cravings

Hold me...
By your tired arms
In the darkness punctuated by our fears
In the uninterrupted silence of our sorrows,
In the lost seasons of longing.

Hold me,
By your pauses,
Your introspection,
Your raw sincerity
Your perfection.
Hold me,
Too close
And far enough
From that shroud of enigma around that smile.
Hold me,
With your scent,
Your fingerprints receding from my rearview mirror
Your laughter imprinted on the insides of my head
Your absence.
And yet your permanence.

Of sins and retribution

I'm guilty
Of falling apart at the seams
Of being in possession
Of two halves

One for rebellion
And the other
Nostalgia
One bittersweet escape
And the other
A breathtaking homeward flight.
I'm guilty
Of one of me
Running into the other.
A heady collision
Sans embrace.
Or maybe
Just maybe,
A fission into oblivion
A heartbroken uncertainty
Of never getting around
to being complete.
I'm guilty
Of falling apart
Of being lynched of my self
Of running a flat trajectory
In this world
That is
Hopelessly round.

*Dream Diaries*

The doctor said he heard something crawl up his ear.
I dived in, only to find a man crawled up in the corner.
Those are the dungeons he said.
I don't remember visiting them ever before.
I remember seeing him open the trapdoor,
One latch came loose,
And the deluge that followed.
I remember holding him close
And I remember his heart throbbing on my temple.

****
I woke up to the sound of heavy machinery.
Oddly enough, mother was in the next room,
First time in six years.
Weaving yards and yards of clouds on a dun canvas scaffolding.
'Wings' says she, 'for you.'
****
I sit there while she binds a slender silk sash around my face and my throat.
'Helps you breathe. It gets nasty up there'
****
And when I finally let I go,
He breaks into hysterical sobs.
Which is surprising,
For I have no memory of him,
Other than the back of his neck.
My road to tranquility,
In the years that went by.
****
I see her standing in a distance,
Statuesque and regal.
Faceless,ageless and yet so divine.
I know she was pleased when she heard me.
I know.

"Us"

We've carved our story out of imagined nothings, caricatures crafted of a conjoint conscious. You and me, and the omnipresent, sacrosanct, distance.
We've lived a night or two engulfed in each other's voices or maybe a gaze or two, intensified, insane, transcontinental reckless, romance.
I've learnt a thing or two about keeping time and distance on the tips of my fingers, sometimes, deep into the midnight I feel them nuzzling at my toes as well. The relative irony, Oh treacherous, treacherous time! Oh tricky, distance you!!
I am a person moulded of a few years' longing and ages worth of whispers carried through the air!
I have been your muse, your scribe, and your tales; years' worth of longing oh! and time haunted by none other than.....the time!
I have constructed a magnum opus on the threadbare canvas of your fleeting presence. A masterpiece to be revered through the ages.
And carved a little memorial out of our fragrant mediocrity; the sweet ordinary-ness of your run of the mill romance.
OUR beautiful run-of-the-mill romance.
I long for a day from an imagined future, with a little ingredients from the past often scoffed at, and a few miseries and memories and contentment of the present.
I long for the privilege of your constant albeit silent presence.

.......

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.