Ready to leave

I am ready to leave.
I have been ready to leave
for the longest time.

Still, dust-laden roads
line this city. The conversations
are tired; the sky a weary shade.
I am a stranger here.
I know only that pulsating screen that pulls me
like a planet, a dangerously divine orb.

My story gave up looking for nourishment here.
I lit it up from within, a vanilla candle in a ceramic frame,
casting a midnight dance of light and shadows,
upon the walls of my mind, within the belly of Time.

But I have a home (although it's not here,
in this deeply-bricked complacency
I hate within myself). I fell in love
with a forest at the edge of a city,
a thousand miles from here. And
that is where I will belong. For even
as I languish in the heart of a city
I never loved, my plot lines escape me.
They flutter in the cool wind of a Bangalore evening,
beneath the gently waving trees. My plot lines
are fragile, ragged, wild. They write me a poem
loose on a breeze, a vagabond of Love.

Now I'm leaving home, physically,
(and so in my mind, too). As I pack
my bags, brush my teeth, get into the car;
as I drive past the streets I never held close;
I must also leave what is home in my mind.
I will have to call out to the wind,
go rambling down loved paths to call back
my ragged nostalgia, my fluttering joys, my plot lines.
It's a relief to have found a place I can always return to.
It's strange to leave my house,
and not head to my valley of yearning.
It's strange, but I must do it anyway.
Who knows what I will find on my paths,
what deep-veined red leaves, what feathers,
what polished round stones, what stories?

It's good to keep moving. It's good to have hope.
It's a beautiful day, and I hope tomorrow is better.
I hope to find within myself all the magic I have sought,
and I hope to have the strength to keep seeking.

I'm ready to leave, it's good to keep moving.
I'm tip-toeing, balancing on a well-settled life. Packing away anchors,
(in my mind and out, in suitcases and backpacks and memories)
sipping the deep form of ocean from the hollows of my hands.
Now I'm putting up sails, bright yellow against a swaying shade of sky.

Where the poetry goes to die.

There is poetry in me.
In the gravity of the black alphabets
I am able to make sense of.
(I tell myself).

The windows mist up,
clear. The green outside
is fresh and crisp; waiting
on the clear wings of dawn.
But on a cloudy day, sometimes,
when I forget to be living a meaningful life.

I see the absolute
futility
of a human life in search of beauty.

(I tell myself)
There is poetry in the feverish chaos
running in the wrinkles of an aging face.
In the cynicism that punctures
something important within me.
There is poetry, also,
in the deep well of stillness I feel in the wild.
And in the pulsating power of a harsh screen
that pulls me to it like a planet, there must be poetry,
in the malicious bubble
of complacency and lethargy
that fits around me like a glove.
There must be poetry in this maelstrom.

Some days, the storm is raging and the light harsh.
In the meandering mess of this mortal life,
in the rolls and loops and webs of stories,
relationships and people and arbitrary memories,
in the faith you must put in your existence
in order to survive, yes, make it through
another day, in the existential struggles of
crossing the road or having a meaningless conversation;
the futility hits you hard. Where it hurts.

What if
there is no poetry there?
What if I am able to, really, see the world
without the overbearing cloak of beauty
that I assign to it, surround it with?
"See the world for what it is" -
do you know what dangerous advice that is?
I sleepwalk through the hours. It is a desperate attempt
to hold on to sanity and purpose. I dive,
wade through the days and float through the nights,
hoping to come across an island, a salvation,
a catharsis to this ever-growing sea in my soul,
a veritable ocean of ephemeral silences, senseless rhythms.