hash browns.

Getting to know myself was a bad, bad idea.
Curiosity did it to the cat and now its doing the same with me.
Worse still.
I guess its using voodoo this instance.

'we want to stay on the darker side of the picture.
We love being pathetic dweeps''
the shrink said.

'I promise NEVER to lose myself to self-pity again.'
I vowed.

I set on cleaning the cobwebs, clearing out the clutter that was.

''exclusion diagnosis' they call it.
You carefully chuck out everything you aren't /not yours,
and hope someday, you'l be left with yourself.'

I was amazed at the speed with which this works,
and the repugnance with which my head gives away, disowns my eccentricities.

'you feel you are mechanizing it. You stop.'

'hold it. It isn't that easy'

'Remember, it'l be just as though you are talking to your reflection. Expect no leading questions.
You hunt it out and you incenerate it'

'they're just a few benign objects. They're not mine to destruct.
Not mine to bid farewell to.'

'Beware. They are known to find their way back'

'but what if I destroy the one supposed to stay'

'It won't leave that easily'

I foraged many,
led out a trail for some,
and a few just came when called.
As I wasn't quite sure when 'mechanizing' begins, or whatever the hell it means for that matter I didn't stop.

Everything else down to ashes outside,
I called out to no one in particular.
My voice echoed in the space.
Empty spaces.
What I always dreaded.

Fluid trickled down my forehead.
Not sweat..
Something obscenely sweet.
Smelling of myrrh, rosewood and......coaltar?

I call out again, and my voice scavenges its way up the dead walls.

'just leave. You scare me.'

it talks, and smells strange.

'what are you?'

'a nameless, faceless voice, cowering inside your head'

that was it.

The sheer horror of it!!.
Whatever went wrong,
.are the rest of them already dead.
I hurried my steps back,
an empty wasteland greeted me.
I cried.
I opened my eyes.

'a nameless, faceless voice that cowers within my head'

'Ah!
I should've known.
A common entity in clinical practise.
Scientists call it,
'being full of yourself'.'

'not done. Where are the others.?'

'they're not yours to speak'

'this....this, can't be true.
You said, people usually come out with good results, that some of them are now happy.'

'aren't you?'

'should I?'

'I'd rather not say anything, lest I sound preachy.'

'you cheated me..'

'deal with it.
Or you should've burnt me when we met for the first time...'

...and me

I wake up to clearer mornings everyday,
and it keeps getting stronger,
this desire to not wake up as myself.
Its easy to drift away in broad daylight, then why do I return to myself by dusk...

Wanderlust;
you make me float above my head, even in the days where I'm trapped in the mundane.

More often than not, I start as a mist over my puffy eyed reflection.
I'm the slow dripping of water on a silence pregnant with the noises of a day.
A thick cloud of sand everytime the broom hits terra firma, an unconscious harbinger of whatever new might pass.
I float above the irrelevant banter over 'cutting chai' and Parle-Gs.
I'm a frail, cataractous, timid opinion with arthritic fingers.
I'm a new dream gleaming in the eyes.
I'm incense smoke floating above a dome, or a silent prayer on westbound breeze.
The patterns drawn on the floor by nervous toes, hope dripping from the i.v line,
aromas drifting off the freshly packed tiffin and the anticipation that shrouds it,
almost always.

I see a lot of my world and long for more, Only if it would stop pushing me away.
As the day passes on I try hiding from myself,
to escape the calling dawn,
this little part of my wandering soul is still a child somehow, desiring more adventures everyday.

I scurry around the electricity wires, on a sparrow's wing,
and hide inside a gem box smelling of time, or behind thick bifocals awaiting retirement.

I'm yet to disentangle breaths from longing and see where it started or even ends.
I feel it all pass beneath my fingers,
from the apologetic, 'I hope you understand's
to the desperate 'I wish I could's.

Like a mother, life pulls me back and there I lie pulsing in my neck awaiting a new day ahead,
and dreaming of the times when I'l float in melancholy notes of a nightraven's cry.

someday

Some day I will carve,
A filigree of affection,
on the silver of your thoughts,

Thoughts sparkling in brilliance,
over a breathtaking chiaroscuro,
of our souls,
and capture myriad colors,
which enrapture my world,

you shall be the portrait of my dreams,
& my every breath, the skill,
I sculpted you with.

Behold your trobairitz,
with colorful tunes in her palette,
to write for you a living ballad,
to be recited till eternity...

confessions..

I take your pauses as excerpts,
and go through the day remembering them, just to keep myself sane..
All kinds of it,
one for nostalgia,
another an innocent contemplation,
a few for longing,
and my favourite one,
where I sense a perfect tiny grin on the other end..
It floats along the windows with the clouds,
ransacking my apartment at the paradise..literally and mathematically(in your words).
All the while when you sing along the distinct hum of a vacuum cleaner,
and me,
equally weird,
try snuggling up to your voice in my head..

.....

A few scattered pearls on the closet floor,
seashells stored in a gem box,
a tickle of cold sand on my bare soles,
and the smell of approaching winters,
Its all a dream in the making,
sans one tiny ingredient,

your scent,
woven in my breaths..

I'm into sewing dreams these days,
in threads of lukewarm romance,
coloured in my
hassle-free poetry.