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.