Ishq-e-khwaab

Aur log zikr karte hain humari chehre hi aaj kal
ki nazre giri giri si koi gham mein
aur honthon ke rang utri si kyun rehti hai

Unhe hum kaise samjhaye
ke har raat khwabon mein aap se mulaqat hoti hai
aur har baar humari rooh ka ek tukda hum chod aate hain nazraana

Ke ab toh lagne laga hai aaj kal ki humara is duniya mein kam,
uss haseen jahaan mein basera zyada hai.

Hum kehte nahi kuch inn logon se,
woh jaante hain, aur hum bhi
ki ishq mein fanaa huwe sharabiyon ki koi kami nahi
yaha is maikhaney mein

Bas do ghoont pi lene do, musafir
phir aap ko apni manzil mubarak
aur hum chal diye uss khoobsurat saaye ki orh...

'Persuasions' Or 'The Wise Paranoid and the Foolish Braveheart'

Following the movement of clouds
And counting the stars in the sky
Letting the night breeze play with with my hair

A friendly dog on the street
A handful of melodies from simpler times
Stories woven inside my head of strangers passing by.

Maybe the search for happiness isn't all that elusive
As we would like to believe.
Tragedy is only that many unshed tears weighing us down,
And joy that many introspections away.

You bubble-wrap your heart and put it away,
Picking up the pieces later seems more tedious.
Emotionally more pragmatic, you say wisely.

I nod, and wonder what it would take to make you believe
You can't swim with the dolphins if you don't get your feet wet.
You can't fly among the eagles if you don't spread your wings.

You may break
And bruise
And tell me that you told me so.

You know they say it is better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
You say it's a cliche.
I say it's a classic.

The world is Schrodinger's cat.
Look up possibilities in your dictionary.
Forgive the past, and look the future in the eye.

An awkward poem to convince you
To come out of your nuclear shelter.

We can battle the modern dragons together,
And break into the corporate castles.
Defeat the plagues and the witches together.
Claim the entire world for our booty.

Maybe I can be your bubble-wrap instead.
Maybe we can walk off into the beautiful sunset together.

On Turning And Returning

Time travelling in mental highways,
He adorns his past self unselfconsciously
And not just see it through sepia-tinted glasses.


Unlearning the weary world's diktats,
He rediscovers the happiness of half a myth ago.


The grass has been losing its green over the years,
The crick in the neck thus not pure sentimentalism.
Rendered necessary by an age that he did not understand,
Or an age that did not understand the likes of him.


These journies are conducted everyday behind countless glazed eyes,
The witch Memory assists with her protean charm -
Wiping out the unnecessary and repressed,
With as much ease as putting up blow-ups of the happy and peaceful.


Unfortunately, the frequent trips -
To and fro,
Past and present,

Come and go,
Live and relive -
Spoilt the time machine...


And now he hangs in a limbo,
Trapped in his own head.

A Song of Promise

Every night tossing and

Turning. Into a new leaf.

Falling in love again,

Swathed by love songs.

Music diluting your face,

Forming blurry contours

Of my perfect lover.

A few tears of redemption

And a watery smile of resolution.

Grabbing every skein

Of long broken promises,

I’m knitting me anew

An old love story.

Tonight I wait for dawn to break.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

The Swan Song

Pink smiles and crimson blushes,

Run-of-the-mill songs

That evoked virgin emotions,

The beauty of the shameless sun and the shy clouds -

As they played out their hide-and-seek

On the never ending skies.

That all things move in a circle,

Is a truth lovers deny

In their colorful nights and colored days.

So what if all good things come to an end,

unless all things come to a beautiful end?

Post Mortem

Spirits hovered over her lifeless body,

In much the same way the spirits moved within her

During her last minutes.

Blindingly fast.

Streaks of light to the lazy eye.

Coursing the length of her veins

As her heart slowed down to a lazy pump.

In an upside down manner, she probably saw heaven.

The clean slate the gods hand out for every new soul-

Was, in her case, a case of undecipherable scrawls by the end of it.

Business Trip

The last abuses of an angry sun fall on the reddish fields

Before the pearly moon comes by with its soothing silver.

And he lies down on the soft earth,

Tracing himself in the starry map above.

Far away from the faceless urban army.

The tiny apartment did not have enough cupboards to contain the monsters anyway.

And on rainy nights,

The metallic smell of guilt seeped in from the cracks.

