In all of my years, a hermetical desire to circumvent the usual furtherance of being alive has prodded me to the end of tethers.

And I wish my blood were just a bit thicker than this.

To begin or not to begin, that is the question. Tirelessly, the clamouring of rushing waves speed into the abyss of multifarious malfunctions of human lives. At one hand, the immense energy points towards a futile future, stuffed with mundane probabilities; while on the other, a veritable waste of inner struggle that could alter the way you perceive reality surges forward amid the opera of humanity. And yet, the mediocre craving for restraint, the urge to get back to the point of no-serendipity!

There is a strange melancholy associated with the sense of being alive. The indefatigable joy of living almost always covers this subterranean impulse of one’s renunciation of everything worldly. Thus, we live within a two-fold reality of our own. Most of the time, we remain a paradox to ourselves, a syllogism with no conclusion.

Probhu, nawshto hoye jai

Every sound of this decaying phrase is like a futile couplet. I try and try to make it intense like a black hole. I so want it to suck in my laughter my pain my nothingness my faculty my frailty. Yet, I fail. Not a glorious failure. It’s more like the death of a street rat, unnoticed by all. Time is, time was and time shall be no more for its ignoble existence. His two-penny worth in eternity, that is.

It’s easy to be good. There are so many flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the world. You can afford to be good without knowing the cause of being good. At times you even cower beneath the shadow of everlasting goodness and the tormented something inside your head calls for a rebellion. Eventually, this deviation from the holy equilibrium hits home through the dynamics of a natural cobweb. And the listlessness of noble intentions reigns supreme.

As the day drags along the path of an uninhibited eternity, a mimsy touch of her ivory- fingers haunts me to the absurdity of being alive. O, how I beseech thee, our merciful lady of the harbour , how I want thee to touch my lips with your pale fingers and guide me to the dark niche of oblivion. But that is not to be.

I grow old and I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. That says everything. I’ll live till my soul turns into a dead man’s skin. I’ll live to haunt myself to life. Some people have it this way.

In every sign of the sun, in everything you do, or intend to do, there falls the shadow. Beneath every charming lightpost, upon every cobblestone, there falls the shadow. I go my way; you go thine. The shadow hangs in between. Sticky and stubborn.

Us and Us

A crowneckish cloud, floating just over our triumph. And the moon and the stars are all taken aback by its impudence. Like the off-keyed howl of a psychedelic harmony, it belongs to the whole, and, yet is just too individual to merge into the interstellar strumming altogether. Rainbow- it conceals beneath the wings. The wings, though, are made of flowers. Often, in my sweet indolence, I have smelt the white yoke of hyacinths. I call her my hyacinth girl. No matter, what the voices say.

It's amazing, how you can find your own voice in times of cholera! The other room might sap the last drop of your resistance, but lo and behold, it actually charms the snake into being a snake and that’s all there is!

Beautiful, beautiful death lingers there. In Ginny’s smile. With promises that are never going to be kept. Like the unkempt hair that often sweeps across her face, when I touch the tip of her nose. There lies my salvation. Our salvation.

The worms are in my flesh. I had been wronged in my birth, and will be wronged in my death. Only when I touch the centre of us, even if it cannot hold, it feels like life. And light. And shadow. And extended guitar solos of a certain Mark Knopfler.

Us and Us. It will always be like this.

Remember us, if at all, not as lost violent souls, but as people who had suffered not to be separated, and who had tried to cry unto each other. Like in a mirror.

That’ll do.

I'm seeking love

But I'm in the thick of it,

This kinda love, I'm so sick of it!

I am seeking love

I hear the clock tick

This kinda love,I'm lovesick!

-Robert Allen Zimmerman.

One or two moments of wistfulness

A sudden twitch of your mouth-

Words, mystery-fanged and heavy.

I remain awake, awake, awake.

Expecting Rain

Each cavity of uneasy moments is full with the splinters of the present tense. What could have been a charming ride becomes a bumpy insight into one’s own recess. Threads, beautiful threads of my back years, have turned into Medusa-hair. The boy is grown, the dream is gone.

Or, is it just that I have not willingly allowed myself to be a part of the circus in town?

I close my eyes. Tired and battered within, how I want to harmonise with the words of a consumptive youth, how I desire to touch the lips of easeful death with my fingertips.

And yet, life keeps whirling about. Like the wheels of a toppled cart....

I don't know how I'm feeling. It sounds terribly vague, and vague it is.

Flesh and blood have turned into a pale shadow of the contour. I don't know for sure, if I've ever felt like this. We do go round and round the prickly pears, at five-O-clock in the morning.

Amazing, we still exist.

Pinkish haze. All over the dark sky, as if the stars are celebrating an early christmas.