Dragonfly

Sitting by the window

Against the twilight,

The last shimmer of the rainbow

Fades into the night -

Out in the garden

Flowers of the last season,

I look at them

I’m looking for a reason;

And then I see it, as it flies past me

The dragonfly riding the wind from the sea.

A season that was past

Where the blue-bells hung

The primrose shoots of love had sprung

The Wind then had prayed the Spring to last

For the tender shoots tied to the mast

But too barren was the soil to hold the mast of yearn

And the Ashes of the dragonfly buried the Earth to burn

This evening, the fluttering wings I can hear again

Like the voice of an ancient miner calling my name

Deep down from the valleys of a heart born and bound

Ever locked away from the world where light was found

I’ll weed the wilted flowers -

The rendition of my toil,

Sow new seeds in the seasoned soil

The Spring can’t last

But new seasons will come

That’ll nourish the flowers

For the Dragonfly to return

Through the dimming twilight

I see a silver line,

Wings rubbing the wind – a familiar sign

Relinquished the knot and ruined is the mast,

Shackles of a season that was past

As the dragonfly buzzes on with guilty delight

I want to cry,

I want to pluck the wilted flowers goodbye…

Not a fenced garden

Walk a road untrodden,

I want to sprinkle new seeds on a path saffron-brazen

To cherish what will remain,

I’ve to be born again;

I’ll scream, I’ll climb to find the me in me

And then I’ll know what’s it’s like to be free

Will you come then to carry the wind to the sea?

I’ll wait to paint my Kingdom of Oz on the canvas of the sky –

I’ll live, I’ll die, I’ll pray to ride on the Wings of the Dragonfly

©

Entry from my Diary: November 13, 2008

This is a strange night. I can see the lights outside but there are none within. And Life just flashes past me with flickers of memories leaving faded sparks of futuristic blackouts – just like this candle.

My sleepless drowsy eyes look on and the candle burns, is burning, and the wax is reaching its end while the wick of it keeps elongating every moment, bit by bit, slowly, trying hard to make the flicker of the fire longer - the tip of the fire inadvertently as if trying to reach somewhere, a hopefully hopeless height…

Lit in the dimmed light of the candle are pictures around me clinging on to the walls; the pictures too get dimmer and dimmer as the wax melts and melts away slowly – a set of pictures that can define your life. Though the room will be dark in another few minutes, they’ll remain illuminated in me – and I can again see them at morning against the sunshine.

Books, clothes, pictures, few official papers… all strewn around, flickering in the flame of the candle will vanish in another few minutes – all that tell who I am. But they’ll come back again with the sun trickling down from my window pane in a couple of hours and the candle makes me wander on…

A momentary glimpse of peaceful sense of loss – that I get everyday when with beckoning sleep; peaceful sleep; balmful sleep; is snatched away today. Tonight, the burning elongated wick has prolonged the night a little longer, prolonging the comfortable chaos that I live in, that I have cherished so long, slogged for so long, craved for so long, breathed into so long. Tonight I know that every night when I sleep, I think everything will be forgotten and at morning I’ll find a new start, a new morning, a new me, a new hope that the chaos will find me joy someday.

But Sleep is just like a wearing candle, whose elongated last flickers just is so much good as giving a momentary sense of illusion that there is light. The comfortable chaos that had defined my life till now, is just like the pictures that remain on the walls no matter how long I shut my eyes, or how long darkness pervades. Take them out, and still they’ll exist in some part of my room, my existence, my blood, in the same way, just as they were – and they’ll never change. They’re a part of me now and they’ll never let go of me. It’s just like the fire and the candle. They exhaust each other, there is death in their co-existence; but they’ve no identity without each other too. Separate them, and they exist as individuals – whole and happy – but there’s no light unless they burn each other – light is from their dying together.

Such fake is the light and yet we need it to clear our vision; such momentary pretence of peace is sleep and it’s a sustenant; pictures… can be thrown away; and yet mind clings to them – they define all that one has given and craved for – all that the thirst of life is for – love is for…

I give these pictures a last glance, as my candle struggles to stay alive and I wonder – these pictures will cling to the wall for their existence; their lifelessness beckons another futuristic set of them in a futuristic past; they come and go in every person’s life and they never ask – who needs the pictures? Do they need us or we need them? Why the initiation of light has always been a resultant of the exhaustion of something? Why do we need light at all when universe itself is dark? Why can’t we see the real without the fake illumination of light? Why do we want to forget over sleep when nothing changes? Why do we need sleep at all for our survival when it means nothing at all?

