Stamp

The bureaucracy of Love compels me to become an applicant,

I stand in the hope-soaked line of faceless nameless suitors,

I patiently fill and refill the dreamdust coated forms in verses and prose.

They all look like carefully left behind scraps of paper for lovers of cafes.

 

 I sit on the mahogany desks and on tables of woods I don’t know or like,

They make the soft beautiful sounds against my knuckles that I read about,

I feel letdown, unworthy, disappointed yet again by the time’s passage,

I am yet to know music or through it you, but the desks hide my shivering knees.

 

All I want is to embed the monogram on my soul but you and I, our names share initials,

Even if I did let my soul be scarred, who is to know, what name is it, yours or mine?

Only the one who will carve or singe those letters or perhaps not even him,

And so I thought, maybe first you can rip my to shreds, flay my heart. 

 

Create by demolition, cut in ways only your fingers, long and smooth on a tiny palm, can,

Slashed and stripped in to ribbons wavering along the same lines as your lovely hair,

Leaving a gaping hope, a grey oozing puddle, bubbling with a heap of boiling tar,

The exact shape and size of your eyes, from when I saw them when you were about to leave.

 

And in return, I ask for so much more, to let my hands claim and hold your wrists, forever.

In return, I want to let my head fall hopelessly, as only in love, on your ribs,

In return let me singe you with traced poems through my fingertips on your skin,

But most of all, let the lips tired of reciting this poem rest for an eternal moment on your forehead….

Half and Half

Have you visited the artificial cool soothing spaces of the galleries?
Have you sat or stood by the religiously whitened walls behind the frames?
Have you ever counted the seconds before the cold surface numbs the skin?
Or was it You warming those sleek black frames with the long caress of your palms?

I went to some drunkard’s gallery once, he was a lover of wines,
He used to ask me what I thought of this work or that,
I used to lie to him, calling them some petty metaphors,
Allegories of a fermented madness aging poorly into vinegar

I refused to tell him that the vermillion dawn of the summer,
Mixed with your lovely lips and turned to ambrosia,
I did not speak of the sharp yellow of the summer afternoon,
Draping itself on your cheeks and turning you into a glowing beacon of my desire

I told him lies, hiding the story of the last spurt of green before autumn sets in,
Green that spills over into my thoughts when I think of you out in the world,
I turn an ugly shade, a dirty sea weed green of slippery moss,
Flecks of black in my heart, evoking a pungent smell of helpless hate.

But most of all I hid the thoughts I had that turned into blue,
The blue of the uncharted sea shores, with memories crashing,
Wave after wave of anguish against the dead scaly rock of reasons,
Reason of you never kissing my burning temple, soothing my tired thoughts.

I hid all the colors of you and of the world with you,
World that made me walk and write and wail and writhe,
Because darling, you are a poet’s delight, you are the painter’s desire
And I am only halfway through in love with you, for I am yet to hold a brush dripping with colors to you.

Arc

Throbbing toes, warmed unpleasantly on the jagged asphalt,

I once knelt and ran my hand across the empty road,

The tiny pebbles, whimpering, jaded and jutting from the tar,

Forever trapped in viscous simmer of the sun and skin and rubber

 Now I sit comfortably, smugly, in the half arc of cane intricate chair,

The café fragrant with the aroma of coffee and cacophony of conversations,

 The smoldering heat striking and failing to intrude the cool glass cuboid,

 Allowing me to chuckle, thinking the road feels just like my poetry

My hand lightly rests on the handprint, the glass table cold and comforting,

 The fingers fit between the gaps of the ones in the oily print,

 I remember seeing photographs of you sitting in the same chair,

I shiver when I realize this is our most intimate touch.

I remember sitting in the less comfortable chairs here,

 You sat across me and the world was blocked by curtain of your inky tresses,

 I remember the futility you made me see in the words,

 Words that I offered to you, to tell you that I am in love with you.

The crowd is thinning here, the thoughts thickening inside me,

I watch as the light tread of your presence transforms,

It becomes dense, heavy rock of your noticed and chagrined absence,

It drops soundlessly through my smoke fused being, a new abyss.

