Now that a century has passed
You might as well feel tired even to rest.
Tragedies aren’t so poignant
When staged a hundred times;
Comedies aren’t either
When rewatched a hundred times.
So now that a century has passed
We might as well dissolve
And let life begin
Again, with a round of applause.
When you look back at familiar shadows
Sleepwalking on a shadowy path,
Even a superstition can save the day—
For life ends and begins
At the end of half-dreamt dreams,
Which you sometimes wish
Were longer than life.
The last to die in an air raid
In a family of five
Was a boy with two dead eyes—
The news reported.
Or perhaps not,
Why should one bother
For he becomes one of the many victims
The moment they telecast his two dead eyes on screen.
Pain can be collective in this world of wars,
But loss and grief are one’s own.
And grief finds no room
In a world gone numb with pain.
These blood-soaked, bottomless tragedies.
What the news missed was perhaps
How he was squeezing the last tear remaining,
To mourn the death of a whole world
Gone numb with pain,
Oh, pain.
Leave it open
the baggage,
So that it’ll show those who wonder
how heavy an empty baggage could be.
Leave it open
the baggage,
So you won’t fill and refill
It with anything and everything
Knowing how heavy
Even an empty baggage could be.
We divided sorrow into minute pieces
Buried some under the giant tree at the back,
Blew some into the vacant air
And burnt the rest—
what we thought was remaining.
But a few like some sticky weed
Had glued onto the hem of our clothes
And followed us back home
Though uninvited.
Stayed there unscathed
As long as they could.
But wounds unattended fester fast
And closed windows gather more dust—
Only when it stings or
The light seeps through the blinds
We may see them—
Those few pieces
Stayed though uninvited
Perhaps to keep our amputated hearts intact.
A road sign near a burnt bridge
A disfigured arrow headed skyward
A blazing sunset of glorious technicolour.
Soul seeps out of the ribs
Like a light winged songbird it flaps—
A junkyard of forgotten dreams.
Words I once thought the papers couldn’t carry,
Now reside in the second star to the right
Where time’s swift currents
Flow neither forward nor backward—
Arresto Momentum!
Passers-by have all passed by
Love loses all its self-sabotaging definitions,
Suddenly, life doesn’t feel real at all
And all-so real at the same time.
Perhaps this is how the birds feel
In their first flight—
Feathers
For the first time so weightless
Blending with the wind
Soaring
Above the real-unreal.
What is life if not a stack of
Countless resurrections—
Piled up high
Only a few feet away from
The first cloud in a summer sky;
Closest to earth
Farthest from heavens.
What is life if not a
Lifelong mission of
Straddling between
Being and Un-being,
Tracing the way back home
From seasonal detours—
For it takes a heart as vast as the sky itself
To love the sky in all its forms,
To love life with all its repetitions.
Oh, how far we've come
searching for faith in a world on fire.
Faith in our notions of our nations
propaganda since the age of maps—
divide and rule.
Rigid stripes to fuel
Territorial bloodsheds, seeping into the
same dark earth.
I do not know how deep into earth
do they claim the land—
how deep into earth
can one mark with blood
the rigid territorial margins?
Soon, a firebird will arise from the ashes
with history’s ugly marks imprinted on its dashing wings.
The fire would cease,
centuries after the ardent pleas of commoners.
The dead will fossilise.
The living will tread on this thin layer of
fire and ice—
driven by our notions of nations
Feeing safe inside our horizontal borders.
Is it a loss to lose something
You never knew you had?
Like the bluebird
You never knew
Was there in your heart;
Nesting now in greener fields
Where the sun shines eternally-
Always day and never night.
Is it a loss to lose something
You never knew you had,
Like when someone says
Practicing conditionals-
“Only if I had known, I would’ve…”
So on, it goes.
She lies awake
On the margins of today’s newspaper
Still undead (to the world)
At the age of fifteen.
In block capitals it says,
‘ANOTHER’
Another?
‘ANOTHER VICTIM OF A GROUP SEXUAL ASSAULT’.
Tomorrow it’ll be ANOTHER
Written in another colour,
And yet ANOTHER,
Even after ten years of time
Still ANOTHER;
As long as the loopholes of law and order
Defend the limits of love,
Only to fill newspapers with
Headless figures (never beheaded)
And lines quoted from
‘Defense against limits of love’.
And she will forever, till death
lie awake undead (to the world)
On the margins of
Daily newspapers.
Rewatching—
Moving pictures of the ‘best’ of times
Backlit by the fire we lit,
Enormous and detailed
Shadow-dancing on street walls
And white ceilings.
Even the invisible made visible,
Seen-unseen—
Shadows can be gigantic
When backlit by a fire so big.
