Friday, 28 April 2017

Your Gifts

I asked for glass bangles of your love 
To sing of nights that didn't want to end
For green sarees of jasmine stalks 
To wrap delicious memories of your eyes 
But you brought me gifts beyond the world
A sacred scent of rain meeting parched earth
And dark vermillion on our parted paths 

Memories

Your eyes, your skin, the way your lips carve out 
Life's most treasured gift, your words echoing
Silence of lifetimes lost and yet to come; these 
And more, I will steal again and again from this earth 
But tell me, how will I find my way back to the ground
From these clouds you had led me to?

Love, the most lonely of all words, comes and goes
Neither completes the slow-kill it is mandated to do
Nor bathes me in mists of moments I dreamed up
Lying there under the stars, holding your hand 
Minute after minute, pours hot coals of thwarted trust
Laughs at heavens' sacred stardust, my vermillion dusk

I ask for your hand to hold me through the mist 
But can memories bring me those rainbow ladders 
to step back from cotton clouds of mirth and misery? 


Wednesday, 26 April 2017

Someday

Somewhere along these mountains we climbed
We lost the "meta" in our meta-physical world 
Your touch moved Dante's sun, my entire planet
My breath draped on its clouds, warm winter mornings
In fingers that blended your skin into mine,
In lines that curve and slash a tiny bump 
Made only for me, right there on your heart,
I entered another meta-physical world 
Step into it someday
Come fall in love with me,
Someday

Missing Women

A thousand ships sailed one day
A million monkeys died on another
Because, you women, you were missed

A silent night launched a secret sigh 
One hundred moons cried in a deep blue sky
Because, you woman, you aren't missed

Who wrote those woman's stories
Such glories that lead men to war!
What gripped your love so hard
As to be clipped by silence overall?

And yet, 

Woman, who are you to ask of fate 
Why beauty dares yet to survive
And why does it not die 
When love fades and leaves us all?


Tuesday, 25 April 2017

Emptiness

All that's dark had entered 
my soul when 
I was born
you traced a charcoal heart
And then smoke trails 
of lives were burnt
in whimsical bonfires 
of some god's 
goddamned game; 
I held your hand 
all through my dreams
Far away meles, 
market places of wishes
Sailboats in windless 
Empty space
And woke up 
To an emptiness 
Your size 

Friday, 21 April 2017

I wish I knew

There on the banks of my ancient river, I knelt
And lit two lamps of your truth and mine
Gently swayed by tides of a reality beyond them 
They rocked together for the night
I wished I stayed on to know
When one died out, did the other go?

On those time-honoured steps I sat and watched 
Your sun rise in the east while my moon waited on
One dawn that brought them together on earthen banks
Held them both in eternity's fickle arms 
I wish I stayed on to know 
Were there other days when the moon kissed the sun?

I held on to sacred chants, ancient charms, temple domes, oil lamps, sandalwood scents of lost ages
Scooped aeons of faith in turmeric-stained rice 
Worshipped the goddess whose hunger fills my being
And Her god who is beyond the very idea of death
I wish I knew, was her God made of stone too?
  

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Doubt & Hope

Twin peaks of infinite thirst 
moulded by ancient, forgotten gods;
Doubt and hope, keep watch on life
And like dawn and dusk,  
Relate neither to time nor space 

Millions of gods have been crushed 
When heavens churned and roads
leading up to those peaks perished 
Uncounted pennies have been minted 
One day's loot, just enough for the next

Treasures, pleasures, lives; gained
In the inner sanctum of one or the other 
At times one is lost in cloud shadows 
Of past lives and an unrepentant present
Or in mystic mountain sunsets. But always 

Doubt and hope, like thought and word
Remain as heavy paperweights do
Keeping together theunwritten pages of 
Life's pointless lengthy short tales 
Your story and mine, together or alone








Silence (V2)

Silence is a warm blanket on a sultry summer noon
Raising faint memories of a red-faced autumn moon
But at dawn when summer slips to her maiden home
On gushing jasmine wind and on oceans' night foam

I worship her in temple domes, trembling forest nooks
Chocolate twirls in coffee cups; yellowed pages of beloved books
Straddling bitter-sweet bridges of a random rendezvous, 
Silence is a busy old friend out on errands with you

Other days, her devious pits fall deeper than beyond 
Thunderstorms, crocodile farms, vestigial prickled bond 
Dark skinned despair, deep valleys, vampire-inn secrets 
Treacherous murderer of light, keeper of weakness 

And at times, a needle to darn old tears in lengthy evening shadows
Holding up daily deaths of a distant sun to see how that yarn flows
No forlorn maiden this silence, that kisses your perfumed breasts 
In her do all memories live, all wounds fill and all life rests  



Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Words

Words that spill, mere words that fill my world
Words can kill, mere words erase aeons crossed
My words, mere words, bundles of thwarted hopes
Your words, mere words, faces in clouds that passed
No kisses, no arms, no eyes fill this emptiness 
That was once filled by an open blue sky 
Now that we have nothing left to say
Words that once healed all of life's wounds
Haunt these spaces between my cells
Crushing each cell to unending tomorrows

Monday, 10 April 2017

Time

One afternoon of a ten-year old pair of eyes 
Was drenched in the rain of an unspoken hope
For an all too distant future, another afternoon
A grownup woman piggybacking on a grown up man
For reasons only hidden in their all too loud laughter 

That moment was reborn one day 
In an eighteen year old pair of eyes
Watching two middle-aged pairs of legs
Entwined and pointing the stars 
For reasons only hidden in their all too silent touch

Time dilates pupils, kisses, hopes, moments
And in the speed of memories, another's and mine
I am born again

Saturday, 8 April 2017

For Donne's sake

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love
Donne's words burnished into an unheard voice
Like bees humming an ancient universal song 
I heard it again and again, When you asked for meaning
This great blue sky and all mysteries that it holds
Today's daylight sacrificed at ritualistic dusk
Do they know if tomorrow will bring a new sun?
For god's sake, why not let me love?

You built an altar on buried behavioual truths
And prayed to other men's truth
I sought to worship those moments 
In which you felt mine 
If tomorrow never comes, your altar will remain
I burn at each dusk as the sacrificial flame
Knowing my moments will be lost in time
So, for god's sake, can you let me love?

Friday, 7 April 2017

Monsoon Storms

I fashioned your image
From mud banks of those
Rivers of unborn tears.

Worshipped you with my
Wishes and dreams of 
A past embedded in my 
Hopeful future.

Meanwhile,
What monsoon storms
Your imagined love 
Unleashed on my earth!

My mud god melted 


Tinder Tales

We traced lanes of kama's sugarcane field 
Smoke rose like gossip over broken desire
But our charred lips held no spark of fire 

We went looking for gods, where idols were sold 
Not a leaf stirred in that weather of wet despair 
But the valley was full of voices from nowhere

We cried out to love in words held and holed,
In miles of darkened ochre-female islands,
But no rains fell to soothe that searing silence

We wept on ruins of stories that were all but healed
Your scarlet wounds lept alive from my perfume
Carried across lifetimes of a deadly gloom

Swipe left, go on try on a few more of those nights, airports, daydreams of snowfalls and love bites 
Dear space between those unseen wounds, 
May you touch us once, just right?


 

A Woman's Longing

Some nights I am haunted by 
Draupadi's love for five, 
and on some others, 

By Kunti's passion to survive,
Ahalya's eyes closed in pleasure
Tara's dalliance with the moon

Other nights, I am Mandodari
Cursed to wed the cause 
Of great destruction of her clan

Tonight, I turn to you and ask
Was I never to receive,
That gift of longing 

Which Sita was bestowed
and thwarted for her love
of this very earth?

Your smile held answers 
like the cosmic egg; 
forever pregnant,

fecund with transience
bound to boundlessness
of eternity. Silence.







Tuesday, 4 April 2017

Stained Sorrows

Don't bring those sorrows to me and ask 
Whether I prefer them in shades of grey
Sorrows aren't ever black and white, 
Coloured as they are in purple bruises 
on tender skin of a newly born love,
And tinged in jaggery syrup of longing
Swirling hues of deathless desire. 
Come give me your wine glass 
And I'll show you
How to stain your sorrow. 

Damn you love, dear love, sweet hurt, 
neat pest, shaker of the ground beneath my feet
 When great fires burn, sunlight is born. 
Here, you burn and I light up. 
Sometimes, the other way round.
All words be damned. 
Damn you, dear love,
Come and Color my sorrow 
In your sunset hues 

Saturday, 1 April 2017

Tangled Tales

What tangled tales these words weave
With your cotton eyes and dyes of dusk
Sunsets, moonlight, bangled hands, 
And centuries of wait for another moment 
To arrive 

What tangled tales these words weave
With your purple dreams and silks of skin
Memories, wishes, unthinking kisses,
And wistful songs that last all night for you 
Who are gone 

Words cross those skies sometimes at night
And lay down beside those lakes on mars
They ask me if my pages will fill
All of the Blue-god's emptiness within

Words burn with fires from afar, 
Neither light, nor ashes, no space, nor traces
Of someone who had brought down my world
From faraway stars into unending lines

And when silence comes, 
it dies; Many deaths 
as I weave tangled tales 
Of a joy that lived once