Elephant In The Room

There's an elephant in the room
And it's called Us.
It didn't come by easily;
It was born over years and years
And months and days
And moments spent listening to Band of Horses
While you gently swayed like a
Tree in my lap to the music.
While you ran to check if your father had
Left the house, and ran back to kiss me
While we helped each other discover each
Other, while you and I 
Spent the nights whispering in half-awake
Whispers, inching like two turtles, day after day, towards
That one fateful day when you could say
You loved me, without hesitating
Or wondering if you
Were more hopeful than truthful.

It's been days and days and
Months and years
Since that winter day, and now
We meet in unfamiliar drawing rooms
And the air is pregnant with a whole 
Litter of stillborn sentences 

There is an elephant in the room
And it is Us.
And it breathes down heavily down 
Our necks and we half-wish that
It would swing its trunk in impotent
Elephant-rage and destroy the room,
This too-small room,
And then spontaneously combust 
Into flames, and die. 
And we would heave maudlin sighs
And we would make a bonfire
And collect our vanities - our letters
And books and trinkets
And watch everything burn down
And maybe hold hands 
And smile melancholic
As we watch
Everything burn down.

But for now the elephant sits alone
In the corner and 
Watches us.
Through its beady black eyes
Watches us
As we talk in parallel streams.
And soon, after years and years
And months and days
And moments spent avoiding eye-contact
The elephant shall wither away
Die, silently.
Unmourned. Forgotten.

Until some day, you and I shall watch lonely clouds
Wander over our coffee mugs, and wonder
Why there is an elephant-shaped bump
In the rug.

Unedited

Written for 4 different women, all of whom I love in different ways, interspersed with some musing.


Brat 

Your words float

Half a centimeter off of

My computer screen; bid

Me into your world and

Your emotions, your

Half thoughts, your daily

Love affairs, your

Mascara running down your

Face in twin

Streams born out of a reluctance to move on,

And move me in ways

I wish I could move.

My words are plodding

And fall thick and heavy,

Blunt, transparent

Meanings: none of your swirling, purple gypsy

Swimming in emerald complexity; mine is what

Is apparent: your apparent is the canopy

Of a teeming forest seen from the sky.

The fundamental tragedy of my life

Is distance: always too far away, in distance

And Time from the things I love and things

That fascinate me, make my heart their own.

My sincerest words rap like petulant stones

On the windows of your poems –

Your ingenuity sparkles through like

Lighted rooms for a travel-weary traveler,

Inviting in their simplicity, beautiful in their delicate lattice print.

I love your words more than I love you.

…

The moon and I are silent tonight.

We give each other company

In our shared solitude. We both cannot be touched; high up in

Our refuges protected by the gaspy, wispy surrounding thought-clouds.

Yes, we are alone tonight.

Like me, the moon is haunted by stars

That seem so near, yet are billions of miles away, in time and space.

Like me, the moon is imperfect, and like me it wants perfection, and it

Strives every night for it, bleeding itself dry over and over and over

Again until it’s swallowed up. Constantly in motion, never still,

Always half a centimeter away from happiness. So close.

Always making do with substitutes.

 I shall have some sucralose in my morning coffee, please.

…

Rabbit

So perfect. Have you seen yourself in a mirror, or

In a dream? Your façade is flawless, my best friend;

Your nose is a cherry on any man’s cake, a capstone

In any boy’s life. And yet under

That gossamer skin of yours

Is a forest, a brambly uncut forest

That shall ensnare and puncture me in a hundred

Thousand different places if I let my armour down for

Too long.

You are perfect, and your perfection is your curse,

My darling bunny.

Never close, an infinite expanse of ice separates

You from warmer climes

Of other men’s embraces, and they all want you,

So much, and yet despite yourself you shall destroy them.

You cannot be of this earth.

Oh how I want you!

And yet that is forbidden.

You are forbidden

Fruit, and I shall wait for you

On the outskirts of your tumultuous summers

And never give in despite myself and despite you,

And eschew arguments for the beauty in the unity

Of two parts of a jigsaw, shall sacrifice aesthetics for sanity.

