.......

Every once in a while you bottle up your whims and store them for posterity. You get impulsive. You read handwritten letters with the color of expression dripping from between the lines. You feel like you're headed somewhere but you don't want to reach yet. You escape. To return. You improvise. To give up. 
One such morning I leave for a possibility instead of leaving for work. I daydream of dogeared pages and knitting tutorials. Such mornings usually pass unnoticed to the rest of the world when you're already on the other side of the looking glass. You live in an era when you weren't even born. You cringe at how Muhammad rafi is highly underrated in the current generation. You allow yourself moments of vanity behind well polished cutlery. You alternate between grey and greyer. You think black and white are too objective. Dividing lines are too mainstream. You become your own kept woman. Or your own wife. You hate. You mutter hindi profanities when no one's watching. You take a leap. You bounce back. You disregard. You digress. You use too many semicolons. One comma too many. Speak in pauses. Get distracted. Leave the doors unlocked. The fridge overfrosted. You run until you're just a narration of your jangled mind. 

Because bottled whims, smell sweet after a day's play( and no work)

of lore and by-lanes

There's this enormous ocean of sadness within you that I can never really fathom. It's not that you aren't grateful, it's just that the emptiness is too vast to be filled by all that you've got, too deep a void that even the most polished of your reflections seem shallow.
But unlike all those who prefer to talk instead, I chose differently, I chose to listen. Yes, I can hear you, clearly as though you're next to me, distinct from all the false-assurances and poisonous self-righteous litanies about the wellness of your being. After what would seem like ages, a void is staring into a void and silence overwhelms the noise.
My lighthouse on the other shore, my dawn of possibilities, I see you folding into yourself day after day. I see the nakedness collapsing into appearances.
My precious, things were once better, I agree, a long long while ago and you weren't so worn out by a quest for yourself.
You were sad, but you sang the sweetest of songs, and whispered the brightest hope into the lips of a silent river called time.
My dove, the sweetest one, weren't you the one with eyes brighter than a winter nightsky.
There's a long way to go, but not just yet.
Don't wander too far in that enchanted forest within your head.

A random droplet in the mist of time. 
The single perspective, in a jumble of others that we seem to ride.
We, are here.
Clarinet and trombones, the coy piano sprinkling the bends and some sultry saxophone thrown in for good measure.
She’s all the old world blues, maybe jazz at times melancholy or not.
She’s all the handwritten notes stashed unread in the bed-table drawer.
A clink of glasses.
The mothballed comfort of books being reread.
Just like you in me.
In form. In thought.

We smell silence. High juniper whiff of bottled agony.
Meanings sans words.

A well crafted abstract in soft nonsensical whispers.

We move ahead and then again we don’t
We masquerade as time.

See all that blood spilling over. See life drain out of those eyes.
And voila! She is alive all over again.
We hear.
Time after all has ears too.
That indistinct static of voices from an old television set.
Those faint sighs from a picture at the countertop.

It has a picture in it. A picture in a picture, and a disembodied hand drawing patterns in the sand.
The sand on the picture frame.
That picture in a picture.

Of those moments of long nights bearing down on the elements, we know quite a little.
Time sleeps too after all.
And lulls all its passengers quite well.

We see candlelit chambers.
The praying quarters, frankincense and myrrh.
deities carved in wood, the Volto Santo
As old as time itself.

we see him banding over a table.
We hear the sound of him scribbling.
A bottled perversion hard-bound.
Literally and metaphorically of course.
His flannel lined trench coat,
his peppered beard.
He is one of us maybe,
or perhaps on an extended sabbatical.

We all of course crawl back into the comforts of temporality at some point.

We wander till we are lost.
And stay till we are found.
caught in the immaculate fornication,
between a moment and time,
as distinct as mast and mist.

And yet we exist,
on the hard boiled fantasy of a toy ship in the bottle.
on the empty vandalized lamp-posts,
and the alter egos living beneath our tongues.

We are after all,
hitchhikers of time.

cupcake emotions butterscotch icing confessions..

