AND THEN THERE WAS ONE

And it's all down to this outrageously braveheart board-pin sticking onto concrete a fast-melting Mankind...

ALL DOWN

The doves all shot down,
Each one;
Their feathers now adorn,
My son's tell-tale crown.

ROOMS UNINHABITABLE

Without You, within is just another of those rooms,
Perenially collapsible,
Where bruised taps gurgle forth dark anguish to be sucked in by the writer's quill;
This room, now become a Gothic museum, made by your absence utterly uninhabitable.

TIME

Allow me to struggle through this vacuous time stretching from your end to mine; with much fancy, we shall soon have it transmuted into the precious wink of a moment inundated with vital sweet-nothings which posterity shall dreamily lap up.

DIVINE JANGLE

With the planes flying in at a brick-shaking low, all this compulsive banter-across-the-dinner-table might at last be put to rest:
A Divine jangle above helping us perfect Silence below.

ALONENESS

He mocks Aloneness from this moment to that, gathering at his table a happy constellation of tea cups, ironing out in fondness ghosts of creases-upon-linen left behind by a community of animated wrist-thumps.

POEM THIEF

And always, it is the settled fate of your honest-to-death Poetry, that people shall read, read and nod, nod and leave, and you shall count in hope an infinite times over for absent sheets smuggled away in pockets ripping at the seams with violent proprietorial love.

AMNESIA

First the eyes, their stare dimmed into uncertain cloud cover, followed by fine-tuned lips stretched to abstraction;
Your pretty pretty face, consigned to blankness, lost to memory for ever.

JUST LIKE MAGIC!

Like MAGIC! Like magic!
Each missed sunrise explodes through each dull day of make-believe festivity;
Each wooden limb feels in its puppet-life the flush and flow of blood, a semblance of purposeful eternity.
Just like magic. A little bit of magic.

SONGS OF THE ROAD

And then there are those songs, arriving at this hurting moment of stillness with the specifics intact: fearless rented cars twisting round and round mountains the smell of diesel, the jangle of time-abused stereo systems, the touch of rusty leather...

PLEASURE OF WAR

Peace-Time archives bury beneath plush folds of intensely fabricated Well-Being, brisk moments privately spent in kitchen corners and at washroom windows, carving upon one's own body tell-tale pleasure-wounds of a desired corporeal warfare.

FABRIC AGAINST FABRIC

She wears a song a day, mostly starched into dull concord, while for sudden nights she reserves the passion-play of fabric against fabric, bunching up at the ear, the honest-to-god creases poorly playing her silent prayer.

ANATOMY OF WORDS

Words will tell you words are good.
Words will, through the charm of voluntarily distributed confusion, make pretty gentlefolk of you; a pretty bundle of heart and mind forever aiming to confess, to intimidate, to force out reciprocation where only dispassion exists.
Dispassion is Yours, honest enough, but for the tiring word-loops, all inauthentic trash measuring out of you pointless courtesy, drop by drop.

SEASONAL CAPRICES

Seasonal caprices;
A season of weird and wonderful battles waged between the within and without, with obscene anger-boils smartly cloaked up in ad banners and fairy lights.
A season of Devotion dealing in petty Secrecy, with the gods of your street warding off those in mine; the path to God-abodes become infinitely labyrinthine.
This season, a Private worship just got Privatized.

(p.s.: the above rant has been composed in a burst of amused frustration, after being subjected to the amazing ways in which pujo pandals are seeking to keep themselves under wraps, ensuring the reduction of spectators to necessary footfall. )

CHEAPSTER LOVE

Much like rainbow upon rainbow upon rainbow
Much like raindrop upon raindrop upon raindrop
Thoughts of sublime tenderness bound by cheap adhesive,
Your tearjerker of a montage scant in accurate love;
In promoting bubble-wrapped hearts, profusely coercive.

UGH! PRETTINESS!

Everybody Loves a pretty face. A pretty pretty face. Pretty like one-dimensional 18th century rustic English abodes cross-stitched on to sick-baby-pink linen.

ANOTHER PARTING OF SEAS

If not a momentous parting of seas, then at least an exciting edging away of bathroom tiles, the unbridged lane in between broadening up, promising to suck in everyday burdens of Dawn-dampened lethargy...

A BLANKNESS

With a bleak blank sheet essentially white but for print-burns here and there, let us pretend twin shooting stars just careered off the edge, the reckless tyre-stains co-opted by our Hope Industry, promoted as symbols of self-effacing liveliness.

OUR PERFECT MOON

...and for You, the heart would step down, a silent melting away into passivity but for an unwarned glimpse of Our perfect moon, so perfectly shared between your sky and mine.

PETTINESS

All these lives, made so petty by such earnest efforts;
Lives formalized into essential-somethings by latching on to them a happy get-to-together now and then,
Snapshots of face-against-face-against-face glued together with 'oh so hard to contain Love!',
Snapshots, airbrushed over time, grotesquely perfected.