You are my best friend, and I love you,

But we cannot be.

The neon and the lamp-shaded exist simultaneously

In your enormous brown eyes.

…

Dani
 

Your mannerisms swim half a centimeter below my skin. Your criticisms keep me company on curtain-less days when I float helplessly on a stream of circumstance and feed me warm familiarity. You are my protection, my bear skin against the cold of the everyday, a pillow I snuggle into at night on my bed that breaks my back, your voice flows like an undercurrent to my thoughts, barely audible yet always there like a firefly or a moth. You upon whom so much of my happiness is predicated; you upon whom I have bet so much – so much, that it scares me and my daily sacrifices pinch the undersoles of my shoes, yet this thread of vermilion that is anointed with liquid egg-stained memories is what anchors me on some Sunday mornings, when I can’t get up from my bed for fear that I shall float away.

…

Let it all out. Words gushing

Like raindrops: sentences

And paragraphs like aforementioned downpour, washing

Away built-up dams that I periodically build up

Around my heart so that it beats less painfully –

Fades into the background when I don’t have time for it.

And yet look now! My pen

Dances like a light-drunk moth adrift

In the impersonal evening breeze

Of my mind – a sort of an agglomeration of

Memories of Chandigarh and Montreal, mashing up

And melting together

Family and intellectual exercise, inconvenience and loneliness,

Light and dust and snow and heat and oil

And lingering memories of my mother’s concern-lined face, as

She moves around the tiny house forever caught up

In Loving.

So much, so much love.

“Where shall it go?” I have

No one and I must love.

My screams for now are the

Furious scratchings of my favourite pen

On cheap, Romantic paper.

I could spend the night writing, and

The morning shall find me lying in a pool

Of black ink – death by overexposure.

We shall all die of loving too much.

…

Mother

And yet what a beautiful way to die, cooking lunch or braving forty degrees celsius and Indian roads and travelling forty kilometers-a-day just so that I could go to a football field and eventually learn to pass the ball before I even got it, hide in plain sight hoping no one would consider me worthy of being given a chance.

Every day a part of me dies when I wake up in a bed that’s not in your house, every day the paper boy brings in more and it’s all I can do to not take my life because I love you too much, I love you too much, it’s too painful to live and I love you too much.

…

I have a permanent half-tear in my right eye and I half-wish I was free.

Adirondack

I imagined her.

I imagined that she was with me as I sat in the observation car of the Amtrak Adirondack 69 travelling from New York City to Montreal and saw from the corner of my eye as a bearded man let his wife/girlfriend lean her arm casually against him. Now he puts his arm around her white, freckled shoulder and she leans against his yellow summer shirt, and I imagined holding your hand self-consciously; it shall have to be self-conscious, unfortunately: I have been indoctrinated by the twin, disparate influences of pseudo-modern Indian social consciousness and Paul McCartney’s more self-effacing songs (as if His Lordship ever had to hide his love away).

On either side of the train stretches lake – the Great Lakes of our childhood American history books. The August wind wrinkles the membrane of the Lake, upon which graze weekend fishing boats and bits and pieces of driftwood from the trees that rim the lake like emerald mascara – remnants of a long-forgotten storm or hurricane.

Wrinkles. I wonder what it would be like to grow old with you. I catch the thought.

This is what I want to do. Ride with you in the train from New York City to Montreal and sit in the observation car and drink tiny cups of coffee and see the light rain leave skid marks on the rounded forward-swept windows and watch the bald eagles take off from the makeup trees in sweeping bursts of American symbolism and wave to old gentlemen who watch the train go by from their weekend boats, wearing sunglasses and meaningful paunches.

By the time we gain the legitimacy to travel together, alone, in offhand places, our lives shall be spoken-for and given names to and our relationships shall have a destination, coherent points of departure and arrival, a direction. Now when we can meander like elven spirits among the woods of the Great Lakes of North America and the untamed spaces between us and be true to our wanderlust that swells like a balloon under our solar plexus insisting on consummation, we are separated by Time and Distance and Overreaching Ambition. Never enough time to take each other’s touch for granted. Every second fought for and accounted for and saved up like pressed flowers in the too-rapidly-flipping blank pages of our mind’s scrapbook, while Desire slowly fades under the over-bright sun and we live out old vows for the sake of old memories.