Here, they roam free.

Tame.

Without poisonous glands.

And as the balmy breeze blew over the smiling face,

It only carried heady scents of the paths ahead.

Gestations of the Mind

Thoughts drizzle down in a weary head -

Trying to catch them in word shaped cups,

To freeze their meanings,

To erect coherent sandcastles.

Fingers shake over virgin paper -

Air writing, mind juggling,

And the cigarette ticking away.

Awaiting the music to descend

of that teasing muse,

playing hide and seek in the corners of the mind.

If catharsis isn't a drug, what is?

To put away garbage in pretty colored boxes

And tuck them away under the bed and into the closets.

And lie in muted unconsciousness again.

A World of His Own

Little child -

Fascinated with mirrors,

Deluded with fairy tales

Of parallel universes,

Illusions and echoes

From a reflecting surface.

Innocent child –

Testing the strength of his myth

one stone flung in righteous anger.

Disbelief reflected

From a dozen scattered pieces on the cold floor.

Pouting lips and creased forehead

Commanded his flight

From the scene of betrayal

Into the woods nearby.

By now he has learnt

Never to let even a teardrop fall

Into the pond,

To keep his other-worldly twin

From falling apart.

The Highway Cliché

A few broken bridges
A dried up rose in the pages of a dust gathered book
Few unshed tears
And fewer misplaced memories
These lie in a road left behind.


And for the traveller who stops for his cigarette break,
Come back to him with every hazy grey of smoke.
And die as the miles-weary boots stub the end.


And life goes on.

Stubborn

Meta-reflecting,

In thoughts and mirrors.

Hoping to focus

On the hazy distance.

Wishing to lose the self

In that wintry forest.

Big words and bigger dreams

In a cranium crammed

With utopian visions.

Meta-smiling and meta-frowning

As the clock ticcity tocks.

And the sun rises.

And the moon rises.

It won’t do.

It won’t do.

It won’t do.

But she'll do (it anyway).

Alternate Realities

The hunter became the hunted
Traversing the forest of forgetfulness and displaced memories.
Travelling on alternate frequencies,
Multiple universes couldn’t prove the truth of the matter.
Reporting from a different galaxy,
The voice of consciousness was broken, distorted.

Truths were shaken inside the box…
And the dice rolled out unexpected numbers.
Trying to make sense,
Trying to carry the truth from the Atman
And not shuffle the equation.

Multiple colors, and the never fading black
Warring/Waltzing in my mind.
Bizzare. No.
Unreal. No.
Reality is overrated.
Truth - overestimated even more.

Kaleidoscope of purple lights and yellow bits playing out their parts.
The wait, the anticipation, the premature hatching of a fragile dream…
Crushed by Miss Cinik and Master Thisbè Leaf.
‘You’ wrapped up in a consciousness of a few words, or a million epics…
Moving the further from the centre, the harder you try moving towards meaning.

Oh yes, ma’am … very surreal. But wait until the end of the show to analyze the truth of this show.

Hurtling Towards the Future Infinite

Different elements, different visions …

The only way I can see the world with your eyes

Is if I gouge your eyes out and mine

And we exchanged them…

Optical fluids and blood and all.

Mix fire with water and you’ll douse the former

Mix earth with wind, and you just tire the latter

Biological needs, and social ones

Aren’t the only things that make us human.

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of orange dreams

Jack went down, and broke his crown,

But Jill still tried to follow the butterflies.

They say parallel lines meet at infinity,

Let’s just hope we do too.

For this life is just the beginning

Of the volatile war

Of the Ram and the Lion.

Unexpected Trysts

It took a thousand dream miles to meet you again-

Somewhere deep in my labyrinthine mind

That I can’t reach with a conscious map.

Remembering those

Strawberry kisses and blue jeans,

The bewitched air under the august sun,

Whiffs of your smile, your caressing eyes-

And the forgotten taste of a rainbow dream.

I don’t know if you know

Our paths still cross on the other side of life.

The chance encounters in the dead of night

When the sandman visits my bed,

Sprinkling diamond dust

Of evenings half an age ago.

And as I sink into oblivion,

I wound my way sometimes,

To that parallel universe

Of our strawberry kisses and blue jeans.

Blind Woman's Bluff

Desire born out of the sight

Of a mass of sleeping curves.

A wishful touch born out of the desire.

A half uttered moan, lost in translation.

