Broken Dreams

I arrange broken dreams on the ledge of hope

And glue them to mountains, oceans, temples, magnets, busy streets of faraway cities, 

Dreams stick to despair and do not leave

I wish to hold on, I wish to fly,to a new land, new mountains, splintered streets 

I wish to splash in my blood on each dream

And color the grey sky in my scarlet truth

But again and again, dreams shatter into splinters

Egg shells, shnapp glasses, long weeks of loneliness, explanations, accusations,

Your reasons to run and mine to stay

In Tokyo

Pretty lashes and prettier teeth

Foreign faces and fresh-cold rain

Bento-boxes of smoked sweet potatoes, 

Home-bound memory train jolted in shock

Sake, my friend from a lifetime beyond,

Weaved a farewell note in his welcome song, 

People pushers pack sardine metro crowds, 

kitty pink bicycle stands brighten morning's maddening rush 

Of crazy black and white crowds rushing right past history 

When train doors close, like elevators, like friends from years, 

They bow low in this land of the rising sun

What farewell notes, what welcome songs!

Masks

Right there on the cold marble floor of desire 

our bodies churned and burned in an ancient fire

My many masks came undone, abandoned

Love squealed out, startled, stranded 

I opened my eyes to meet yours naked, unafraid

lust claimed my name unashamed, unmade

Love and lust, both masks, like you and I

I burnt them that day in our pleasures' blue sky 

Miss you

Do you miss being cramped 

In crooked corners of comfort

When breeze curtain lifts its shy veils?

Did darkness enter your heart 

When one after another I tossed 

Every mask I wore that night?

I gifted you my nakedness, my masks, 

all veils and in return, I brought 

a piece of you. Do you miss him too? 

Nameless

Countless artists have etched your smile on sandstone, in pigments, in woven silks, in momentous pauses of melody

Poet-saints have described your love

For the down-trodden, the weather-beaten, the sinner, the questioner 

I seek you in a touch, a smile, in the forgotten hesitation of being held 

In your name, I worship the nameless

You, again

I gather birthmarks on your skin

And throw them into the blue sky

When the night lights its lamps

I find your base-tone in its million stars

I gather your voice in my cupped hands

And splash sweet sad glitters on my face 

When silence deepens its dark shadows 

I find a star-kissed curve in the mirror

I gather shared smiles of a darkened room

And sprinkle on my day's first coffee, last sigh 

When dreams weave a tangled web of desire

I find your steady hand upon my heart 

I wish to fly

Meanwhile, meaningless roads meander by

I turn and squirm, I run and swim, I wish to fly

Take off from these tar roads of torture

But plastic baubles of memories litter my path 

And crystal droplets of a yesterday lost, 

seed fallow clouds with saline emotions

Cloud bursts flood and tempests shake 

The ground beneath leaves no space to breathe

I choke on bitter fumes of could-have-beens

Turn on tender taps of easy-pub-empathy

With every stranger I gain, I lose you a little 

But I turn and squirm, I run and swim, I wish to fly 

And lose the whole of you behind

The Storm

Hands that were once mine, strangle me

words echo silences and shouts in turns

The storm wades every crevice and nook

And hurricane black-holes devor spaces, sounds

My heart shrinks a little to escape fumes

I seek desperate cliffs to cling on to life

Amaranthine anger explodes around me

Coloring me in your plastic perception 

 

When the rain washes me clean of colors

I dry myself to another beautiful day with you 

My heart peeps out into sunlight, a little shrunk 

Meaning

What power in these glorious temples

marriages, mothers, malls, mini-museums of another's ideals!

rituals elevating routine to purpose

With the morning sun, I garland these statues

Light lamps of hope and incense of each day's breath 

At night, when the temples close

I am left to the billions of sparkling universes 

rapidly running away from each other 

And wonder if my worship draws them away from me

Fly With Me

Concerns and cares, gather them all 

In a cloth-wrapped bundle of sudama's unspoken love

Hang them in the blue-god's temple of monsoon

And bring on your wings of sunlit golden dawn

Come, fly with me on cotton wool clouds of kisses

Into Indra's thousand-eyed heaven

There on a bed of orange-stemmed blossoms,

I will woo you again and again from tomorrows and yesterdays 

Ephemeral Deaths

Seven steps of stark-naked togetherness 

Shy seduced room embraced by darkness

Your body speaks in a forgotten language of the unspoken word

Our conversations uncrowded, today and tomorrow blurred 

I seek you again and again in places, people, fingers, nerves 

You find me at times in kisses, butterflies landing on spinal curves

We tussle uncontracted in unions of unformed urges 

You crush fantasies fragile as mist-cloud-starlight-merges 

I die ephemeral deaths of conjugal spaces breathing life into my pain 

We live omnipotent dreams of logical phrases, yet rain-scented clouds remain

How can someone know each sinew, curve and nerve 

And of me, know nothing?

