Let's

Let us bend over the stars and sculpt constellations burning bright,
for tonight we dance with our dreams as lovers like candles alight.
As for the little mouths crying hungry tears,
let us become food,
so they could dream a few hours with us inside.
Let us hold the gods in contempt for all the wishes we never hung out
to dry, and pretend that heaven is just a word to give death meaning.
So that things could take us for granted for a change.

Tonight, let us fly upon paper doves and chase down stallions as they call
out our names from tenement roofs and rickety billboards advertising
peace.
Even as empty graffiti cans rattle down the lower east side with parched tongues,
whispering sweet nothings at the brick walls, they stand
as naked as they please.

Let us throw upon horizons like aprons, and glisten with our eyes,
while they clutch the sun tight in faithful fists, and wring it out of
all light.
And as the ruddy cheeked angels read us fables of our new-born yore,
their fall from grace will teach us to fly without wings,
for a moment, even soar.

And as our childhood turns into dog-eared, time flavoured pages
unscathed by the sun’s ire, each with a beating heart,
let us drape this moment around our shoulder, and shed tears of unforeseen
joy, for love will devour us before death do us apart.

Let us sing free of melody, rhyme and reason, as the cosmos stand in ovation,
for soon the shells in our pocket will bear pearls.
And we won’t remember our names or the promises we made to our lives,
for the life of us.

Yes my friend, we are fruit and seed all at once, with roots of feather so that we may
take to the sky when the clouds come to blush.
For when they bow our heads with might, we will drop dew from the saplings made
of sky, upon the earth azure and lush.

birth of time

Birth of time

Time be alive,
we, like trees and peace ,
are raised to the ground, beneath even,
for the fortune-shackled chasing tail

Exfoliate. The shed skin of the moon,
grown to imitate sunbeams and bows of rain,
a petty soldier of circumstance, newly divorced.
Only to be shredded like memory stained
paper, petty change down the reverend throat.

Blinded was the halo of GODblinding the sycophant mirror to shards
of light

With scene of crime drenched,
in shadow-lines from the pencil of time
on paper,
rickety spiders hurrying their
burdens down the green mile. Naked.

The wound lay waiting, patiently biting nails; waiting like a room
betrothed of doors, invisible.
Like a room wailing woes of witnessing war,
upon deaf ear, after year, after year.

Solemn and sedated in sun trance, eyes of ageing
falcons betrayed belief.
The machine it was. The daily standard honked in newsprint ink blotches.
The still-water prey, suicidal in glee
arrived with the cigarettes for the night.

This is the reddening sun turning blue. This is my birth
coming on a little too soon. Cried some child
on all fours.
Madness and chaos embedded
in microchips,
sold like sanity on the street, sold like hell.
And I watched the souls turn to eternal flames

tea for two

Tea for two

Similar hues
of that moment, reeking of tea and spring flowers,
now lay suspended in
familiar epiphanies of past roads. And the shoes
we wore out on the ones untrodden;
their coal-charred still-life negatives
hanging, drenched in life.
Our skins spoke lesser and lesser.
And so did we.

And old summers of love
floated alive
in their feathery closing
of your eye-lids,

Cotton-mouthed love it was,
glistening like gold in irises burning
into angels;
their eyes mere shadows.
Grown on earth, pure and brown. Our amethyst ascend into
the moon’s eye,
now blind
in our illumine bubble of sun’s tears

But we did not look below or beneath.
With the sun in our conjoined aorta,
never did we know
that the sun, skin and shadow
share same blood.

Now in the memory of our dawn,
I FIND NO SUN
in the ground beneath
LAY GRAVITY DEFLOWERED
in wooden eyes before, in the mirror
I FIND TEARS

And the reel shrieked across
the soft grass of daydream stupor,
the projector moaned in pain,
and the eyelids turned back into grey.

The slow weightless amble of our eyes’
beloved curtains reveal the amethyst
glasses of our summer wine.
And our possible pasts
and single-bed linen garden
of Eden as gleaming as it was, would be.

The remainder

The remainder

Blank open spaces remain, from the eclipse,
not much around has changed
false and plastic prophets, still carry megaphones
of blindness

Vast and lush, such used to be words that would ring open
into a starry ocean of our purple night, deepening still, into
little 24 hour long black-holes called reality and truth;
torn and reveling in surrender to
trigger-happy journalists, reporting live
from the grimy confines of lower east side and mumbai’s entrails,
“The television should’ve been dead by now”, you breathed out,
hair flailing slowly from your lips,
against the orange moonlit shadow of a wooden lamp,
you heard me say a number of words,
some discernible, some dead.
they spoke at length about the quiet rustle of leaves
in wintered night of JNU, IIT, New York, Atlantis
and heaven.

were these not the very words?

