Last Day

"Last night, I threw a bucketful of the Pacific at you and
The water froze in the vacuum between us in the image of diminutive glass birds in flight.
You are God
Of Ice.

You weighed the fragile birds in your wise right palm all night long and then let them fall in the dust.
The morning Sun followed your instructions and burnt them to death.
There's a puddle in my breast and you float in it, confused.

...

You went to look at the happy sweet peas hanging in bronze in the balcony.
Morning found them dead.
Frost, she told me.
Cruel, love.

...

The baby-pink cashmere that you draped me in had a glacier on its inside.
It melted all night long.
All night long, I was cold. So cold."

- Hayat

...

You are poetry.
And since when was I so generous and inarticulate.

Romance

This love*
is selfish.
It's self-serving;
it cares only
for its own fulfilment.

It does not care
for you or me.

...

My blood flows
hot and thick and most of all,
painfully, but
it flows.

butterfly

I capture

a flutter of your eyelashes 

on my left cheek, and save it

in a bell-jar

...

for a snowy day.

Desire

I ask.

What you did, what did you do,
that I am become a brooding madman? All
happiness expended
on keeping thoughts of you at bay.

What you did, what did you do,
that I fight phantoms in my head? That
cloud my vision and taste
for that which is real.

What you did, what did you do,
that this frenzied lust
(for that but which exists in the spaces in-between
my synapses)
haunts insidiously every fibre of every starving muscle,
like slipping poison.

What you did, what did you do,
that you are become the locus of Beauty
in my half-awake brain.

...

I would wish for
Freedom,
from this suffocating desire. But I fear
that to lobotomise this love would be to silence the taste-buds of aestheticism. No,
I accept this, but
A little more control is all

I ask.

Paper

All these people.

So much love. So much subconscious fear, that I might die without having shared enough of my thoughts with the external, that this unique experience of having been ME, that all the words that swim frantically through my thoughtstream, would curl and wisp away in the fire of my pyre.

This irrepressible need to express. To live. To love.

So I share with people I love. Pour myself into them. And urge them to pour into me, and bind, and be bound. I spread myself in all these pretty, pretty people, who I call friends.

...

And you. I wanted a partner, one person I could do all my pourings into, optimize this process of exhibition. I started defining the experience of reality through sentences that I constructed in the smithy of my mind, and gift-wrapped them for you; I occasionally sent them to you in summer night conversations, and texts sent in the dead of night under the influence of exhaustion.

But this exclusivity is dangerous. If only you were a boy...

And we fell. 

...

And now we dance again, slightly older, slightly wiser. And the old smithy of the mind is whirring up its machinery again, softly humming your name in interstices between family and friends and work.

...

I am so exhausted from this pouring. I don't have time, I'm ruining myself, I'm spreading myself too thin.

But you're all so interesting. I love you all.

So do I pour myself in all of you? I would die from the effort. Oh, if only there was one who could be a placeholder for my experience of reality. If I had one, I wouldn't need all.

...

Or perhaps this whole idea is flawed. Why should I define my life in sentences wrought for someone?
But then who do I talk to?

A piece of paper.

But paper doesn't talk back. I cannot love cellulose pulp. And it cannot love me back.

...

Go lightly.

Perhaps I should not want to love so much. Perhaps I should stop thinking about this process. Perhaps I need to learn detachment. Happiness surely has something to do with !thinking.

...

I need to learn detachment.

...

Hello paper my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.

The Old And The New

दुनियाँ जो प्यासा रखे, तो मदिरा प्यास बुझाये 
मदिरा जो प्यास लगाये, उसे कौन बुझाये?

This Shirazi wine, quenches the thirst that the world ignites, but
the thirst that this wine ignites, who will quench that?

...

हम हैं कि हम नहीं?

Are we, or are we not?
You told me once, but I forgot.

...

Ah, Bollywood. Imparting poetry to the emotions of a billion hearts.

Patterns (#personal)

Everyone out.