A VERY BRIEF ENCOUNTER

You appeared as a city tabooed against itself, cloaked from end to end in starched black;
Yet you shall be remembered as a city of Suddenness,
Looping around street lamps strings of happy raindrops made of an abrupt cloudburst,
Your concrete walls resigning in joy to broadening cracks.

PRETTINESS

Prettiness, in pretty people, causes eruptions of paradisal worthiness upon the most pointless of spaces.
Prettiness in pretty people fine-tunes the mind of the Non-Pretty towards a severance of the loose ends riding towards devastating distraction, such that attention might be paid, must be paid.
Prettiness in pretty people tutors the mind in nurturing a black vacancy in the heart;
This chasm beckoning to that perfectly-proportioned image of worthiness positioned at a ridiculous distance,
An image defining the Pretty in a breath, while consigning the Non-Pretty to eternal heart burns-
Infinite vacancies heaped one upon the other till emptiness snaps the chains of the measuring scales,
Snaps them in an uncharacteristic assertion of presence.

WISH...

My non-essentialized Dream-Self contemplates inheriting that anarchic cornucopia of barbed-wire tattoo rings, limbless clock-faces and a pretty little concrete garden where You wouldn't insist on nurturing your safety-valve rose buds of Reverence.

THE FIGHT

But finally, our lane of beggared nights would conduct under the democratic gaze of a street-lamp, ennobling shuffling-ups, of tales infinite; each such tale petitioning teary-eyed for glorious Representation, most threatening in razor-sharp prose for absolute Promotion; while crawl forth the winners, unassumingly resplendent on all fours, our street-dogs stray, as abandoned as the night-time, charming each same-same night with their uber-human Otherness.

HEAT.

Of Love Lessons learnt, this shall be the darkest instance;

When flippancy in winds gains not a petal of sincerity,

For deceptions infinite latch onto Life, emblems of impermanence,

With a petal a day forfeiting breath, without a fight.  

Thus sobered wind practices hard Constancy,

Binding up the flutter of a leaf, glaring upon shadow-pockets of sweet respite,

All for an embalmed Adoration, to be tediously bought.

While perspiring bricks scream:

“Heat, we love you not!”

BLACKNESS

Of a morning’s rampage through the mute night,
An abrupt unsheathing of sense
With bullying headlights scavenging among stillness.
Of such mornings that prophesy dead ends,
Days unnaturally begotten, dragged forth by flight schedules and clock-sirens,
When stubborn Purpose measures moments whistle by whistle,
With the ardent heart bonding illusory narratives of a time beyond Travel;
Then shall her prayer-head knelt over steering wheel relinquish the Present,

But body-bags of triumph remain,
To usher in darkness, of interrupted nights swarming back into the skies,
Asserting-
'For she died, with black sleep in her eyes'.

THOUGHTS ON A LEAP YEAR.

The perfect day, Today, for effecting the perfected death;
Blanch walls been stamped enough with black-lettered noughts and crosses
Battle-pits all, crayoned and grid-locked, sprouting designless.
Some such comical chronicle of inane violence
with gallant noughts and crosses playing fillers to a four-yearly wait,
shall finally aid in charting out a death-sentence:
This death, self-tuned and demanding reverence.

Thus today, when your shadow is rolled up with finality’s flourish,
you know the memorial shall be grand,
divested as it is from the everyday of the every-year;
Celebrations of your absence, to be observed with overwhelming relish.

BREACH

What to make then of this breach made manifest?
A breach ever-distending
Across a fabric caught disrobing;
This fabric: scripted with precision, meant for decorum
Now nursing a hunger homewards-bound
With defector knives and forks ploughing through my disciplined Self;
Myself, disheveled.
This Self, cracked from end to end,
Brooding at stubborn blind lanes for Your self’s coherence.

DREAMS

All you thoughtless thoroughfares erupting under laserbeam awnings,
Yawning forth billboards on a whim,
With disembodied voices fashioned to mock a private prayer calling from boom-boxes perched atop telegraph poles,
Selling you dirt cheap that life across this street; pretty as a pamphlet-
Your neighbour's retreat.

RAIN

....And then you laugh into the austere night;
Militant nights tutored in stoic abondonment of passion,
Till raptures labour forth here, there, everywhere,
A night raining tear drops, of delayed restitution.

FEEBLE FABLES

Towards Time-crumbs they fly, salivating crows, sparing not a feather for this fable pieced together;
Of fiery tricksters, all pretty rockstars:
Slipshod murmurings of a heart steaming pink, haloed a quater times over with night-bulbs going wink! wink!
....And then to bemoan,
that my spectral star has sped, to gyrate in caustic abondon over planets not my own!