Some say you’ve been a part of me for so long that I keep losing myself in my writes.
That all my narratives, my memoirs, my confessions point you guilty.
That subtle romanticism we always try hiding
‘Are you sure you aren’t really drunk’

‘Stop giving excuses for butterflies in your stomach’
#
Shaking off the burnout, I go up and about, to business as usual, to life.
And just about the corner there sits a blind troubadour with his melancholy violin.
“I don’t remember you paying attention to my recitation really. Why do you have to humiliate me like that?”
“It was the best of the times. It was the worst of the times”
you always spoke, with an incomprehensible nod.
I smiled.
you rascal.
#
The last time I studied my reflection by the greenhouse door.
It seems frozen, urging me not to leave.
Urging me to wait for it.
“by the twitching of my thumbs, something evil this way comes”
“your mosquito repellant hurts my eyes, for the last time….”
once again, the show begs for its life….to go on
#
The line somehow blurred wherefrom we stopped counting our heartbeats, and started sowing moments instead-with you as usual, banking on the fruits-and we never knew one from each other.
“the butterfly farms are where the twilight ends, and you and me begin”
“don’t stop, you have witchcraft on your lips”
#
I tease and whip and brush and re-tease my hair, just to get rid of your smell, and all the while sits on the secretary your voice drenched in our tears.
“it’s all in your head, Alice”
and I sob the rest of the night off.
#
And approximately 8215 miles, 11 and a half hours, a missing dime, and some subdued laughter away, lies a happy picture, sitting on a picture frame, wrought iron, crafts class stuff.
“I can’t imagine what made you fall for me”
“smile with your eyes open, let us not look fat”

muted necrophilia in words

Open spaces and vivid nightmares.
Or perhaps,
Rum-soaked queasiness of a solitude shared
With my own self.
A book-sniffing pervert that I am,
I derive all the pleasure from the macabre shadows of your words.
The in-between worlds between lines.

The wandering souls of prose left unfinished.

The rotting flesh of thoughts open to all meanings.

And thus,
I drug my twisted soul,
With millions of your lapses and last moment contradictions.

A thought is crushed unbeknownst to your pen every second,
Quiet,
Solemn,
And mangled between the pages.

For perhaps me to caress.

You're a soul searching hermit in the land of words,
With scavengers like me in the tow.

let me be...

If I may, That one instant when you wake up with a start a few hours past midnight, Let me be that tale shining through the crevices of your fingers. That one instant when moonlight filters through your eyes into yet another bright orb of your dreams. Just so that you know, I sleep less on my sides than more on my face these days.

Just so that you know, 
I'm greedy to dive headfirst into your head.

secrets of the universe

.We shall be, two stargazing narratives around a cackling fire..you and me, two independent galaxies maybe 

Of heavenly failures, and fears. 

A falling star shall trickle down your shoulder and winter nightsky shall breathe into my hair. 
Maybe, 

You and me. 
Two placid moons rambling about the silent skies

farewell

The metaphorical omnipresent ink blots on your office stationery, pale blue undertones in the placid, balanced silence, for you I'd be some of such firm unshakable facts. Be it your favorite Beatles song, playing inside your head in the same nonsensical loop, or your rugged laziness--which as a matter of fact is laziness all the same- or perhaps, pointless knowledge hoarded through the time, EVERYTHING invisible and yet there, can be me. I don't deny my absence anymore nor do I proclaim the the distance out loud. Fact of the matter is, be it those anonymous thumbprints on your glasses or the tiny missing button on one of your cuffs, proclaim my person. with a plethora of many such souvenirs there lies an unmistakable evidence that I, somewhere in the warm, cottonwool covered alcoves of your mind exist. That it is not just you but a little bit of me (an the uninhibited cliche) that I bid farewell at the airport tonight..

a process of means..

Forget. 
For one tiny fraction of a second forget your existance and take a form of something that is just a part of you. Be a silent, dependent appendage, a silent helpless witness of you on the better part of the great divide. 
A silent witness of you watching you grow.
Yes, even when you think you're not in the habit of growing anymore.

Observe.
Notice how carefully you exit one belief after the other. 
Like pods in concentric chrysalises. Breaking through one after the other.
Yes, right there, what you are now was never what you acquired on your own, rather it just shed a skin of its own.

So you can see, that the hatred was there for quite sometime. Quite sometime before it shed the veneer of faith. 
And surrender does lie there, patiently waiting for its own turn. 

Now stop.
Open your eyes, start existing again. 
Run your fingers through the tiny person shaped depression you've left on your bed.

Observe.
Like they say, the devil is the details. 
If you look closely you can find the bits and pieces of an older you lying somewhere.
You can almost sniff out the balance that you nurtured not long ago.
The balance that you just perspired.
The balance giving way to something ominous altogether.

You carry yourself as the biggest souvenir of the past.
Like, you know, vintage idiosyncrasies and collector's edition fugue. 

Breathe.
See the tiny involuntary movements of life.
Like a tiny alive, moving, living creature within yourself.
Like you within layers of you.

Close your eyes.
Stop existing for a moment there.
Now think of you as worthless dependent appendage of yourself.
Think of you as something you shall lose someday.
Just like that.