The roar of a hungry lion.
A crackling log of fire burning in the dead of the night.
The deafening loneliness
Of silence in the middle of the ocean.

The spilling ink of a frenzied writer,
A suitcase full of memories.
A shape-shifting omen in the darkness,
The flush of a first kiss.

A stubborn needle in a haystack,
A weary ghost in a graveyard.
The lifecycle of a tiny fish,
The final bow of a dipping sunset.

The echoes of birds trapped in valleys,
A lost shoe drifting in the gutter.
The first drop of rain,
The finality of a slammed door.

From one insignificant lifetime to the next,
The incongruity of it all.
And the utter wonder at the sheer possibility
Of our existing at all.

And amidst all this.
Fear and insomnia,
Life altering discoveries and human intervention,
You.

Secret

Dark, dark this night
Darker my desire.
I listen for the breath of your heavy heart,
I cling to the laden spaces in between.

Each time I look into your eyes
I try to decipher the message.
Each time a different story,
Each time, the same lonely tear.

Each time I inch closer,
Your sad eyes drift into the distance,
Tantalizingly close in flesh,
Forever out of my reach.

But have you tried asking the waves,
"Why come back again and again,
Only to inevitably fail, shrink and perish?"
I can tell you, the shore will never know why.