no pun intended

Absence

I love the way

Your liquid body

Melts into my arms

Completely:

Whenever we are alone;

It is almost as if

You are not there.

Without You…

A stray dog rolls in pain on the floor,

He cannot touch or lick the wound

And looks helplessly at the door.

There is a laceration in his heart;

But no language at his disposal to express it in.

Is he a victim of love -

That old primeval mortal sin?

The light through his window

Is too bright.

The chain of memory around his scrag -

Too tight, Oh! Too tight.

He feels asphyxiated, his breath in vain;

As he can only, but howl in pain…

The terrible memory of the fruit he swallowed,

Just refuses to recede.

It did not reach the stomach to be digested;

It is stuck in the heart instead.

And the seed germinates in there -

An innate, fundamental part -

With branches, all over the heart.

He is scared of light -

Heliophobia is what they name it -

And is condemned to live in the shadow,

With the howl of pain stuck in the throat

That he can neither throw up nor swallow.

And when the night closes in on him,

On his knuckles he goes down -

In the streets, through the town.

And if you ever want to see -

Out of concern, or curiosity -

He could be found,

Somewhere around.

Listen carefully;

Don’t you hear the sound?

There he lies – deconstructing his memory -

Nights after nights.

Oh! That sadness of a dog’s eyes -

While he stares at the mist under the neon lights.

The beast doesn’t go to sleep.

He has promises to keep.

He has promises to keep.

                     l o n e l i n e s s

There is nothing in this empty poem

To keep you company.

Not that I did not try to innovate metaphors

So as to replete the void;

But all of them,

Without exception,

Were blown to smithereens -

The fragments disappearing into thin air.

First to go was a bird I’d sketched

Which flew off the page

Into the deep blue sky,

As if it were never there in the first place.

And even if you were to look at the sky now,

There is nothing but blue.

Next was adumbrated a Royal Bengal tiger

Which I had to run away from

Since it threatened to gobble me up.

And by the time I returned

To ascertain its motives

(for the safety of my readers),

It had eaten itself

To satiate the void.

Or did the void chugalug it!

One could never tell,

Even if one were the tiger.

Since then I have gone,

Hither and yon -

Emptiness is the only leitmotif  to be identified,

 Whatever we look at.

The discerning reader must’ve already realized -

Loneliness in fact, looks just like that.

The Song of Beginning and Redemption

We’ve just borne witness to the slow death

Of the last of the remaining light.

And there has been such a morbid certainty,

In this long lonely wait for the night.

Obituaries have been penned, while we have watched

The darkness pervasively seep in.

And concurrently have turned up these ominous clouds

That let not even the obstinate moon peep in.

There ain’t no direction, there are no paths no more,

There isn’t even a guiding star.

We had been running all along, from ourselves,

But had never lost our way this far.

The way back to light is paved with perpetuity

But then, journeys do have boulevards within;

And since those who seek not, will never find anyway,

There will not be a better time to begin.

Along the way, keep for company, the Old Dogs;

And ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’.

Fall if you must,  on the road to redemption,

But remember not to go down without a fight.

When the other six steeds are tired and wounded,

Summon the last – the Sun’s Seventh Horse.

History will record this and legends will speak of you,

That it was ridden to the morning by a corpse.

Journeys don’t go waste; there will be the sons and the daughters,

Who will bask in the glory and the light, and will know –

That there were men, who had to go down, on the way,

But boy, did they not put up a show!!!