I count time
to know when my absence will be noticed;
to know when his absence will go unnoticed..

What makes me laugh with this crazy man;
interloper in a strange land?
The absurdity of his non-belonging
or the heart's pull to a kindred soul?
How long will the wait be
before I accept as home,
the world he reigns in with sceptres
made of lovers' bleached bones?

Violence of Time

Image Courtesy: Madhumita Roy, Trek Earth

The wheels of the windmill
try and make a revolution,
but half way through, at its pinnacle,
it retreats retracing its path.

The violence of this time refuses to pass,
and it stays hard, staring from the vacant eyes
of half baked durga idols,
bleeding crimson traces
of falling gulmohar blooms,
flaming and red in indelible suffering.

On lonely autumn evenings,
the mind follows faces,
moving in waves, looking for digressions,
as the fixity of your memory blurs
the world into stoic stillbirths
of such insufferable silence.

Intimacy

Yes we had made love,
and perhaps became one
for a fragment
of those splintered orgasms,
escaping in spite of ourselves.
But when she says intimacy,
I think of the times you sat silently
and wiped with the ends of your shirt
the edges of my
red spectacles
as I kept on writing
feigning ignorance
of your presence, the heaviness of which was
its lightness;
that and the roughness
of the skin around your nails
which I grazed and you bit
in assurance, in anxiety,
in memory , in forgetting.

And Forgetting ensues,
entering engulfing
as quietly as love had exited.
How nimbly his fingers work
unheeding on my memories,
lips tracing the scars marked as oblivion:
a moment's incision into a million segregate thoughts, and

where you were, a tingling sensation of enforced vaccum,
worse, worse than the pain you drew in your presence..
I cheat a little,
I refuse acceptance of certain facts,
like
I imagine you still remember what my hair smelled like,
before other sensations took over.

Lacing tiny glass shreds of love,
you kiss and clip my wings,
my heart, a frightened blue bird
struggles and tries, but can never really forget to fly,
it seems for more than her own good
she had tasted the infinite sky.

Sometimes, just sometimes,

I wonder if you are a misplaced dream,

plucked from another's garden

for me to have a moment's whiff of fragrance.

On other times I banish thoughts,

and guile myself into thinking

that happiness could be had and deserved 

even in your proportions.

I must have held other hands,

kissed other lips,

my eyes must have held dreams of another,

I must have walked on these paths and known it by heart,

but today these alleys have become strangers.

If I had known love,

I have forgotten,

for in your hands

i am born anew,

and in your love

i rise again and again

as if death had never visited.

I dip my toes into

his eyes,

those pools

sage serene,

stirring for something,
perhaps a rasp of our breaths
like the wings of dragonflies 
scissoring through this metal frisson.

I am tempted to dive in

and make known my fears,

But instead I sit there beside him,

staring at the sky,

for a clearing of throat,

for a rumble

of rain

to pour down secrets on to my love's skin.

Those nights that smell of silence,
when strangers wallow between my secrets
and words bed their cruelest friends,
when I mother in dangerous succession
skeptical truths and lifeless living,
when I wear the laughter of fear
with its thickening clouds,
and my dreams migrate from unknown to unknown,
broken only in sweat and
unsought flapping of clipped wings,
its guilt, its protest,
when I am lonelier than this night,
when I am the darkness of its wine,
its dissolving inebriety,
its excluding insatiety,

those sick sick times

I seek you,

those bastard hopes, 

brutal bruises

fathered by anonymous love.

He once told me,
Life is not a two line poem you write
If I write such a poem,
will I title it as love?

Is Love a strange balance in equilibrium?,
Will one heart sink
when happiness is tipped more on the other?
then,
Is Love misery in equal measure?

What we called love,
was nothing more than
a holding of hands
in defence against
a world where it is an offence to be lonely or alone.
How easily we slipped out of
our interlinking chains
when the world shifted its glance
and sought
others to blame.

Still as lonely, Still as alone
we prise open smiles,
just in case in passing
they turn and look over their shoulders.

and when he spoke...

And when he spoke,

he spoke

like a river gushing forth to the sea,

like he was in a hurry

to make up for Lost Time,

like there were too many words unspoken,

and they all vied to be chosen for me,

he said he loved clear skies

to a woman who adored rains clouding,

thunderclaps announcing,

yet lying to please him

came so easy,

it ringed out in a rhyme

like a song i always hummed along.

His words were like a glassblower’s lips,

forming and deforming

my stories, its intricate mysteries,

our colluding bodies

and their struggling histories

What to cook

You go to sleep

and on the other end of the world

I wake up, 

both wondering what to cook for the day.

I write poetry on the back

of my theory book on the Melian Dialogue

biting the ends of my pencil,

dreaming like granules of sugar

pelting on your Teflon pan in which you’ll later bake a pie

with bananas ripe.

Your worry lines will deepen

with the red markings on the report cards you have to sign,

with the lunch returned half eaten , soggy labor thrown into the sink,

with the sagging lose flesh around the waist, the electricity bills, the rings around the eyes, the dying

jasmine plant, the maid and the batter she steals.

I will match my words to his in obstinacy

over heated arguments on things I really don’t care,

saying intelligent things for him to hear,

hunting for methodologies to find myself

 that will satisfy the questioning panel,

remember the delayed period with the ensuing relief

the sticky warmth of the menstrual blood.

and in bed we are both as taught to be ,tigresses

ensnaring  our men who mark us with their semen,

unassured always, in fear or anticipation of his betrayal.

Like reflection in a river,

in apathy of the other side,

like following shadows in the dusk

our grammar intersect

 yet never blend into the other’s existence,

but if we ever meet,

I’ll hold your hands in mine and

you’ll brush off the mirrors at the ends of my eyes.

People would say of us “but she seemed so normal”,

And yet one day,

before sedations of normalcy injected into our veins

by different hands, different beds to rest, different clocks to time,

We’ll throw our hair back,

And run with the wind

in the direction of each other

knowing you exist,

knowing I exist,

knowing the embrace will never realize,

we’ll scream out our rage,

despair and disgust  then

happy and hysterical,

we’ll stop worrying about what to cook

for a day.

And a poem of mine was put up on Muse India's website :)

From my rectangle box window panel

which the aircraft instructed me to keep open,

draped in diaphanous white muslin fog,

the world beneath resembles

a topographic sheet.

As we descend and ascent through the clouds

resembling  chunks of snow

floating in the icy blue sky,

beneath, blue curves around green swathes,

mounts brown and then the sudden crescents,

like a model you made

and painted in school cutting

out thermacol sheets

and crayoning in copper blues and mustard yellows .

But somewhere among the silvery dots,

the clusters, the cities,

I have left my everything

in a flat fading away like a freckle

where my love resides.

my poem in ignitink.com :)

http://www.ignitink.com/blog/my-lovers-body-is-untouchable-to-me/

What does one do with profane memories??
Make love to it and breed more blurred incestuous ones?
or weave a song out of it
and wear it as a green glass necklace around your neck
or toss it into the overflowing red bucket
where you threw your two day old black petticoat
with shame smelling all over it