Loneliness walks in, stealthily on his feet,
like the black cat in my alley
crouching in fear at a stranger's footfall.

He hovers around silently
and sits at the windowsill of my heart
like an obedient child
looking on at his recuperating mother.
Together then in silence,
we listen to the strange cries of peacocks mating,
as if they were Morse codes waiting to be deciphered.

And finally when I turn to him tired,
and yearn like a woman in love,
he wraps me warm
a wounded soldier's homecoming.

Yes,
The doors are fastened and locked,
I am enclosed in this thought,
I become thinking,
hairs stand on my arms,
spiraling into kites reaching for the clouds
which coil and curdle into mazes,
puzzles of endless thoughts,
winged and spitting fire,
tired with inertia, yet
spurting out to freedom,
And just when the knots of agony
unfasten to leave along,
you barge in,
smiling always...
sickening my stomach
housed with thoughts and more thoughts
waiting to die and live therefore.

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.