Why the hell do we live a life that’s so damn fake?
©

© Dreamt of Rain on a Rainless Night

Raining…
Can’t see a thing
People running for cover
Narrow view from the terrace
The weatherman doesn’t know when the rain will stop
And none knows what the sky looks like beyond the clouds

One umbrella…
Printed with the colors of Spring
That came and passed too soon
One drenched body standing tall under it
Measuring the rain with a coffee-spoon
For the weatherman cannot be found
And none knows what the sky looks like beyond the clouds

Broken bridge…
Across the bend of the road
Eyes restless everywhere to reach a safe ground
Black coats and black boots run in order
To cross over the heaving river not knowing
What the sky looks like beyond the clouds

A broken roof…
Above a broken house
Pair of eyes look through a broken pane
Twitching the ring around her finger she
Had wished to stay in… waiting…
The weatherman had said he would return
To take her to the world beyond the clouds

The play has ended and the actors have gone,
The black boots with people in them stay on
The broken bridge is mended, the rain has ended
The stage is forlorn, and far beyond stands
The tall body with eyes looking beyond
Holding her lifeless in his arms and her ring on his finger,
Screams out lifting her up to the sky
As the black booted people close in to swallow her up
The weatherman stands paralyzed with the sky in his hands
The harbinger of Sun and Spring
And screams out with death in his voice
“None could see that the sky came down beyond the clouds.”

© That's Me

I should’ve been raved apart, I should’ve been screaming out,
Why did I tell you that the stream flows there along?
Beat me you would have, teared me you would have, apart and wide,
That would have been better than revealing that the stream flows along.
Now that I told you, I revealed the nooks and crannies of the valley,
You know that you’ve conquered the Neverland, though the stream doesn’t flow to thee.

The water now splatters on my hand and the stain of blood remains,
Will I ever be able to wash this blood away and numb my pain?
For I drank the blood of the unicorn where the hopes of both keeps throbbing – for I’m a selfish quencher of thirst who moves along robbing… There you know me now:

I’m a murderer of Hope.

I walk with the wound on my hand,
Aching in pain as the wind blows past it. I don’t balm my wound: I keep it covered, block it from the wind, the wind of balmful silence – It’s my job:
I’m a murderer of Silence

Cackling out loud, the thunder comes, and time strikes a standstill;
The moment of lull, or so did one think – where Time will wait for me to come back,
But I walk out, lashing time out with the cackle of my silence; I have to, for
I’m the murderer of Future.

I know what I’m doing, I know I’m right; I don’t know what I’m doing, I know I’m wrong –
I never gave, I responded; I never promised, I only nodded; I never made, I only destroyed;
I walked into the valley of Life to wilt out hope; I was born make every affirmation bow down and grope;
I’m the shadow in every source of light; I’m the boulder in every path; I’m the oasis that only deludes;
Falsity in every truth; Death I am in every rebirth – I’m the bad in every good,
I’m the present that can only be a desire or an unforgettable past that’s not worth a memory.
I’m the all pervasive wrong that all must hate – coax descent in every ascent and every assertion I negate;

Yes, that's me - one of those ordinary cowardly modern beings
'Human' I dare say - the core of neverness of all Neverland dreams...

It's with My freewill that nullifies the Providence above -

I’m the one who cried when I murdered you, My Love.

Dedicated to John Steinbeck and his 'The Chrysanthemums' (My private reverie at a coffee-shop on a moonlit night)

Elisa waters her Chrysanthemums as I sit in the moon-bathed coffee-shop –
My eyes stretched on the other side of the road: blink and drop.
As I look on farther and deeper,
Past the mud, over the fence, across the road, arrives the tinker.

It was the white road there, and the moon-tainted greystone here,
It was a fence there, and it’s my two by four bed here,
But our eyes still take flight
Like the sharp edged Chrysanthemums shooting up to the stars into the dark night…
Yes, it was night there and it is night here.

