Skin flaking away to shreds
Breathing a fresh whiff of mockery your way, my way,
Shrouding their compliments and
My pride that turned stale
As they were uttered.

Alphabets
Lisping out of my mouth
Numbers
Trickling out of my mind
(Not a hospitable host,
This existence of mine, they recount.)
Fears & dreams
Going into comatose.

Clock-hands pointing at me,
At the stroke of wakeful realization
Like arrows, yanking out and
Darting past me, in all directions
On a time-bound mission.

Sounds, gone out of tune inside of me
Screeching out of my ears
Favourite colors, smells, sights
Now driving me nauseous
A choking cough that echoes
(Was it not supposed to stifle it, like in movies?)
Of all of these
Crashing at me,
Trying to weave again
That familiar path on that train
That leads to the crossroads of that maze
Of self- destructiveness
That I seemed destined for,
No matter where I'd exit from.
("The exit is only a dead-end!", a fleeting voice quivers)
As I stagger under weightlessness
While familiarity squints into a blur
and
Alienation burrows a happy home
Mute stares from my end lasting three nanoseconds
Angry for they still don't get it
Thrilled, breathing a sigh of relief.
For I get it, lest I should forget it,
This, where I had arrived.

Or

Was I inhaling stagnant complacency
Slipping into the reprieve of familiarity again,
Of accursed i-dent-ity
Wait. Am I getting familiar with myself?

Life is
Just as I'd
Declared it
In my scribblings.
[It is] precise to the extent
Of the [now] most appealing and repulsive
Contours and intricacies,
Some overwrought with older etchings,
Made darker by attempts
At rubbing them out-
Of where, pray?
[The eternal itch of perfecting the complete, you see.]
I'd dropped them
Into a box called time
Shuffled into compartments
Of past, present and future.


We mistake dreams for reality.
And then
Do you mistake imagination for imagination nowadays?
In your sleepwa(l)king consciousnes(t)?


The weaved hollow of Empiricism,
The added undulations of space and duration.
Somewhere, one's interpretations
Sewed into another's visualizations
Vis-a-vis
The maze you charted for yourself
To be/get lost
Where all that has existed yet,
Is the reality of the imaginary.
Knowing there would arrive a juncture
When you would be breathing
Into a kaleidoscope of chaos
Waiting to wade into patterned perfection,
Eventually, when; Alas!
You fell for time, again, time and again!
And shifted to the infested realm
Of hackneyed manifestations.

As the universe thrusts that sheet of paper
On to the pen in my hand,
In my quest to trace and quench
The voices sketched somewhere
In the white void of the sheet,
As I pen verses of salt & pepper.

Now, I seek solitude for company
Waking to the spectrum of vitality within,
Enough of your rhetoric,
Now's for my soliloquy.

Beneath the semblance of the Silence,
On the verge of bursting any moment.
Silence, spelled as chaos,
Sitting in fear till now,
At the sight of sound and the voice of light,
Stabbing itself with self-consciousness.

Where no one can reach
Neither the notorious comfort of darkness.
Nor the shadow of light.
Neither my thoughts,
Nor my circumstances, can reach.
For they just are.
And I just am.
When no one's watching,
When I'm not thinking.
(For to start thinking,
Is to not be yourself.)

P.S. Not a narcissistic retreat of self- pity, this.
       I look within myself,
       To rise above myself, eventually.

I've snuggled in your embrace,
Smuggled and sneaked in
On you on tiptoe
(On the tip of a bubble)
Kissed you a million times,
Cringed with shyness,
Pretended to scoff at you
To break into laughter
And clasp my hands with yours.
Bumped into you
At some street, on some staircase,
Letting you spiral down a step further
Into my soul's merkaba.

I have sketched you in fervent hues
I have penned you in vivacious blues
I have perused you numerous times
In my pursuit of you.
Fondled you after fumbling for you
In my dog-eared memories
Of my portrait of you
On a blank wall of my reality.

I've often visualised you
Lurking around the corner of a street,
On another day, in a library maybe,
As I gleefully offer my mind for you to read
In lieu of the book that we picked
At the same instance.

At times I let these scenes
Play on a little longer in my head,
(None of it ever happened anyway)
Till the juncture when you walk up to me
(in those scenes)
While I
Freeze the moment then and there,
When you're probably just about to utter
Something I may have been longing to hear.
To then move to a distance
And admire that still frame I'd set,
Picturing a dewy winter morning
On a summer evening.
Till the sounds, sights and smells disperse

Till we part ways like always,
Without having met, yet!
To meet again in an unfamiliar setting
Against the backdrop of familiar feelings
Born anew
In the thrill of anticipation (of)
The certainty of uncertainties.

Trust me my dear,
Your visage will fail
To do justice to my portrait of you.
Let us meet  and be lost
In my mind's tangled sketches alone.

I often have conversations
With objects around me -
From
Mindless banter ******* into
Heart-to-heart conversations,
To
Waking up in the middle of the night,
Fumbling for the right switch in the darkness
To put the lights on so I can see
For a split second,
Things obligingly lying still in their place,
As they stagger through burdened time
To lull myself into sleep
With an assurance of familiarity.

On days I enter my room
With bottled thoughts, when these things,
With all their weathered, withered strength
Spur me on to etch out utterances at length
Knowing as they do,
You don't always seek
A response, reaction, remark, judgment,
To something you nevertheless feel the need to speak,
Which at times starts to turn incomprehensible
To yourself and to the other,
As your tongue rolls them out
In the gibberish of vowels and consonants.

So I start off on a mindless rhyme
At times confessing my mind's crimes,
Scraping out fears rusty with neglect
Pulling out halted thoughts from a staggering stack,
Laughing as I admit to myself that joke was funny.
Crying with relish for I won't be accused of being weak.
Stretching out a tune I'd only ventured to hum [in public],
Into a song, hearing my voice sing & strum,
In a long time.    
                           [Hitting the table with a pen
                           To make up for the beats.]
Dancing with awkward steps on my two left feet,
But dancing nevertheless.
[Thank goodness I have feet to dance.)

P.S At times, when the familiarity
      Of my own presence poses a threat,
      I need their company, these non-living things,
      The only solace sensitive to my minds' mutterings.