April 30 : Uncontained Endings

There's something about dying roses.

A sense of an ending
strangely poignant
in the crisp twisted petals
and the tangy scent of death.

And well, it's too cold,
the sky is too grey;
my tea is too hot,
my heart is out to bay.
And my arms are simply too goosebumped to hold you tight.

So wrap me up in some clingfilm
and leave me out to dry:
I'm a soaked out desert in a concrete maze
and today, I can't help but lie.
I lost all my maps and I lost all my guides, how can I possibly reach the light?

Floating in the empty sea
I watch the sun rise and I watch it set
the purples and reds surround me and fade
taking me with them to the land of the dead.

Marmalade stains on ragged blankets
line the lining of your heart.
Time seems to move in jerks and falls
sepia-tinted pictures mark the walls.

An abyss of beginnings, endings,
aftereffects (and mayhapses)
rises around the dying fire.
Someday we shall look back and smile
It'll happen, just give it a while.

My heart is full from this night
and my eyes are on you.
Let us walk away from this day
as uncontained as you.

Morality and humanity
sit by the ashes of our souls.
Mark My Words and In My Opinions
are tossed back and forth in rolls.

My coarse shirtsleeves fend off
burning smoulders from the fire.
But who'll be around to hold my hands
when I rest my shoulders in the pyre?

April 29 : City Boy.

From the thick-grilled windows
in the tall concrete buildings
caked with the dirt of hopelessness
you watch the streets, silent.
Four fifty-five. Tick tock.
An uncontained numbness is in your eyes,
lending a certain desperation to your lies.
But somewhere, your soul is alive.

Dappled remains of sunshine
on the rippling surface
green-clear.
The stones writhe under every surge
of white-foamed froth.
The valley closes in on you
and opens up her skies.
Silver ropes slam into the water
ploughing it up like
so much gunfire.
Wind crashes into your face
with all the gentleness of a scorned lover
and all the grace.
You gaze into the heavens
wet and still.

Shirt sticking to chest
clammy hands on solid ground
cold feet soaked into hiking shoes
hair plastered back, you smile.

With the sting of every raindrop
(like so many shards of glass)
you feel alive. Slowly cracks the precious farce
the layers and the lies peel off from sheer force
and you dissolve into the torrent of froth
that the river rages against the rocks. You dissolve
into the air and the thunder, into the mossy pine trees;
you are so much more than a City Boy.

What has a City? Neon lights.
Unpleasant smells and painful sights.
Grimy legless men with begging bowls
outside of fancy boutiques. Angry men.
So many crying children. Unhappy people
unsatisfied with their lives and their wives.
Empty eyed old woman with unreal smiles;
Black-suited shiny-booted clones with files.
A dull sort of heartache throbbing around the
skyscrapers and steeples and heavy court buildings.
A concrete maze leading deeper and deeper
into the heart of nothing. Aching.
And in the grey and the garish
you sometimes forget the reasons
you often clench your jaw and your fist
and tears escape your bottled heart
(brimming over in frustration)
but you cannot remember
(or perhaps you never knew).
And then nothing seems to be worth it,
nothing seems real at all.

But under the fiery gray heavens
under the stoic mountainsides
under the raindrops and the burning sunshine
on your soul, you will remember.
And once you live to be more than
a gray City Boy under grimy neon lights,
you might never forget again.

The precious thunder of the river rages on;
perhaps that's what happiness is made out of.

April 28 : Dreamcatchers And Wanderlust

Soft lines mark out
deep honey coloured eyes
in a hard smiling face.
Tinted glasses (the colour of the night)
perched upon beautiful little nose.
Shining self-consciously in a dull, lifeless crowd;
in her monochromed life, alarmingly bright.

Well-fitted starched clothes to work. Heels.
Businesslike, brisk. Confident and composed.
After all, a life to live: built up
so carefully from fragments
of cracked porcelain dreams
picked out and held against
the blinding lights of reality:
the commonplace ruins of practicality.
It hides well her inner romantic, in this melancholy city.
But beneath the shells and layers and memories
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

Behind the dark-tinted sunglasses lie her secrets
(open sometimes to those who float above shallow waters,
open to herself some of the time against a solid, dependable life
mother, daughter, lover and wife)
a worldfull of chances and mayhaps
built up so carefully from a perfect life
a house of cards rising against the gleaming glass counters
as order falls, the tentative yearning for chaos.
Within the whirl of her embroidered Indian skirt
lie rugged mountains and infinite oceans
exotic-skinned people, deep purple sunsets,
skyscrapers and windbreakers and railwaystation tea
dizzy late-night drives on winding roads and
comfortable blankets against pine-smelling fireplaces:
after all
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