You had stretched out your hands to feel the touch of light but I keep it folded,
You had given the Chrysanthemums to him and he had discarded –
You had hidden your face against the white road at the Chrysanthemums drowned in your fears,
But Elisa, he has returned to me now, and
I see him everyday, arms outstretched to give back those shoots of toil and tears;

I want to grab and grip them back, but numb I lie,
The moon has set now, and the soil behind the fence and the Chrysanthemums die.

Elisa, your toil of nourishment I couldn’t plant back,
As I sit scribbling down as Preludes’ “ancient women” against the rack.

The crimson petals now stare at me in painful derision,
Or is it mocking my lifeless vision?
You tried to iron the crease out of your pink dress of desire
And I wear it now as my motley of mire.

A tinker comes to every life and the parody being:
Either he refuses you or you refuse him,
The moon-dimmed greystone ever awaiting the Tinker of the Light,
To regain hope, or till yet again, life rejects life.

I’ll rekindle my candle again as it burns its both ends fine,
I’ll build a sand castle of rootless Chrysanthemums another time,
And auction it again in the market of emancipation…
Till the silent road screams again:

Rejection, rejection, rejection.
©

Do you remember?

Do you remember that day when you saw me?


Me, oblivious of your presence? Do you remember how we had exchanged the first words with intermittent hesitations on our mind? Do you know that I had felt then what I feel for you now?

Do you remember that small wooden bench by the side of the lake where we sat?

And we spoke a world without speaking a word? Do you remember the person who gave you the best compliment? – you are yourself when you are with me…
Do you know that I had felt then what I feel for you now?

Have you thought of those crooked paths ever after you left? That corner stone, half glistened by our peace and half torn by the storm that was raging inside you… your ego tainted lips won’t reveal the secret of the holocaust that only I could see in your subtly glistening eyes? Do you know that I had felt what I feel for you now?

Uncontrollable were you, wild and untamed… do you remember how I had watched your calm countenance against the sparkling water splashing over the boat? Do you know then I wanted to tell then what I feel for you now?

You had asked me what do we have in store… I wanted to say “happiness”, but dared not, lest I’m carried away by your ruthless passion… I had replied, “let’s see what’s in store” –

A small feather asked to blow with the breeze or choose to be with current… it could only bear to wait till the breeze had passed… but the breeze is still here, while it craves for the storm… afraid all the time of calamity… well that would have been calamity without and heaven within…

It was then, and it is now… you couldn’t see then, you can’t see now… I felt the same then, as I feel now.

My First Broken Lines

I was sitting all content, when a broken piece of mirror was thrown my way…
The shards scatter all around me…
A slice on moonlight falls on a thin piece from the window… the only source of light in this room that is –
The same moonlight in which we bathed together once, remember?

And now that very streak of light tears me apart… that had nurtured us once…

The mirror… in which I can’t recognize myself anymore…
Scattered around, the pieces, I pick them up…

One by one…

Put them in place…

Yes, I do manage them into one whole…
I’m exhilarated, emancipated… Yes!
And then… I look at the pieces put together…
I see it… now I do…

Myself in the labyrinth of a puzzle… I scatter them, arrange them, scatter them, arrange them…
Oh the rays are now moving away… fast… fast… hither… thither…
My fingers fiddle around frantically… the shards moving restlessly, cutting across my fingers…
As if they’ve a life of their own!

I have to figure out, I have to…!
Oh yes… I think I’m almost there…
I can see the picture now…

Wait.

Can I…? ……

The moon has set,
The shards have spread,
The room is now dark and grim,
Blind, I put a step forward and a piece of the faceless mirror enters my skin.

Ah… I’m bleeding now…
There’s no pain, no light,
Nice and easy… let it flow down now…
Flow to that River that witnessed our innocence blossom
My life blood will be buried in Her womb…
Preserved and secure.

I couldn’t collate the mirror to reflect what I wanted to see,
What was it again? – A Question. This is how it is to be.

I lay my bleeding hands outside the window…
Trying to grasp with my bleeding palm the last rays of that receding moonlight…
Will it stick to me? Will it show? The last flicker of light in my being?

Nothing….
Nothing but a faint sound.

The sound of my blood dripping against a pair of eyes profound…
Eyes I could not live for, have finally become worth dying for.