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.