Impulse to Scribbler

Spin spin, entwine entangle

(sway selfishly away)

wheel, reel.

Then twist, turn and roll out the carpet

while all that was invested, divests.

Bore the tips into the knits and grits,

twirl and flex these bones 

through the coarse, prickly fibers

(cuts, cuts, cuts!)

till reams unravel and expose under

the streams, beams and gleams

A trap! Scratch...snap! Catch, catch, catch!

Then plunge, pitch, sink

into heaving oceans of sighs.

Letters of Verse - Part I

It's a void, this inactivity.

Spent.

The sap of satisfaction drains from your limbs.

Each finger falls numb and yet the cup is held

for illusion to be drunken, 

for a sip of merry when all mirth has sunken.

Velvets of the dark wrap away at this solace,

enfold their arms and embrace this form so limp.

Mourning is delight. Drown you, further in despair, in shades of grey 

unless, flicker in time, the pale shadows of day. 

Glimmer into your pupils, a beam of cream and white.

A quick warmth rushes to these naked arms, bare toes

to have you recover from your woven woes.

The cup to tumble will be gripped. 

It's a slow repair till loss is not all,

till the self will suffice to pour into this void. 

Posthumous.

Something twinkles. The blades of this grass are dancing green. They waltz with the wind. I think it is the eye of a hare. The fur looks immaculately white.  Did it just wink at me? It's soft, pink paws reach out to me and a slight grin is discernible on it's round, puckered mouth. The mouth does not threaten me with the razor-edged teeth that dug into a seven-year old me. It left me pricking and aching with disease. Funny it should've pricked considering I had lost every inch of hair that had ever grown out on my soft, young skin.
The smell of perfume, a sharp rusty, singed scent of Ittar. A scent of white, holy, sacred sheets and clean bathed women. The smell of pilgrimage and prayers that jumped into your head and wrapped around like the sacred, white dupatta my mother shrouded my sanctity in when I bled for the first time. It's purity claws me in. I feel thirteen again.
The shadow of the setting sun is upon me now and I feel this grass will be green no longer. I can hear life being trimmed and sheared at its edges. The sun wants to snake its last last rays around me but there is nothing to trap any longer. There is no flesh and nothing that can bleed tears. I want to touch myself. I am the air now. I can see myself, the dust buzzing in the last light of the sunset. I can see my life in particles and I know I have left it all behind like I've always wanted; Like I always envied the feather that simply parted from a fully functioning body and flailed to its destiny.
I spread my arms out. There is silence and loss. Something twinkles and I can see it grow, expand and welcome me but this luminescence does not hurt. Maybe because I don't have any eyes that will face the hurt. Perhaps hurt was never more than a word, a rolling of the tongue, a melody that broke and crashed into shards of numbness when I took flight. I don't remember any hurt anymore.
I can see the man who left me alone when I tried to learn to live like that flailing feather I have always wanted to be. A thirty year old me flashes onto the theater screen from the grinding projector that gurgles out my entire life on this black, smoky screen.
Marry me. Kneeling, smiling, feeling. The girl beams at him. She knew he would propose today. I always knew. Even when I screamed at him for twisting my heart and breaking it into two. Even when I banged the doors wide open and walked out of his territory, I knew I loved him.
This warmth, this smiling, feeling light blankets the inside and does not let this strange, dark, Sad Man near me. I would shed tears at a time like this but I don't want to. This light is too warm.
It's drawing me in.  Music caresses my ears and wraps its symphony around my head. I can hear giggles and  white laughter, snowy white laughter that sings youth to me. I don't remember exhaustion. I don't think I may have ever felt tired. It's like the cosy, green and white afternoon where all my friends chat and live over a cup of warm, brimming tea. I can smell the rich, foamy tea pouring into a cup and I can smell friendship.
This moth flaps, dances.. The sweet, honey-coated moonlight is her majesty. The river sparkles blue and splashes itself into the sea, head-first. There is nothing but breath, and exhaling, royal, blue skies.
One moment I am the jiving butterfly. In another I'm the liberated sea.

Return to Sender

A sordid rusted track, railed upon for miles

the smog folds at length 

every shovel of coal sends the fire roaring, burning in its own agony.

Trundling carriages wail
A puff of sad song into the Departure air.

Souls are thinly lit and veiled, 

the winter tugs at every desperate tobacco fume;

Charring, twisting, crumbling

I can hear the gravel crunch beneath your torn boots, Jimmy.

The wind bellows and falls back on itself

Voices war and buzz red

While at the Front, the rifles pay their respects

A flower turns restless in another sleepless moonlit night.

Every triumph is a battle on land,
Sirens of tears lost

Every war is a battle of Hearts shed.

