Ivorised

A hazy curtain does raise
Iron shutters be my eyelids
Like globular lead, my pupils –
Pupils that reflect nothing
Why so blank, so bland?

Downcast are my eyes
From left to right it darts
No tug at the mouth
Puckered, like my thoughts

Clad in red
Crossed grasshoppered legs
Fingers haven’t been spread so long
Scratching, spotting, scrambling
Across the sheets.

The walls are white
Four walls – no door
No window – no hole
Large, expansive –
Loud yet deathly silent.

And in the whites
Like a drop of blood
I sit frozen
And pen down my mind

Such mindless thought
Such mindful rot
In the ivory coloured room
With looms of space
The breathing expanse
I sit and jot.

That’s all I need
In whites and reds
I can live myself
I can immortalize –
My brain cells – preserve into words.

Then let me live
In lonely space
Let me breathe & let me write
Between passion & detachment – let me exist
So without regret, I may perish
Become cold & numb, even before I die.

T'ease' till Dawn

I am like the autumn leaf
Variegated is my existence
Like inconstant fractions
Denominators and numerators inverse
Inverse as often as day and night

Mouth widens
Tears spill
A laughing sob escapes my body
Convulsing – Sometimes in joyous fit,
Sometimes in passionate anger

Despair, disgust, dream, die
Change colours,
Wound sentiments
Turn dust to gold
Turn heart to stone

And then like an autumn leaf.
Detach and drop
Float midair
Swoop in the wind
Touch the ground.
The season has changed.

Demons of Denial

There is this fancy sounding word that I recently came across… and have been using it ever since. Is it an attempt towards positivism, an ironical usage or simply another one of those babies of the Greek metaphorical and mythological world that I seem to adopt periodically?
Eudaemonia… the greek goddess of Joy…eudaemonic, the state of being in joy and the derivation that I have been using of late…

But I wonder… do we just use these words to cheat ourselves? To make the apparent surface of our lives better?... like one of those self-help books, that ridiculously ask you to wake up every morning and like a buffoon look into the mirror and reiterate your own positivism to yourself…I have always found those books full of glossy frog crap, if I may put it that way. And then again, every day, I log onto my account, and watch the fancy word “eudaemonic” appear on the screen – as if sometimes indifferently watching me, sometimes mocking me in its noiseless expression.
How often do we tell ourselves that we are happy? How often do we desperately want to believe that we are content? So have we climbed onto that branch, from where, we only have one perspective of ourselves, and we end up assuming that, the view from up there is the only view that there is?

And this vague question now makes my stream of thought, take a leap into another random track …how powerful is the art of self conviction? Can you look into the mirror every morning and repeat a lie, so much so that the lie turns into the truth for you? I have heard of people living in self denial, not acknowledging their shortcomings, their faults, their lacks and blacks. Of late, I have also seen some of those… who, for fear of coming to terms with their wrongs, refuse to acknowledge and admit it in the first place… so as to live in a joyous illusion of virtuosity.

It is a human phenomenon I think… to believe in what makes life easier… but an easy path isn’t essentially the correct one… and then again, you can turn around and say – who defines correct and incorrect, moral and immoral – they are all constructs – more societal than personal – so what maybe terribly heartless for me, may be absolutely acceptable to another. But I think that humanity is the touchstone to human behaviour, to compassion and concern – the abstract feeling of hurt defines right and wrong – not society, not a personal weighing scale, not a moral conditioning – but simply the art of being humane… to consider feelings… and even if inconsideration has already been perpetuated, then the self realisation and consequent apology must follow. I believe that denial is cowardice, those are the brave ones who admit to their fall only to rise again

It would be judgemental on my part to make such statements on others…to demarcate the line between being courageous and an escapist, to define the two in the first place – for definitions is what limits us, as human beings - to stop thinking beyond our convinced selves and look beyond the little world of denial that we constantly build and live in… it would be narrowing my view to that branch that I may have climbed once, but then again, a few steps beyond and I am another iota closer to the zenith, and instead of looking down with one perspective, may learn to look around and beyond. And then, eudaemonia may be a sight, a vision, a feeling that may permeate in me – than just be that elusive, deriding word, demonically sitting on my screen.

I like an unlike verse...

Just when i begin to steer clear of every little particle and word that even distantly smells of the word called 'love', i open some old dusty poetry books and within the yellowed pages, come across something like this and cant help but want to share it with the world... even in the false emotion of love then, there is some inexplicable beauty, that, if in not life, can atleast be an expression in words...

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon,
at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

- Pablo Neruda

Hug me Tight

It is just another morning thought…one of those soul searching sort of questions that pop in your head once in a while…however these questions seem to have been popping in my head too often for comfort – it may be a good thing though, for then I give a few minutes of silent consideration to some issues that I subconsciously grapple with in my life and don’t even know about… some questions that make me the complex person that I am…some questions that makes me the cynic that I am, the critic that I can be…
I woke up this morning and thought about the same time last week and the time before that…then my mind traveled like a port-key to the time much before that too…weeks, months… time seem to collapse like a castle of cards in front of my very eyes and images, flashes, words, conversations, touch, smell, feel…everything of the past just seemed to touch by me again – like that humid wind that just whiffed past my face- it was like a movie and I was the protagonist and I wasn’t smiling…I was one of the two main characters and I wasn’t happy…and then some droplets, some sobs, some breathless sniffles seemed to zoom in front of my eyes…big huge brown eyes – soulful sad hurt eyes… and then in another flash of a second, it zoomed out and the face was mine…and I wasn’t happy. How important is happiness in one’s life? We live – we don’t die – I may be an existentialist and yet I don’t live in the worthless abandon of one – yes, it is an interesting theory that I keep telling people for I find it extremely fascinating and remotely believable – that how can we say that we are living if each day we travel closer to death…so aren’t we dying…what is life then, if we started dying since the day we were born – and then again, I see sad movies where unrealistically the dying protagonist talks about dying with a smile, about living each day – for tomorrow is a distant hope and today is the only gift we have – so live, smile, let joy wrap its arms around you and let a hug envelop you – and then I look at the movie that had just flashed in front of my eyes… and I only saw a depressive sight of me – and then another question began to nudge me every minute – do we live to love, that love which is a skewed up theory with no particular definition – comes in all shapes, sizes, ages and stages – that we share with a friend, a family, an ideology, a passion…a person?? And then if love is a phase that makes me the protagonist of this story then I’d rather not love – for if we live, we must live to smile, we must live to experience each day and squeeze that last dreg of happiness – to be hugged and to hug with all our might. This morning I couldn’t remember the last time I was truly happy – and when you reach that stage and its cause is some sort of inexplicable love, then you know its time…the day you cant recall your last unadulterated moment of joy, it is then time to let go of that futile unrequited love – it is then time to let some happiness seep in and some bitterness ooze out – it is then time to go back to loving, but only loving your life…it is then time for that tight hug – and I need a hug again.