Each time I wake up in your arms
I am a different person
My troubles far away from me
The nightmares never dare to touch my eyes
The city sleeps along with us in the one-room bed
The fluorescent advertisement of the avenue street dances on our naked bodies
I wake up at midnight often and stare at you for hours
As something precious has happened to me
Like those highway stories
I wrote while traveling with you
Mixed with the smell of the dust, the wildflowers, the just blossomed cherries
And you, my scent of a woman.

She is fire, even before I touch her
She is crazy like an evening summer storm
But in her mascara applied eyelashes, in her black eyeliner
I found the calm deep ocean
I stand beneath them and breathe.

She is a river, in white, short skirt
With beautiful legs,
With the red scarf, symbolizing every inch of her poetic grace
Any man's heart can stop looking at her
I look at her in amazement as she brought with her
My lost poem of youth.

Her neckline, studded with ruby beads and junk jewelry that matches with her shiny black hair,
Tumbles down through the valley of unannounced sanctity and wild desire
Before her eyes, fell on me.
She nibbled an apple, half
And threw it in the basket
I stare at the darkness of the basket, the fallen apple, and then again at the light on her face

We both trembled, shivered
We stand there, as it is,

She in the magnificent exuberance of her youth
And me, in shy appreciations

At one time, I walk away
Gifting her all those pages of the poem, with blessings
But, woman, I have inherited your beauty forever in me!

I have in me a bit of Tuscan sun
The wildness of mistral
The calmness of a Cezanne village
I often walk around the countryside of Pissaro
And see the colors, still abundant, undefeated
I stroll around the lilies and the harbor of France where Manet painted being thrown out of his house, not able to pay the rent
I dance with the beautiful girls in high society Parisian parties of whom from Zola to Maugham spoke about
I learn art in silence, in the bright orange color of the day drawing the French young girl
Whose face is like Madonna
Her innocence, her laughter, her flawless body
Excite me, breaks me, creates me
I walk with clean head and red wine in the streets of Montmartre
Searching the gone and dusted studio of Renoir, Picasso, Monet
I stand exactly there where there is nothing old except the moon
And the Sacre Couer
In the morning I take the first train to Auvers Sur Oise
And walk into the cemetery
Where lie in the gorgeous French sun
Vincent and Theo Van Gogh
I utter to them, "Can dream ever be false?"
It is when I heard the footsteps
I turned
The girl in the yellow dress stands at the gate of the cemetery
Whom I draw every day but never captured her beauty
The French girl
We both stand there as it is
As if 
framed
paused 
Frozen
We, the Impressionists!

The more I undress you
The more you are in light
As the half-burnt moon come out from the clouds
It fell on your rising ******* in my hand
Then slide across the undulations
Down to the river
From where rises the gypsy madness and the wild smell of a primitive surrender
Oracles are born then
I can hear them, even you
As we make love
In our body dances
The Mediterranean wine.

Woman, yet we spent thousand nights of Heart Stopping Blood Rushing Love in sacred moonlight

We spent the first norwester from the balcony of our yellow college

We sat in half dark college room with excitement in eyes waiting for the first rain

We stand together in one umbrella in the storm, soon it flew and we held each other with the falling flowers kissing us

We ran through the pavement of slippery cement, with our hands tight in each other

We reached the bus stop and in the first blue lightning
We both scared, nervous but laughed!



Woman, we took the metro ride in the horribly hot summer
Sweat gathered like pearls on your forehead
We walked through the Presidency College and then to the Coffee House
The scent of books everywhere
And the thud of our heartbeat loud enough
To embarrass us
Until we found the corner table
When on the wall the golden sun fell like a sculpture of Michael Angelo
As if a curtain removed, as if a moment of no return
And everything changed.




Woman, I never say I am perfect
Neither are you
We loved like as if there is no tomorrow
Perhaps there never was
Yet we loved we sang we wrote secret letters fragrant of pregnant clouds with rain
We met in incredible places, below a lamppost, near a Kachori shop, outside the green door of your house
A bus stop with hundred people waiting, in alleys of book shops and call of the hawkers
The walk through the forgotten roads, in Puja Mandapas, through rail crossings
We were so young we never thought of bodies
Until that orange afternoon when you
Gave me your first kiss.



We were so pure that we were cursed
You often said that, and our dreams always danced around the Eutopia of nothingness
We thought of a Ulysses within us
Which exist nowhere
Until our love became so intense that fire rose
And we both burnt altogether in that fire
Yet we live
all alone
In different cities
Different world
But at midnight often we look at our naked bodies with the touches with the scars still painted like brushstrokes of Van Gogh

We smile then
Like in silence, the lovers do.

We dance on the glass prisms
Below us burns the fire
The flick of a romance or love on the edge
A half open door...death or life?

I never understand the world
The reality where we live
It's like a crooked satire or a hallucination of walking bodies
Before they have erased all memories
Of their own faces.

But those who deny forgetting their own faces
And look at the mirror every day,
See age crawling through the naked bodies
A man and a woman in bed..then their warm skin at midnight on the brink of extinguished immortality.

Poetry comes to me in those moments
Of laughter, of a feeling after love making
An emptiness, a desolation yet hunger for everything
That is when beyond our dreams our shadow comes and dance
On the prisms.
Like Pygmalion, I create my own woman of beauty in silence.

As I lie down on my bed I saw you pushing the half-closed door and entering
You wore a red saree
You are as gorgeous as ever
Sacred like a temple in the dawn
Like a woman who has bathed in night dew
Someone who knows everything about me and yet come to know me from the very beginning
The old door swings in the air
I can see your face as calm as neat as clean
Like the moon outside shining
Let it be cliche, but today it is truly a full moon night
I cannot say what I wanted to say you
Everything has been dusted in time
How do you find the old address of an expatriate?
The yellow envelopes and the red-inked words must have turned blue now
Once I sent within them the clouds
Which kissed you as rain
You in red saree stare at me
Ah! Is it really you?
Or it is all a surreal magic of hallucination
But at that moment you sat beside me on the bed and kissed me deeply
And whisper in my ear
Like a fairy tale told thousand nights ago,
"You still smell the same? And me?"
The last tram of the night goes through
On the empty tracks now lay, love.