In the purgatory
of etched ink
I was asked
"Where have you
hidden
your happy heart?"

Perhaps, I lost it
in the sea
of noctural whimpers
or had it stolen
by the fleeting bird
called chance

The umbrella of sunshine
against broken blues
is nowhere to  be found.

"What you carry within,
a dismembered array
of broken hearts
are not your own."

Go find your happy heart
of childhood.

Stop making suffering beautiful
Stop twining words with death
And making ladders and ladders of poetry
Which I am tempted to climb
Hoping for an eternity

Stop making art out of suffering
Stop dancing to tunes of whimpers

How sorrow flows,
as it gently nudges
at the edge of my elbow
again and again.
Until I turn around and
surrender.

How sorrow grows,
from a little moment of
discomfort,
shame or death of a feeling,
which was once dear...

Into a monster
who cannot differentiate
love from hate.

Sorrow flows,
like the monthly massacre
of a woman's
body, week and dreams,
gestating
from a tiny cell.

Tiny black bulging dots
Marching in a skewed line,
They hunt down,
The syrupy hints left by your sweet boxes...
To fill up their primitive huts,

so no fellow ant dies-
hungry.

I wonder often
To myself,

Humans with green, blue and yellow revolutions,
And Bt products,
Are perhaps the only species,
Which suffers the worst hungers known.
I haven’t seen malnutrition in ants.

Can I take you
to visit a favourite time
of a decade or two ago
when there were many trees
surrounding large terraces -
and hung from wooden sticks were
Old clothes left out to dry
That began to fly with
Wind on a summer’s day

There are slivers of
my heart
Which fly and soar high
Only to crash and bloodily weep
As they land,
On that stage
Where I will never be
Or that page
Where my words will never speak
Or the summer
lost from sight by tears of silly endeavours
Or the sweet little spring
in between the desert which dries faster
than I can run

Oh this emptiness
like between the vase and
the shrivelled flowers within
Dried now, a thing of past
but which once came
from someone as
a beautiful present.

The poverty of patience
clutches at my soul
as I no more wait to hear
the ends of songs,
the middle of the stories
and the loved ones' complain.

Stuck in the chorus of one,
while the melody of the other recalls
a painful nostalgia, which
further disencumbers a story...

Each of you stands around
holding the silvered surfaces of mirrors-
the most foolish invention of all times
limiting our possibility to be, to think, to dream -
by an imperfect visual defining.

As I look into them
to find a face I may like,
each tells a different story
but they all lead to one -
something I know,
only I.

Every story is important,
but you only pick up one
which best defines your love,
indifference or hate
and, show it to the world,

Saying, that is all there was to her.

Like a small drop of ink,
Dense in its heart
Sharp in its tone
and round in its rolling
the words collated together into a sphere
of intensity
and fell upon me, splattering like the raindrop;
dissolving as easily as the ink in water
it diffused and became one with my language.

Today, I learned you.

Time is sweeping away
all those autumn-ed memories
into the lanes of past -
To prepare a place to keep
future's experiences

Pebbles pelted into the pond
Sending infinite ripples across matter
we are like them,
each of our lives
thrown carelessly
into the abyss of infinity.

Zig-zag was the last word
in the picture dictionary on
the old forgotten bookshelf
of my childhood.

These roses on the flower beds,
planted a decade and a half ago -
run zig-zag like a bee on a hunt.
Much like, your love
for me.

You said things -
because its easier to speak-
and gossip, and later forget.

Than it is to
follow a crazy butterfly of a dream,
when everyone asks you
to chase instead an angry bullfrog
of tradition.

To flick your fingers
and dismiss failures
as unthoughtful mistakes
and heartiness as an
an ugly carnival of
embarssing emotions.

Follies of other are good fodder
for two minute advice soliliquies
a distant critical review.

Dear friend,
or foe - as you like,
Come around to this side
of the window,
and wear the torn shoes
of his distress
or live through
her sorrow

And then tell me,
Would you again,
given a chance,
say the same ?

All of us
trying to project
our deep sorrows and
high joys
onto the rhythms
that paper understands.

to what avail?

The button was stiched
sixteen and a half years ago
on a winter morning
just in time,
before the bus left -
the important
of its presence on
a school uniform

Only a child can understand.

Today, it lies hanging out of
the tattered piece of cloth
which was once used to be
my shirt.

It reminds me of the
fights, dramas and the
pricked finger of yours
as you sat there stitching.

Square roots,
had troubled me since childhood
Until I learned how
to derive the square root of
a poem.

You place the poem
firmly between the planes of
logic and imagination
running parallel - each to the other
and grasp each multiple of thought
that  you catch swimming in your heart

and then simplify
one by one - the shreds of words
off the poet's diary

and you must repeat
until you discover
the ultimate joy
manifest as non-divisibility
of a zero.

What remains in your basket
is the square root of the poem
Hear, as it speaks to you,
tugging at the flesh enclosed
within your chest,
listen as it conveys
the myriad of emotions-
hesitations, ecstasy, impulse, shame and rage.
Each alteration hidden beneath
neat metres, rhyme schemes and free verses

Born of an unseen, unknown
infinite mutlitude of thoughts.

Sunlight seeps through
little cracks on the
broken windows, cuts in
the red curtain,
loose openings of
unhinged doors
and slits in the
scraped walls.

As I wake up
yet another day,
to the mellow touch
on my forehead-
your endearing insistence
on lighting up my day
despite the many barriers
wins.

Last night-
the soft raindrops shattered
on the brick pavement
as the drops lay dying-
they were reborn as  
a ***** trickle,
which washed the dust laden brown  bricks
to flame orange.

Blue of the rains
merged with the blue
of the shoddy plastic sheet
above the old cobbler's forehead
where destiny had scribbled poverty.

Will the rain wash it away too?

She thinks,
sometimes too much.

A thought-
abstract and gas like
is condensed.

And grows,
only to become a
stray ant -

that emerges
from the depths of her hair
and starts running along
the loose strands -

which I pluck
and throw away.

I wish,
she would not think,
as much as she does,

sometimes even thinking
about how thoughts
must be thought.