How can I mortgage each cent of happiness to guilty hours

And of you, seek nothing?

Plastic Magic

His smooth velvet voice lets in sunlit dreams of insane reason

Each word treasured in the jewel box of time and season

Judge not my plastic moments of magic, my mystic blue sky

So what if they all look different to another eye?

Fingers wrapped around mine for a while, 

is the whole of the blue sky to beguile

I drink from his lips and my heart is full

So what if his heart holds another's pull?

They say in a parallel universe I was his

In another, diamonds are what dust is  

Here in my tiny mind-verse, I write pages

To be read on a sunset beach beyond ages

By someone who recieved a saree studded with stars

Wrapped in my pages of mystical mad memoirs

Ghosts

Clothes slid away in slow motion,

soft glow glances of unbearable desire

drew us into paralysed embraces.

When I replay those dead moments

of laughter and lust in my head

Like a ghost haunting its own funeral,

Your kisses hold my very core.

Hair, fingers, feet and palms

Shy swell of your soft skin

Quench a thirst that I brought along

When emerging from a womb alone.

But, loneliness is no ghost after all

to haunt our unwedded nights and days

And ghosts do not exist after all

nor does lust haunt laughter these days

Happy Birthday

I was looking for someone with stars in their eyes
Lightness of bearing the gravity of aeons
Flying festive kites of tireless, needless thoughts
And with laughter blows wind bubbles, away those troubles 
When you wish for someone to be a night friend
You turn blind to the gift that life brought you along
But atlast I knew you, I have found a well 
To quench every thirst for knowledge, validation and quest
In you my sister, life is reborn every day.
Happy birthday
To you, to me, to a new hope for stars in your eyes.

Sunset

I listened to her in horror, in awe

Of words so powerful they could kill
I was all of six and so was she
But said she did and how
"It's true that mothers die"

I shivered all the way back to home
No way to know if my mother did die
An hour for a six year old, already long
that day, it stretched into aeons

Until she came in her starched pink saree 
groceries, clothes to sell, evening treats, 
pink saree wiped my wet tears then 

I prayed that night to forget the day 
which never happened but
Sunset's long shadows scare me still.

Story of An Eclipse

Waking up to a warm summer breeze

I watched the moon once eclipsed

Shimmering stars stood shattered around

Watching the orb melt into a shadow

Fear ravaged my jasmine terrace

Plundering dark depths of my soul

Until I touched amid those sheets,

your sleep wrapped bangled hand

That night I came to know

how shadows are wiped away by sound

So my moon may join his stars again,

Will you lend your bangled hand today?

