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.

The Eighth Colour

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."
~Orhan Pamuk


Again the infinity of a blank page stares up at me. The familiar ache of silent echoes just out of reach gnaws at my senses. In this part of the world, at this time of the night, darkness seems to spill over endlessly from the relentless skies, as if from the grim peak of a celestial waterfall. At the receiving end of a forlorn night such as this, I can only hope to brave the intangible heat of an overwhelming Absence, whilst daring to disillusion myself into believing that I am beyond any hope of salvation. Like the last remaining tree barely alive in a forest consumed by fire, I shiver, desiccated, in the utter silence of death.

Oftentimes, I think to myself - I do not wish to merely live life, I wish to live its meaning. I then ask questions, but later realize that the inconsistency of my thirst does not merit true answers. I have often felt that the essence of my being, despite the depths to its anguish, falls just short of deserving the light of my disproportionate dreams. I searched for my answers in the kiss of a stranger, in the sound of wind, in a drop of rain, in the touch of music, in the dance of poetry - and each painful time, I was met with a crippling sense of loss. I sought, in desperation, for a redeeming colour, and the rainbow revealed to me the inadequacy of seven. Like a suicidal autumn leaf falling meekly to its own unceremonious demise, I saw myself plunge into the abyss of my own unsatisfied soul, irrevocably burning its edges as I descended my wretched way. The single, final journey to the shores of blessed anonymity.

So there I lay amidst other fallen leaves, burnt yellow and unremarkable, mediocre even in the eyes of my own colourless misery. I could almost hear the ghosts of my slain comrades as they exchanged stories of my errant rebellion to one another. Faithless, homeless, I felt like an impostor in the light of their unforgiving gaze. I shut out their whispers and I felt that familiar burn of the Absence flood my insides again, threatening to drown me in my own blood. I could hear the others desert me in the wind, and I decided to stay behind and live my aching thirst instead. I, an unworthy traitor to the very cause of life, lay buried beneath more falling specimens, revelling bitterly, yet again, in the self-imposed obscurity.The hollowness of the present was quickly devoured by the fallacy of time, and the past eventually became stories I told myself. Soon these stories turned into unfaithful memories that leaked away at the faucet of my consciousness.

Then one day, beyond any quantifiable measure of time or memory, a lost wanderer came floating by and picked me up ever so gingerly. The hardened weight of the Absence seemed to melt along the insides of my parched soul, healing my rusted edges. As if the lock of a kiss had sucked its way into my mouth in the intimate darkness, and drawn my pounding heart out of my throat. As if a drop of rain had engulfed me in its frozen bubble of blinding light. Imagine a painting of fire tearing through ice, and the metaphor still pales in comparison. I dared to open my eyes hesitantly, and my insides shook with a fervor unbeknownst to me.

I was staring at my answer. I was staring at the eighth colour of my rainbow.

The world is now slowly starting to feel like home.

Ghosts of Silence

The evening was particularly long; the sullen stubbornness of a rain washed street, the glaring neon lights of the motor vehicles suffused in the thick fog of a pompous weekend night out in the city.  The taxi jerked to a halt, jolting her out of her wistful reverie, and she forced herself to step out into the overwhelming crowd, knowing there was no escape from the engulfing numbness now. An overpowering disassociation overtook her, and she got the feeling that she was watching a vestigial self of her mingle with this new crowd of people – the all too happy picture of social fraternizing – engaging in forced conversation, and being awkwardly pushed into offering half-baked opinions about topics she couldn’t begin to care for, as the incongruous listlessness wore her patience thin and made her foot soles ache in frustration. Bewildered by the ecstatic commotion of voices around her, she found herself unconsciously looking for him again, as if her mind had a will of its own.

Now, after politely sipping on a drink she didn't like, and lying automatically in reply that she was “fine” to a person she didn't wish to talk to, she found herself retreating into the farther corners of her mind, and scanning the room to catch his gaze. Not meeting it, she was overcome once again with a specific loneliness – he wasn't around so she could lose herself in him and by natural consequence unfocus from the disastrously loud music drilling into her ear drums, he wasn't around to make her feel more comfortable in her anxious skin, he wasn't around to understand her look without explanation, he wasn't around to forgive her myriad inadequacies – and his absence continued to burn her heart, rather like the disgusting drink did her throat. Multiple parallel trajectories of thought, the grammar of which eluded her understanding, wove in and out of her mildly inebriated consciousness, threatening to overflow into the surrounding air of thoughtless revelry. She saw the words of her incoherent yearning waltz before her dazed eyes, mimicking the uncoordinated dance of the disco lights, the syntax of which spilled out the pages of her mind, shaping wickedly into the luring shadow of his smile. She fidgeted with her phone to overcome this anxiety, only to find herself fixating on the reason behind it compulsively, her fingers absentmindedly tracing a pattern of his name in the air. She felt as lost as the distrait drop of condensed air trickling down the outside of her glass, stalling for a second only to resume recklessly on its meandering course to the bottom, whereupon it would disappear into an insignificant pool of such misfit nobodies. That is what she would amount to in the end – nothing more than a melting puddle of wasted desires consumed in the heat of life.

A painful couple of hours later, she headed home, past the rambunctious gaggle of easily excited college kids, her lonely heels echoing on the pavement, its regular rhythm reminding her of the empty space carved out in the shape of him beside her – an excruciating emptiness outside that dug a similar hollow within. As she turned round the final corner to her apartment, she stopped in her tracks, willfully drowned out the pandemonium of the city lights and the steely stares of strangers, closed her eyes and wondered fondly of what he might be doing now – quietly absorbed in reading, perhaps in bed, whilst plucking at his nascent beard, or simply listening to music by the window, having shut his mind off the world for the remainder of the night. She gazed up at the distant depth of the skies, and wondered at the silence of the oceans, and wondered if at that precise moment, he too was gazing up at the stars from his abode, their shared solitude binding them together in that moment. Slowly, like a falling leaf, she felt a warmth in her bones – the knowledge of his stoic solitude seeped into her consciousness, its enduring spirit wrapping her in its comforting embrace. She took a deep breath, smiling at the visceral living memory of his laugh, marveling at how intensely vulnerable and yet safe she felt in the light of his fierce love. As she continued to walk, the warmth of his elbow brushed against her bare arm, and the touch of his breath whispering in her ear drove her to madness. 

Sunset

The evening sky fades into shadowed pink,

Immersing us in its melancholic luster.

Again the silence of the dying day.

Again the echoes of yesterday.

Memories often render an illusion

Of retreating quietly, like waves, 

Into the distant confines of your hustling mind.

You let the thrust of time conquer the ocean of life.

Not for long this false stupor of time's healing.

For the scars continue to burn you in silence.

An overwhelming passage of remembrance leads you there.

The charging waves of seeming eternity, 

The swelling tide of seething misery.

This then, the fabric of searing loss,

Chafing at your insides tonight.

Like every other desolate night.

As if, the slightest touch of warmth, 

And you might melt into the disappearing light.