I remember the tar of my lungs and of the road,

I remember the jagged bits of the road cutting my palm,

I noticed the words jaded in me, cutting the veins of the feigned peace,

I grip the now smudged handprint a little tighter

 

Plane

Ever walked out the grey room, only to end up ankle deep in graying sludge

You stayed in the room, reading those yellow books, 

They talked of luscious toe-kissing, sole-caressing terrains,

They spoke of those damn meandering streams like a lover after a long slow night of

 

But now you stand in this barren sepia wasteland covering the plane you exist on,

Gone are the delicate orchids, replaced by even finer, more fragile dust statues,

Stuck, suspended in the air, ready to invade you, feigning a kiss

You realize that you’ve been fooled by words, you’ve been slowed by time

 

All that was spoken of, all that you saw in those baritone narrated documentaries,

Those weren’t chronicles, those were nostalgic reminiscing of a bygone eon, 

And all that remains now is the smog veiled, soot flavored acid breeze,

And dry cracks and jagged pebbles, not even the relief of the silken sands

 

It has betrayed you, for you betrayed it for so long,

It waited for you to stop, to pause the ravaging of its delicate contours,

And then, like an accommodating dead-fish wife, it just lay still, letting you scar it,

And now you will weep and cry and you will create odes like me about it. 

passion

Too Much Of A Desire

It was inherent in the moment to understand that either there will be a nigh impenetrable silence between them or a completely devastating barrage that would create a pregnant parting when it shall end. Of course time would cause an abortion to that pause eventually, but for those few hours, those few drawn out, metaphorical eternities, it would have been such a cherished anticipation. 

 

I sat by the windowsill of the cafe despite the repeated request of the server to shift to a proper seat. I liked the way the cold slabs felt against my walk-warmed toes. She sat nearby, on the floor, my foot on the slab at her eye level. I could see the faint drop of the collarbone, contrasted by the deep abyss of her cleavage, so wonderfully offset by the swell of her bosom. It was a riot of symmetry going crazy in some sensual loop. 

 

The coffee that she was sipping smelled of hazelnut, creating a mystical aroma when combined with the dull bland aroma of my cigarette’s unflavored tobacco. Something that reminded me of yellow handmade papers and when I asked her, she said it reminded her of her grandfather’s knuckles. It was a perverse pleasure to combine these thoughts into one image and when I told her, she admitted her grandfather hated writing. I knew I was on the right path of being memorable by the distinction of being hateful. 

 

She reached up and took my cigarette from the ashtray and I was covered with a coffee hinted smoke cloud off her lips a second later. I turned to look at her and I deliberately let my gaze linger on her breasts…

 

 

A few hours later, as we lay on the grass, my eyes darted from the bra strap dangling off her shoulder to the orchids that delicately suspended their blossoms…the color of her nipples reminiscent of the coffee she had drank, the aroma of her core and the moistness on my beard after I had repeatedly drank from her completing the elongated circle of fluid dynamics of desire. As the sun rushed towards a crimson farewell, I felt a sudden urge to erase the emptiness of my hands and so I lit up a cigarette with one and let my head fall on her ribs as my other hand sought a temporary menage between her thighs..

 

The cigarette shivered and a chunk of ash fell down on the grass as she trembled….

Raven

In due course of writing, one is bound to come across a beauty so compelling, not merely by its presence but by its attributes, by its very conduct, that the urge to write is fierce enough to cause sweat, to have fingers go stiff with the want of furious clackety clack over the keyboard, spewing out eloquent but vulgar, honest but fearful confession of the love one feels for such an artwork that is as fluid in its humanity, as it is frozen in the writer’s perception. This work, is a result of one such Muse. A painter, one who is shy yet fierce, a gentle brook, which turns into a thunderstorm, at the slightest hint of passionate expression. 

It was supposed to be an unplanned, uneventful, pregnant night,

One that sought the solace of absence of any stimuli,

Only to have the deep blue, mixed sensually, almost erotically,

With the grey scaled loveliness of the countenance so divine

I have seen you many times and every time you’ve been lovelier,

Sometimes you made me splurge my sentiments in poorly formed sentences,

Yet other moments were merely marked by an ill-timed silence of admiration suppressed.

And then arrived the culmination of my passion for beholding you…

It exploded, fiercely, a silent scream ricocheting behind the curtain of my eyes,

The moan of an overdue climax of all that I’ve held close to chest,

Bursting forth in form of alluded metaphors and unnamed passion, undefined adoration,

Bordering on the maniacal devotion, on meticulous exploration of your every word

Like your name, your fingers stretch and dance and flow with colors,

The magician, the diva, the craftsman of visions, bringing forth incantations,

I’ve seen you transform the bone white canvas into a monochrome poetry

You with your curling spiraling tresses and sharp lines and curving planes

You’ve marked yourself with the notions of flights and furies,

Of furors and amour and you have countless paramours, unknown, unseen,

And amidst them, unwanted, unacknowledged, lies the dull throb of my desire,

Buried in allegory and alliteration, in admiration and anticipation…

So here, my raven haired, brush holding, canvas adorning, beautiful madame,

Here is my manifesto of my latria offered unto you,

For now, henceforth, let it be known that a poet was compelled, hypnotized into submission,

And he ended up carving a sculpture of vernacular, to be both adorned and ignored,

For only you gave birth to all there is, so only you may reap when it decays in memory.