Sweet Lies

Little, sweet lies, they tortured truth

Packed her in white stockings of youth

Carried her to the fairy pond at night

And smoked themselves out of daylight

Lies, sweet lies, they caressed life

Dressed her wounds of pride and strife

Sang lullabies of a golden tomorrow

when hope would chase away sorrow 

Lies, sweet lies, they seduced priests

Promised a paradise of youthful feasts

Locked them in lonely rooms of celibacy

Dancing with their could-have-been-intimacy

Lies, sweet lies, daily dose of hyponotics

Besmirched brothers of banal logics

Give me some today, oh let me fly again

of pain and gain, let me not in vain complain

Gratitude

In a few stolen moments, greedily I try

to savour your skin, whole of the blue sky

When banished from double of six floors

I dig myself deeper into ever-closed doors

And wait for spring texts of "Hi" to bud

a psychedelic dream of burning blood

Here, take my breath, whole of my sky

Bid my dreams, burning blood, goodbye

But when silence brings its sacrificial scimitar

I bow in gratitude for the moments that were

An Affair That Never Was -3

Naked chocolate skin dipped in honey

of radio silences turned sad and funny

in schizophrenic twirls of tongues and lips

we plundered mountains of leisure, pleasure ships

We filled and emptied ports of desire, living

Empty holes remained empty, unforgiving

Unsaid and hence unlived, something

remained unborn in our careless fling

Alone

My eyes held yours and seconds turned into aeons of desire

Our gaze lit a thousand nights stretched on my poignant pyre

But my love blanket turned into a two faced bitch

And wrapped me quickly me in a life giving glitch

I awoke to the sound of your muted moans

and crossed those shores of silent stones

Stars, planets, moons and galaxies I searched

You and my world left each other besmirched

In love, I was alone, as in death

Soaring into a free fall of lapsed breath

Colors and seasons made vivid and pale

Each a step closer to the promised tale

Pale Stranger, Do you Know My History?

Tombstones and temples, plaques and pillars

Pale stranger, you call this history, my identity.

But fuzzy granite images of forgotten rivalries speak only in your tongue, 

My stories burned these sands of time into hoary stones

 

They sing to me of an undying, unbroken knowledge, 

of the serpentine course of infinity, that arrow-head of the first constellation

and those churning spokes in the wheels destiny 

Can you not hear these millennia preserved in metered verses of my worship? 

Under a finite firmament of mortal gods,

Can you not see a new creator for each era? 

In the poison consumed by my blue-throated one, 

can you not see the masculine shaping the feminine

As the duality of life holds onto dear death?

Tombstones and temples, plaques and pillars

Pale stranger, you call this history, my identity.

Peer into my very being and you will find

Written in the ancient script of the trinity

An ancient poem in every cell.

Masturbation

In the balcony of my tactless tavern

Amidst shattered laughter and sheltered woes

Spewing shadowy secrets hangs a deep red lantern 

Swaying to the music of seasonal wind-flows

On empty evenings with no one to hold

I watch the play of her shivering shadows

My sky paints her dreams in molten gold

And her poet composes his bonny prose

I tread those assymetric pleasure peaks myself

The red lantern's warm wetness and musical sways 

All speak to me of my life, shivering by itself

In the maculate magic of a maddening daze

The Fool!

Each one of tomorrow's stars, 

word-petal-wings, sweet-verse stings

yesterday's deep scarlet scars

I tied them to silken secret strings 

And let them free in dark blue skies

You brought for my fate, fallen flowers

Worship me then in smothered sighs

Down there in dream-clouds beyond ours

Flowers and stars wage wars sometimes

Time fades them both, but death so slow! 

Memories and words make love at times 

Time feeds them both, but morsels tiny, woe!

All day long you run fingers along my spine

But the fool, she clings to a life-line 

Your words kiss mine and synch our love song

My life merges in your line. The fool, so wrong!

Silence

Wavy whispers of wind wands

Race across the desert sands 

humming in a humdrum of silence

Sirius courted Rohini in defiance

And it rained gratitude and grace

That night, I opened my heart 

to your urgent need to depart

A splinter of silence, you left behind 

Stabbing, throbbing raw nerves  entwined 

As Sirius pierced Rohini with his silent rill 

she bled grace and gratitude. Does still 

Perhaps

Perhaps something in my being was destined for you 

But you denied your karma's sweet fruit 

And run in circles enticing you with invisible kama's arrows.

Perhaps I love you so I can worship, uninhibited

But you deserted your true nature

And I am yet to learn to soothe desires with prayers

Perhaps my love is simply life in its starkest, most primordial form 

But you are yet to be born

And I knock out deep pockets of hardened clay to sprout the ever new? 

Perhaps love like life rushes into death headlong

But you are Sita, his material world. 

I am his hanuman, and can hold him and his Sita too 

Perhaps I can tear my heart apart to make that space

And you are my space, life's deep pockets of hardened clay into which

I climb every moment without you?

Lost in Translation

I must be your smile, your eyes
taking in mountains and fruit flies

Behind a big blanket of the blue serenity  
Cuddled on a coiled serpent of the cold infinity

They say you dreamed up my universe 
Each moment's future, it's past in reverse

For tomorrow has already happened somewhere 
and yesterday is just today getting there

They say you sewed wormholes into your multiverse 

I must be your teardrop, your wrist watch
that dropped into one when you played hopscotch 

And here I am staring at your deep blue eternity
Wondering where man has found his unbearable certainty