A ripple in the lake of placid calm.

Layers shed. Urgent messages dispatched.

Her experiments of playing blind.

His pleas, begs and thrusts.

The tug of war of sensual principles,

While the world around rocked gently,

Bursting in a million colors.

Till the moment of death in which

Her eyelids finally fluttered open.

One look into the depths and he died too.

The lake regained its still

And the world its monochromatic hue.

When Art Misrepresents

Faulty prophecies of misguided diagnoses
Froze her fluid essence,
Caught her in one of those moments
You and I pass over -
Every day. Silently.
Shifty. Embarrassed.

Now, after two eternities and a half
When they put that frozen statue under scrutiny,
They mark the broad expanse of a battle-worn forehead.
The pool of black
Crystallized into a glittering scorn.
Two balls of fiery ice -
Medusa's paralyzing gaze.

They wrote her off -
No work of art, this sculpture.

She had mothered her ice age.
Her ice age had mothered her.
It was just one of her protean shapes
In which she got stuck.

Now - brushed clean, gilt-framed and hung up
Before the yellow eyes of critical aesthetes,
She belies her origins -
Of faulty prophecies and misguided diagnoses
In her own ice age.

An Angel That Wasn’t

If you look closely enough
The angelic smile cracks once in a while-
A temporal tear in the flawless gossamer.

The glowing halo hovers awkwardly over the heavenly locks-
Like forcibly thrust into an inhospitable aura.

Human colors hidden behind a manufactured fairy fairness.
It longs to tear off its wings and ooze red.
If heaven were grace, it would gladly fall from it.

It just was not cut out
To be a beacon of hope
Processed out of god's own factory.

The Mirror

Light and reflection

High cheekbones unadorned by the love blush

Shadows on the proud forehead, tracing arrows of past wars

Eyes that open no doors to the seven seas

One tear journeying to

Silent lips, virgin pink

A face that launched no thousand ships

A face pregnant with a hundred tales

Boxes of Love

She sits there
making boxes of love.
Measuring the width
of wooden promises.
Checking the length
of varnished vows.

Perseus flies by
on his winged steed.
And Daedalus too,
on waxen wings.

Troubling her perspective,
Lifting her gaze,
As she sits there
making boxes of love.

Someone beside hugs a tree.
Another poetises it.
Yet another replicates it on their easel,
There's one who philosophically untrees the tree.
Then again, another wonders what to do with the tree anyway,
While she sits there making boxes of love.

Two semi circles side by side,
and a right angle joining them below.
A perfectly symmetrical heart shape she devises
To put on the boxes as they grow.

Beautiful miniature boxes,
each hatching in it one lovely dream.

The goblins pass by with pots of gold.
Fairies reveling in the firefly dusk,
And she sits there,
making boxes of love.

She asks Sisyphus,
"What is the time?"
But he has no time to answer back.
She just smiles, shaking her head.

And everyday,
She makes boxes of love.

The Ceramic Jar

She was the black ocean
he wanted to drown in
The shower of ephemeral scents
he wanted to bathe in.

The ebb and flow of her lips
melted his concrete
Her gentle rhythms
diluted his core.

"Let's meet in Donne's little rooms," she said.
But he wanted every drop of her.
How do you contain infinity in a ceramic jar
you bought from the convenience store on sale?

The moon had nothing to do
with the high tides and the raging storm.

The weatherman never anticipated it.
The weatherman always expected it.

When dawn caressed her the next day,
The sun saw -

Broken pieces of a ceramic jar,
scattered on the virgin shore.

The Dream of an Insomniac

Soft colors of an artificial night

Burning in my eyes

Keeping watch for my soul

Lest those lurking demons come claim it

I know they hide behind the shadows

And they wait for a moment of inattention

And whoosh!

Bells clang – clang – clang –clang!

Winds whoosh – whoosh – whoosh – whoosh!

My night, my beloved solitude is raped!

I hate, I hate, I hate the light!

Penetrating gaze of a heartless judge …

I don’t have the witnesses and the proofs to prove my case

They cut out my tongue, I can’t speak.

So scared, so worried, so paranoid –

Let me hold myself tight and protect myself from me

Let me sing me a lullaby, let me rock myself to sleep

And while I sleep, I’ll stay awake and guard my precious myself

From the lurking demons, hiding behind the shadows –

So that I can have a sweet dream …

And dream of the soft colors of the artificial night.