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.