Undone.

The grains of white, pure sand swam and slid between her fingers as his fingers moved closer and closer. Their skins met as one hand clasped another. No spaces left.
The deep blue water lightened. Moonlight saw right through the waves as the sea met the shore. It lapped, it heaved, it rose up in foam and fear; Fear of surrender, laying bare a part of it that, once given, cannot be reclaimed.
Beneath it, the sand rose. It dampened and settled in wet arms, swimming with the recklessness and the knowledge of losing every part of itself, every moment. Bluebottles and seashells clanked and sparkled feelings against the dark. Seas and sands. Blue and white. The two swelled and latched onto each other.
The shore gave way and left the two undone. The sands sunk, taking everything that was left awash and giving some of itself to the seabeds. Breaths pulled back with the salty, summer breeze. Clear waters receded home only to return, hoping to soak up an inch more of the drier sand.

Pants Down Low, you Chakkas!

This is perhaps the longest gap I have taken after a post. But oh well, my mind was only accumulating angst and more angst to spill onto this page. I will abandon my Austen-ish and Wharton-ish tones tonight and unleash.

 Some might say I'm just PMS-ing...'cause it's the 'IN-THING' to say nowadays, amongst us Neo-Imperialistic, Third World inhabitants who dare not step outside their cocoa shells of an English medium lifestyle. Or rather American, considering how Gay Rights strike more of the soft chords of the heart now than the fact that mothers are hurling their infants onto railway tracks as an alternative death to starvation. It's the best kind of excuse, really. The most poetic of it's sort. Haye. (sigh)
What if I tell you that the world around me appears to be involved in this wonky jamboree? YES! Look! They're all shaking their bums in each other's faces and gyrating their delicate waists into each other's hearts. What if I say I'm not the one PMS-ing but it is them? I am not mad North by North-west, I swear! I swear by all the holy books and not just one. I'm a passionate and true advocate of secularism, you know.
So what if my unholy eyes notice the exceptionally low, almost-drooping-down-their-behinds, tugging-at-their-pelvis-for-the-last-breath Pants?! Is it really that my eyes were not baptized when I was born?
Then I'd say, their mind's ought to be exorcised for labeling artists (or rather sculptors, *hint hint*) who possess a peculiar way of walking, talking, hand-gesturing, a "chakka". Now this is the point where I really lose all my sense of secularism, imperialism, literary-ness, modernity, humour, PMS-ing because this is when I realize that society will never change. It will always consist of PEOPLE. People will always talk and churn out labels with their English Medium cum butchered Urdu minds that will go onto to be polished by the liberal arts colleges of the American. Or Cambridge and Oxford. Really, that's as far as they go.
I mean it's one thing to disapprove and it's completely another to catwalk around school with your pants down low, flashing a rolex in one hand and vociferously condemning the YOU-ESS of AY in your World History classes and going around calling a poor old sculptor a "chakka".
My own PMS-ing and imperialistic indulgences go as far as 1.5 gram chunky bar of Snickers. My pants are breathing their last but they're sure not, falling to their (my? *chuckle*) knees and begging my pelvis to let the world take a hormonal peak at my hot-pink boxer shorts.

Hah! I don't wear any!

Just.

A twist of the lip, a knit of the brow. This air around me is inflated with a hot hubbub of pricking murmurs. A fit of scream on the left and someone bawls pointlessly on the right. Inflated. All their chests are inflated with words and sounds and noises that they have stifled the air with. There is talk but no discussion. There is laughter but no joy and there is only noise and no music. I part my lip to utter something of significance but My Voice is overwhelmed by the reflections of yesterday's mistake and my throat dampens with the stench of a hollow life. I twist my tongue; I utter only to lose my words to this layered atmosphere and I see them ricochet back, floating into non-recyclable cans of waste.
There are times when crowds end up strengthening my sense of singularity. I feel like the only one; one among many. Their backs, shins, shoulders and arms reflect my voice like  and the a deaf mirror. The indifference of their pretentious nostrils, indifferent eyes and vacant words obstructs the view of the breathing skies.
There is a time when we feel like no other. The moment envelopes us and we recede into ourselves, and the people that surround us only serve as unpleasant reminders that we are needed without and not within. There are days we cannot relate and we begin to question if we really belong. To take such moments as ones in ecstasy or solemn depression is in our power.
To lose control is frailty?
 We are never alone until we have our self to ourselves. When we let ourselves fly outside our bodies, we temporarily undo every delicate string that ever held us back. We learn to unbind. We move on from "we" to "I". Perhaps, at times, detachment saves us from losing our minds to the heat of Insignificance. Perhaps, some times it serves us well to just not belong.