She lives in the night sky, with the stars;
casting aside demons with a twist of her arm
she puts away fear gently on the windowsill, rain-stained.
Pale skin bruised, fat ego tight-lipped, integrity intact.
Smug about her maelstrom of adventure (sipping her chai
against the pounding pain in her skull, shining eyes
half tear-filled and half innocent eagerness)
she doesn't hold back. She lets it fly, her anger
and her pain and her endless sky-filled joy;
floating, she dissolves in herself
pointing at beautiful sight after sight
against this rose-tinted horizon
in her night-tinted glasses.
Her sorrow she holds quite tight to her chest
wrapped up in ancient insecurities
she is silent, gathering it all in a single
tightly clenched fist at the end of an arm
held quite open against the thundering wind
threatening to topple her over
today.

And she will think more and cry more
see more and sigh more
she will have more to regret
more to repress
but she will have lived more than anybody
in these narrow crowded streets and spaces
(against the tight-set faces, the long-healed traces).
With the risk and the fear, she pulls into her arms
all the joy of the world. Complete and untainted
(as it is only when it comes with a price
as it is just when it's undented and unpainted).
Joy that comes with the hunger for knowledge,
experience, good food and endless love.
Joy as gentle as it is proud,
as silent as it can be loud.
She smiles, balanced solidly upon shaky ground
floating simply on the ephemeral clouds:

after all
her soul is made of dreamcatchers and wanderlust.

April 27 : Fighting The Sky

Hammer-shaped thunderclouds
Preside singularly over rain dripped roads.
The pebbled black tar, soaked, holds tight to its chest
the living memory of a two-dimensional toad.
Pressed into the earth, with all the love of a passionate collector
driven over ferociously with all the pain-stained wheels
of a hundred steel monsters and garishly bright bicycles
soul squished into subservience under polished heels.

A hundred yards away
you lay
fighting the sky
with the might of an army
the size of a lie.

Grey roads lit up
with grimy neon lights
the city looks alive
(like a corpse, bright
under the shroud of the
prescient night and the
sinuous approaching dawn).
I sit, quiet, inured to your ragged breathing,
the sight of popping veins in your tightened fists
that inviolable look in your solipsistic eyes,
even your lurid words, acerbic to my ears.

And the maelstrom of the night
gathered her skirts about her, tight
grasping persistently in her slender fingers
the ephemeral skyline spread across an eternal horizon,
coming into focus with the first rays of light.

I watch over you as you writhe
I watch over as you cry.
I listen to your honest rants
And I listen as you lie.

Sometime when the still-damp roads
start filling up with dusty cars
zooming close and then further away
in the effulgent light of the early morning
you sigh.
And I pick you up in my weathered arms
silhouetted against the nebulous sky
I gently arrange your porcelain limbs
upon this tautly stretched car seat
your pristine (yet pallid) face looking up
your shaking hands unwilling to accept defeat.
I prise your stiffened fingers off my scarred arm
and slowly touch your face. The car groans and jerks,
and I have one hand upon the steering wheel
one upon your precious china-like cheek
your lashes, dampened into triangles of a grief
unknown to mankind, lower until you are asleep.
And we are ready to begin this journey again,
driving into the far horizon (of my eyes and your tortured soul).

April 26 : Art And The Artist

Raindrops trickle down
reality-tinted window panes
exhausted legs crumple
onto an unmade bed.

Bare walls. Bare arms.
Tendrils of black hair
reach the small of her back,
arched like a taut-stringed bow.

Slender fingers settle the pillows
Pull at a plug for the perfect light.
She arranges her long, shapely limbs
around her, her grey eyes ask
if she's doing it right.

And you can see every muscle
move precisely, supple,
an ocean beneath the velvet skin.
And his eyes sit silent, just taking it in.

Erect in his hand, he holds
his tool of the trade
(his beautiful red-brown paintbrush)
and he waits.
With his paints gathered around him
in an order decided upon years ago,
a grimy cup of water (stained green and deep).
He watches her
silently with an air of detached awe.

Her mouth seems to never be still,
His hands move like moths around light.
He sees not her - he sees through her
into the light of her soul
behind the long still lashes
of her sky-grey eyes.
Her collarbones, the hollows
and the hills of her curves.
Her shoulders, gracefully
forming those arms, light brown,
gentle down shining in the twilight.
The straight arc of her spine
placed strategically
between the beautiful indentations
in the small of her back.
He sees the mole on her hip.
The birthmark on her ankle,
shaped like a shard of
freshly broken glass
ragged.