I do believe that you are quite frankly, out of your mind
wind-stricken fool of glorious vacancy for age
deep-brown in your sleep, and a fall
into what you call grace,
I could just sigh in pity, or pray god to shine his light upon you
perhaps. Someday.

You are wrong. You are not you. You have fallen prey again
to your falcon of choice,
and you don’t need to blink.
that wouldn’t prove a thing to concoct any further cry from truth,
to what has unfolded and will lust for the sheets,
and fold, and fold, till you are no longer familiar with your own mirror.

The slander in your words, quivers forth in your voice
only those who have used, can feel the dull ache in their joints,
before the turk sets upon,
if only you never knew such a word existed

Of all the red apples

Of all the red apples

Of all the red apples, rotten and ashen in moonlight, collecting memories off the grass,
there was one that stared up at the velvet sky, wondrous and unaware.
Ripe, crimson as angel blood,
dripping with nothing he could remember.
To clasp to his breast as memory.

Of all the king’s men, none seemed awake.
Riding stallion after stallion over
mountains of rusted iron in the night;
quiet as steel before the anvil wakes.
None, except the king in wait of gold.

Of all the lions feasting on a gazelle,
The yellow rectangle of NatGeo,
stared at the empty couch in front; the one
the feast was for. A mother-less starving cub lay beside,
steadily out of frame. Till flies hovered over him by the first rays.

The opal eye, stone like torn pages, his wrinkled skin moved
towards the button.
With the buzzer, appeared a door.
Stumbling over the broken ledge,
he fell his fall
and slept like the baby who never tore pages.

As white- noise filled the darkened room with the hum
of the television, the montage swerved to the city lights,
concrete luncheons and soliloquies dancing,
like petals in the first rain, proud like an unseen blood-stain,
a crouching tiger by the curb with no vein to lust the pain.

Of all the red apples, one was born with a crease.
With no one to devour his flesh and bone, he rolled down
the mildew and pebbles, rolling the hill around him like
a blanket, till the rot and halt.

The last act

The last act

Severed. The slippery truth
like feather, swallowed, peacefully,
rain and dust,
And as hollow as mirror, things held their breath,
with the splash of a distant wind chime
things died like echoes

Gone like vultures in fear of a birth,
the christening was the warm foam from the stains of coffee,
we left ignored,
And while the silence fell,
like a small uninhabited circle of lamenting stage-light,
the garish eyes of the protagonist sang in the din
and made childhood rye-field dreams float,
in the eyes of all

All was not lost. Not the war atleast. The riches flowed
down the streets in a grim crimson, the poor fled in the epiphany of joy.
The city lights lay hunger wrought that night, the underbelly like violins gazing,
at the burgeoning moon, with new-born waters learning to swim

The druid, while dreaming the strangest opulence,
metered and sewn, into words, a creaking door
severed its hinges in full view of insomnia-stung-red-eyed-god.

The ovation was loud and clear.
And so was the lull. The asphalt waited till the last act.
And then died with rain.

Tangerine nights

The image melting into mirror, the doe eyes gaze like the lone drop of dew
of night,
silhouettes, chasing, panting, claiming at the top of their voices, there are shadows now,
drawing eyes,
red rooms and films in repose, of more orange shadows than silhouettes, moonlit
till the curtains and applause,
And outside, a lone leaf has grown on the bare tree to the song of the sparrows, hears the wails from the window, of shadows captive,
dug away from the girl in the orange scarf, taken, shaken and strung

broken echoes of these thinning walls,each have names, rhyming with the sound of silence, comfortable
and listless in wait,
of a time when birds circle, in and out of clouds, and cobblestone coffee mug
shuns all souls and indifference of the street,

The matchsticks speak, of the daydreams and landscapes only words could paint,
a smoke ring cirles the fly and a blue neon halo beckons the photographer again,

An orange shadow of windowpanes and cars, flailing specks of mud, imprisoned in the picture,
the girl’s almond eyes gape at the shutter through her tangerine scarf,
the shadow stolen, and the clock still ticks unevenly same, a dungeon of dreams draped in a red room
awaiting paper notes and plastic smiles,

The silhouettes all agthered, leaving their swords and words behind, and gently crept walls

The pictures had dried and the amber sun ambling in the horizon shone in unison of joy, as the shadows flew back to the toes and kissed her almond eyes, the blue neon shadow was already drying,
in a dungeon of dreams, draped in a red room
awaiting paper notes and plastic smiles,