Blank

Blank paper, an empty pen, blue screen

Fingers type what eyes have never seen

At first they plan to kill, flesh and soul

They think words revive, make you whole

And grey clouds fill emptiness with words 

Smearing bird-less skies with thunder chords 

Foolish fingers seek to entwine: your hand and mine, 

Blank sheets of paper fill but when voids combine

Grey skies empty into blankness 

 

Childhood

Dear childhood with your cotton candy pleasures

Memory snowflakes add to the haze and sand grains melt in summer days 

Who shrouded you in forgotten sandy measures?

Dear parenthood with your textual hugs, visual kisses

Who will bury these moments, and plant these blisses?

Love

Love, beyond-lifetimes love,
Tiny-little-sweet-childhood love,
Kitchen-heat-sweat ruined-meal love
menial love, transactional love,
a lonely night's-lustful love, 
ritual-filial-brotherly love, 
tea-time-tenderness-love
tracking flight-path-nervous love,
saree-end-clumping-touchy love, 
hand-shake-is-enough-too love, 
White-sheet-wrapped-up-nude-love
Here hold my hand and stand up to love

What if life slipped its tangled mess on our feet and got ahead?
Maybe then, skip the race, don't catch up, clean up, just be?
Cushioned by the delicious mess, 
here hold my hand and dwell here a while

Broken-bitter love, pupil-dilating, 
heart-rate-pumping love, 
Dazzling firework-love, oil-mud-lamp-love
Burning, shining, crazy, flaming love
Whichever way you find love, 
Here hold my hand and stand up to love
Pointless love

Under purple skies behind the horizon
Dawn met the dusk in moments lapsing before their birth: you met me,
They told me that our space is a deep, dark, noiseless ocean 
and the blue God is cushioned by a coiled snake 
And love, little love, the pointless torch.

Emptiness

Voices of vice, musical mane

Musky madness of muted pain

One God split his form of none 

A million heavens, a million hells

And all of his emptiness, in between

You

The ancient one who wrote our fate, 

lost his script when he held your palm

He gave you his hand to hold

And write in your own script 

But wisdom and passion, both his wives, old hags, they fought and he let you go

He let you go with empty lines,

to tweak and write a story he can't

The lines he drew, remained untouched 

Fate took his wives'side and you flirted 

With blue butterflies, Nectar names

Lustrous longings and abstemious arms

Yesterday's memories, you offer to wisdom

And carry tomorrow's dreams into passion's temple

Indu, Don't be afraid (after Frank O Hara)

Indu, don't be afraid

Roads do not end where doors close

Your named changed during your lifetime

Edges softened, anger sharpened

Sweet whispers honeyed that golden orb

Today, no one knows you meant 

the moon;  you do

a full name brings emptiness

And Indu, be not afraid 

Don't worry, your mother forgot

all about the hanger, the cane, even 

the starched cotton saree 

to mop tears off your bruises

Bruises no longer break hearts

No, not twenty two years ago

But if your heart breaks now, 

Indu do not be afraid 

It has been shattered before, 

and knows to wait, to draw strange mouth- glues

to itself and become whole again

Indu don't be afraid

To hold hands that have already parted

Or lie still on another's heaving chest

Sadness has many names yet love is not 

a synonym

Emptiness is not always loneliness 

Or vice versa

So what if he whispered your full moon name,

Only because you insisted he do

All things short aren't always sweet

But a childhood name re-lived in him,

Is a door opened at the end of the road

Indu, do not be afraid of open doors 

My Greed

Mighty mockers, powerful posers, 

Splendid sycophants, this oyster is yours 

I came bearing my rucksack of need

Moonbeam moorings, passion pockets

Siamese- sameness, my lonesome prophets

Empty rucksack mocks my daily greed 

Lost

Awkard silent dismissal, heard no plea

I remained on the dry land that was breifly you and me

But your country is a faraway land on clouds without a sea

Splintered cracks appear from nowhere 

On windows to my world here and there

Vanishing into dry wounds unhealed, sore

Unheard pleas, those salty seas

Burn my soul down and wait for more

Gone

When the sky falls on you on a fine morning

And without warning, roads tear themselves apart, did you hear the silence?

"I love you" whispered in your ear 

heard it too  

Continents drifted away from the landmass that they once were

Without saying, in breaking up, 

I am gone too

 

Miss You

Synchronized words, lips, limbs, silences

Your dark deep pools lighting up my inner islands

Those wild swings into flash togetherness

These perfumed nights, sweet taunts of tenderness

When I bid you goodbye, I will take along these precious feathers

And on lonely evenings, weave wings of lost treasures

To fly at tomorrow's first light into yesterday's glass loft

To seek in your embrace, a new life, sweet and soft

Another Dream

On lonely roads, I yearn for untainted moments, desire unquelled 

Sitting face to face with an unexpressed wish to be held

Pink umbrella, bitter coffee, passion fruit macaroons

Monsoon clouds, loneliness and unfulfilled boons

Such a short story this tale of your life and mine, together

Hands held but briefly, skin to nerves, an affair of the weather

I hold up muddled monsoon mirrors to my soul and ask

If skin makes love to the heart or does it wear a mask?

I douse my skin every night and dawn, in jasmine, neroli and rose

What's washed still lingers and your scent on my soul flows

Oh to draw short stories into a multi layered tome 

Resting my skin on your soul's sweet home!