नीति

संभल संभल पथिक तनिक

ये पथ निहार, नीति पतित

कटे गिरे ये नग्न भंग

लहुलुहान भंग अंग

करे सवाल पथ भी ये

क्यों ऐसी लालसा सब की ये

कोई तो बोल काट दो

कोई बोले जवाब दो

करे कोई हुंकार नाद

भरे कोई सिस्कार नार

सुने न क्यों चीत्कार न

हो प्राप्त क्यों उपाय न

कहाँ गए वो शूर वीर

जो रक्षक थे कौमार्य के

ये कैसे नाग चारो और

कहाँ है वंशज आर्य के

क्या लाये हम कल्कि यहाँ

क्या उठाये हम खडग यहाँ

करे क्या हम भी रक्तपात

क्या हो उसी से पाप निजात

आ बैठ पथिक, विचार कर

या इस मूढ़ता का संहार कर

ना रुकने दे जो तू हरण

तो त्याग ये नीत का तुच्छ वरन

उतार फ़ेंक भय को तू

बुला अतुल प्रलय को तू

कर विनाश दुष्टों का

और बन जा फिर से मानव तु… बन जा फिर से मानव तु…

Balm

Sultry amber evenings with colored bands of clouds,

Glimmering asphalt moaning and sighing after a long burn,

Rustling leaves, whispering branches, hush hush of the wind entering the streets,

Silken scraping of your skin over mine as we entangle our fingers.

 

Somewhere down the lane, walks a flute seller, crooning tunes,

Old hindi songs and new ones too,

You smile midst the frame of your tresses 

Annoyed when the song changes from a sweet old to a shrill new.

 

I must have walked the street a thousand times,

A few hundred times in reality, the rest in my dreams,

And every time I had wished you were walking by my side,

And I am not sure, now that you are, is this a reality or a dream?

 

Countless footprints, invisible but present in the black tracks of road,

Millions of ambitions, desires, denials, rushing over this mad expanse,

And yet, the slow, the paused desire that is you and me,

Gently gliding over it, as if it has melted into a velvet carpet..

 

Interred

Welcome, mortal with the unfrozen, alive, beating heart,

I am your ferryman, they call me Chiron,

This is the Styx, the river of the dead

And you are now swimming in it for you have loved once. 

 

Strip away your clothes, brave one, strip away your fears,

For there is neither dignity nor masks, not in death, not in love,

There is beauty in nudity, there is honesty in being naked,

And you, mortal, are now in realm where masks are undone by both charring and caressing 

 

Come with me, swim along, I’ll show you the Hades 

You’ll find yourself at home here, you may even find a beloved,

But I can see the Styx is black now with the ink you had on your skin,

So I think you’ll choose the Muse instead of a Lover, won’t you?

 

And you’ll be wise, for an aeon, for choosing so,

for you will know that they belong to you in a realm

Where none can enter, but where they will be forever interred,

Until their buried coagulating being rots from a Muse into a Fury

 

Until then, mortal, run the river black, make the Hades echo,

Wail and moan and scribble and scratch,

Until the ink is black and then it is red,

For you have but an eternity, to then watch it rot. 

 

You poor little mortal, you thought the Hades would not decay,

You thought the songs would save you? Like they saved good old Homer,

But you were wrong mortal, for this is the Love and this is the Hell,

And in nudity lies the beauty, in beauty, lies the mortality, and in that, interred is your Muse with your decadent decaying Poetry. 

Derivative

You’re living the wrong protocol, 

You’re existing in the wrong configuration,

All your life, you were taught to cherish the joys,

When you should be acquiring the taste of pain. 

 

You see, they lied and fed you the psuedo-poetic bullshit,

“Make the most of it”..till it lasts, they taught you,

And you thought, in your Keats-fed mind,

Mortality begets beauty, morality begets honor. 

 

But you didn’t realize that when it ends,

When the happiness is snuffed out because someone was a coward,

It will not leave you with happy memories of the beginning,

Only the puke inducing sour chalky taste of how it ended easily. 

 

Because Pain is what you should have known to love,

It is like the finest of ambrosia, the smoothest of scotch,

Burns yes, but soon you will come to love its beautiful rich flavor,

Soon you’ll realize that it leaves a wonderful intoxication of amnesia

 

You are a derivative of a bamboozle,

It is the con of our progenitors, 

To lull us into fulfillment of their vicariously enjoyable justifications,

And you are not you, you are nothing, but an empty canvass, waiting to be filled with bullshit.