The paints swirl around on the canvas,
gentle, the brush flows as if by itself.
His hand is the crevices
guiding the river of the brush
gushing down the topography that
is her body.

He isn't himself,
he doesn't need to see the bills in the broken bowl
in the dusty apartment rise up to the roof,
he doesn't need to work at the smelly restaurent
down by the dockside or wait for a phonecall
from a family that left. He is more than
the sum of his individual peculiarities (the way
he scratches his nose when he's uncomfortable
how he hunches when he walks, his torn pockets
that lose him pennies, that he will never sew
his light-furred cat and how he scrunches up his
face when he laughs, his shoebox of tear-stained letters
safe at the back of his closet), he can matter.
He is a catalyst, he will see and he will move,
his eyes (with his own special perception of the world and
her scar-stained forearms) and his hands (his beautiful hands)
are the only parts of him that mean anything. He is an Artist.

She isn't herself,
she can forget the cursed whitewashed walls of this
godforsaken studio and the magazines that rejected
her and the men that hounded her down till she relented
and slept with them in the salty mattresses and the thin
blankets, hard like stale bread, she can move beyond
the repressive childhood and the bad decisions to get out
of her town, to mean something to the world and fail
all over again, like her mother said she would.
She is more than all that. She is Art. And she
watches him with open mouth, in awe of his awe
of her. This is all she wanted when she asked them
to photograph her, not fame or money, she just
wanted to be Art in somebody's eyes for a while,
so that she could be Art in her own grey oceans.

She is still.
He pauses, looks at the foggy grey outside.
Sliced up by electric wires, into disorderly gashes
of rain-coloured sky, stretched out so far, so long
that the melting horizon looks painfully ephemeral.
He never wants to leave this room
she never wants to leave his sight.

April 25 : How & Why Mechanics For A Cynic

"He who has a why to live
can bear almost any how",
said Nietzshe, and I appreciate it
but somebody's whys to live are
so often, so inextricably
connected to their previous hows
that to assume otherwise is unfair.

Whys stand chances when there's
porcelain tea sets
to break in the acts of rebellion
(not when the single steel plate will only
bend, and the food might fall next time
you get a meal).
Hows stand around
in varied levels of undress,
watching the scenes,
callous. To dreams and whys.
Whys live in joy and cookie jars,
Hows hide in unexpected places.

And I have whys, a hundred whys
packed up in my closets and
inside my socks. And hows and I
don't have to meet much.
But I see it and it hurts.

Whys don't save the fallen girl
killed because she's beautiful
(I thought you weren't supposed to hate them,
isn't that how it went?), the man who
was shot in the head. Hows come quietly
to the doors of the weary
and slip them out as if they were never there.
Old people with dreams die. Young people
with lists and boxes of whys
get scarred and scared and stay still
for too long to live life like it's meant.
Babies starve. Mothers watch.
Helpless to the onslaught
of ever-growing hows.
"Raped and mutilated body has scars
which show definite sign of struggle
on her part - how brave"
See, for whys, it can often get too late.

April 24 : Luminous Insides

The clock ticks past
and hourglasses crack
it's that time of night again
I knew it would be back.

The moon sits quietly behind
the skyline of my personal
first floor horizon (antennas
and ugly buildings line it
for a straight 360 degrees).
The stars, shy, hide behind an
overwhelming blanket of
pollutants and the floating crashed hopes
of a monotonous, repetitive life in the city
(which is worse, I do believe).

Our house is warm,
Our nightsuits on.
The streetlights are stark
but the silk curtains drawn.
The lamps at strategic locations
light up our den with a dull yellow glow
(dreams aren't broken here, they're made,
every day is similar, in the happiest way).

I can see you sitting here
across from me, in
matching jammies and a beer.
We would talk about beautiful things
and I'd tell you about my day
(and my fears and insecurities
and regrets and guilt and)
we'd hold hands and arms and faces
and you'd make it all okay.

Your eyes shine bright
(but that's not the lamps,
its your luminous insides)
your smile is wide. (I wish
you were here, because the
night is too sacred to go on
without you and I'm not enough
I shall slink away from it and wait).

And why I don't write a poem about you
is that I'm afraid I could never do it right,
I could never do you justice.
Not you,
with the luminous insides
and fearlessness,
your matching jammies
and spontaniety.
You with the zest for life
as I could only hope for.

So I slink away from the night
till you return, and then bask
in your glow. The night might
accept me then.

April 23 : The Magician/ Beginnings

In a slow grey-white memory
at the back of my head
I see her.

Running up the stairs
on her slender little legs
(two steps at a time)
with a plump little friend beside
she smiled.