And all this time the train chugs up the East Coast of North America and all the natural beauty – the soaring birds, the lakes and beautiful puddles and the lovely and dark and deep woods and the yellow autumn flowers and the yellow t-shirts and the freckles – is being left behind.

…

The overcast sky drips through holes in its fabric.

Pain

Pain.

Possessing
My mind, like
A breathless touch.

Becoming the core of my consciousness
Driving out everything else.
And yet

It has a melody of its own.
I listen in feverish fascination
As it leads me through troughs
And peaks and
Salty ravines.
It is ennobling
In its obliteration.

It makes me want to scream.
But that is unbecoming of a gentleman.
So I breathe instead.

A roiling ocean of lead
And I'm but a boat.

...

They stuck five needles
Into the roof of my mouth
And the numbness bubbled
And spread through my face;
So hot 
that it felt cold, like the touch
of your index,
so many months ago.

...

A roiling ocean of lead
And I'm but a boat.

Regret

Don’t get me wrong –

I’m happy I’m here, drifting in your arms-chest-neck as we whisper our love (for fear of overzealous adults); I am happy, yet somehow it seems that I was happier still months back, when I was lost in wistful contemplation of this very summer afternoon; then, when outside it had raged anemic, and Desire had not known where to exhaust herself.  Your

Phantasm then had seemed yet more vigorously alive, real, stirring with animation, and your lips had been heavily pregnant. And

I had been happier still, lying with you on the silver screen of my feverish famished imagination, than I am now, with the merely-satisfied present: where the minutes fall heavy and mute from totalitarian clocks. I

Had been convinced, then, that I should explode on meeting you – thus released convulsively from the thrusting, expanding tension straining against the confines of my skull; that my eyes should melt from the heat of your presence, from seeing you in a place other than the marshes of my facile dreams; and yet:

Here I am, and here you are, and

I am adrift in impotent poetry.

Impoverished senses of mine; incompetent! Incapable of keeping up with the battering-ram of your presence, choose this virile hour to turn dull and philistine. Oh, that I shall peer upon this day down the looking-glass of Idle Recollection, seated upon the stale and mildly uncomfortable armchair of Nostalgia, and berate myself bitterly for not:

Pressing you harder to my breast, that a sliver of you

May diffuse into me, and for not

Entwining inextricably with your

Arms-legs-neck, that

A solitary flutter of your

Eyelashes against my right cheek

Forever beats

As a butterfly against the confines of

My stomach, and for not

Losing my fingers and resolve in your Tagore-scented hair.

Chrysopoeia

My love is pewter.

Given to base grunting, and rude
And crude
Expressions of vulgar desire.
Bite the stannic apple.

Part your
Hair and whisper in your creamy ear
Forbidden nothings.
Watch you squirm and undulate
Under the influence
Of Scandal™ (that mutable aphrodisiac).

Laying the slushy foundation for the
Oncoming bloom of
Flowers of consummated passion.

Nurture with a caressing word.

Until the ancient madness that courses through
Our veins comes to a head:
Waters the lakegarden, exhausts itself.

And out of the dirt, beauty.
Out of the mud, a quivering lotus.

Almost immediately despising its roots --
A saint rising on verdure nobility of birth above
the condescended huddled filthy masses.

Pure, friable, innocent, prodigal.

The urgency eases cataclysmically into a benign, golden mood, and
The alchemy is complete. 

Crystals

This sweet agony that stems from my
Nucleus accumbens -
Down my spine
Down the veins of my right arm
Down to you.

This touch -
A feather tickling a hole into a corner of my
Brain;
Oh.
Oh would it that I could
Capture one or two of these tumbling, fumbling 
Pleasure crystals and save them for
A moonless day,
When the lack of a person streams in through
The blind-ed windows, and
When my midnight coffee foxtrots
With my restless tongue,
And the smell of wetness just won't go away.