Her eyes were large
on her small face.
Her voice shrill
with the innocence
of childhood.

Words came easy to her
pencils lived happily
in her little-fingered hand
the world was big and scary
but she was a happy kid.

She ran down the stairs
(in the depressing gaudy colors
that murderous schoolteachers
paint the furniture to make it look
like they aren't doing a terrible job
of growing these kids up well)
and she framed it in her head.
The words. The sound of them.
Selecting, regarding, rejecting.

The poem was about a magician.
The rest is a blur.

Her parents hugged her and
told her she was wonderful
(and they went on doing that
all her life).
And she was proud too.
Of herself.
Which is the best kind of proud
that you ever can be.

A decade later
a lover of words
a fanatic like never before
as the hammer of that
painful peeve of every poet
(writer's block, they call it)
rested upon her head
(where are the words?
Why would they leave me
at a time like this? Am I all out?
Is it over, am I dead?)
she threw it back
and remembered.

And because she was
technically challenged
and couldn't convert that old file
to read it again
on this stupid computer
she clenched her fist and her jaw
and hated her life.

But reason prevailed
and what matters
matters.
Sometimes it's important
to go back to the basics.
Go cycling down memory lane
with child-proof pepper spray
and watch for a while.
The joy of beginnings.
Of things meant to last.
Of happy memories
from forever ago
and poetry written
with staunch large-eyed
love for the written word.

Post Script :
And magicians never fascinated me,
I couldn't write a poem on one if I tried
(I did try) so then sometimes we surprise ourselves,
don't we? (seven year old me, what is up with this?)

April 22 : Nighttime.

Falling through doors
flat long spaces
flying through large
incomprehensible places

I pause.

And in the dark
(it's the shroud of the nighttime
a sheen of velvet clad dreams
flecked with stars and celestial beings
like you) I shut my eyes.
And I stretch out to you
(the far, deep corners of myself)
and I float.

Blurs of trees pass by.
People blurs. Dog blurs.
In the daytime when I am still
my mind is still and calm
they will mean more. But
I let the blurs blur past me
in a desperate attempt
to seize something
which I lost long ago.
Streetlights zoom
in onto my soul.

And if I open my eyes
to the blinding darkness
perhaps I will see your eyes
(a sickly grey, flecked with sad stars)
and perhaps I won't.

And when the nights grow longer
beneath my blankets and my leg
fidgets incessantly but my eyes
are still, you will sleep.
When the piano keys
fall off with the sounds
of breaking hearts and
the moon swells up
with fattened sky and
gentle arms rocking it
to sleep in the gentle hammock
of the precious nighttime.

April 21 : You and I

The night was threatening
to tear right open
at the stretched out seams
at the end of that day.
You know.
Your arm across my shoulder
and my hand so inextricably
intertwined in yours
I thought I'd never get it free.

And I was glad of it.

I did get it free
and I did leave
eventually,
unceremoniously.
And you walked away quietly
after months of magic
and never seemed to look back.
You swept yourself away
into the ocean
and left me with ruins
of sandcastles and seashells
tangled seaweed in my salt-dried hair.

But that night you held me
as if I were precious
and behind your hundred lashes
deep in your flecked eyes
I could swear I saw the distant sea
for the first time, the sorrow.
And I'd broken your heart
a hundred times but never as much
as that day, I believed.
And we talked and we laughed
as if nothing was wrong and
the day passed in a single blink
(of eyelashes glued together
into tear-shaped triangles).

And we had regrets and
we made mistakes and
we stayed apart for far too long.
But when I hugged you for the last time
something broke (and yet, something was
mended beyond repair, deep inside).
And you wrote me things I always wanted
to hear (but I was too afraid to listen and
you too afraid to speak). And I wept
and I shuddered and I wiped my snotty nose
and prepared myself for a new life.

And you never asked again and
you never spoke again and you left
(although you didn't have to) the moment
I did. A ticket, far off, to somewhere else.
And you smiled at me distantly from behind
thick glass panes, and you went on with
things I never knew you needed. And
you grew.

Once,
you saved me from uncertain dark days
with your warm glow from afar.
You walked down long streets
and forgave me often, you
make me laugh at the smallest things
under this wide incomprehensible sky.
And now we're familiar strangers
in a strange sort of labyrinth
where thick-hedged walls
lead back to where we can't go
(I see you cross me but I must stay still,
your mind is suddenly a painful mystery)
and the sky gets darker
with every passing starless night.
Perhaps it's better to sit
silently behind you. I'd
hate to disturb your search,
your incomplete lamp-lit life
(but I can hear you breathe,
can't you hear me sigh?)