Another dull winter day painfully crawls away
       into garden-variety biography
          just a run-of-the-mill résumé
          filled with antecedents whilom
          and to top it up
          a corrosive impostor syndrome.

I lie quietly in the flickering, yellow light
of a jaundice-stricken forty-watt bulb
trying to think about something superb
which would somehow improve
the way things do (or do not) move
in my achromatic life.

Nothing worthwhile emerges.

Only some vague urges act out
from their stingy hideouts.

The clock pushes the evening further
into the dry, arid chill of the night so still.
I sigh and switch off my ghost-like
sleepy, vapid eyes
into the ancient time-line
of a vast, un-bridged solitude
in my quarantined, immotile life.

© Chandra S., 1995

face up on the ground
rain hits my face
i have been here before
lying in the mud
slowly enveloping me
like a hug
or perhaps more like a boa constrictor
my skin pulls upward
towards the stars
towards light
while my bones want nothing more
then to be laid to rest

Passion is carefree, often buoyant.....breezy,
and is absolved perpetually of prohibitory rationality.

Being logged in to it for a little over eternity,
this is exactly how I have felt:
intense, steamy
...maybe a bit frenzied.

Passion is also a sudden, swift salvo.
On many a fleeting occasion, ergo;
I have come perilously close
to suggesting my maudlin ardor
and poetically propose
an incredible romance,
which if you dismiss;
shall break my heart in two
and if not;
shall break a home or two.

It is like this therefore,
that I have come to feel
like an outlawed fugitive
and as if in the wink of an eye,
a million lonesome nights have passed,
sorely bruising and tearing me apart
between the hearth and the heart.

Tonight:
the first one after those million;
I am transcribing my thought
to tell you that I am hooked,
as though in a playback loop -
      a weary, age-old vinyl record;
      pitching forward, skipping backward
      in a pestering, irksome Xerox
      of scratches, static and blips;
      all in the same little sector
      where there was once music.

❉

Maybe that is why I surprisingly realize
the pain of passion, and slowly capsize
into a drifting, dry sleep

devoid of all dreams

of you.


© Chandra S., 2013

In my mind I say what I mean
And mean what I say.
But my actions could speak otherwise.
Am I a hypocrite if my mind is far greater than my own two hands?

Am I helpless if I know what to do,
But my body won’t move according to plan?

Am I deluded if I think I can
When I can’t,
Or if I think I can’t,
When I can?

Am I who I am
Or am I what I am?

A half-dream that something was wrong with my brain and
there was bass growing deafeningly, deafeningly louder.
Too loud, too loud.
Searing, hitting pain.
And I ran to find him because I didn’t know what was happening or how to stop it. And he couldn’t get organized
or to the hospital
and he had to maps it
and I couldn't stop screaming
and he was so scared, crying, wanting to help
but terrified and unable to.

i feel like a tiger
pacing in a cage
it is not poetic
in the way that
if the bars were opened
i would burst out
like a firecracker
it is instead in the way that
i would lie down where i stood
unable to leave.

Dear Author:
I am posting
your 'the-then' thoughts
on this web-blog
since I do not know
where, in time
and in place
are you lost.

If,
someday,
you happen to stumble
upon this web-page,
send me a message
and I will quietly
remove this entry
in exchange
for a small fee:
The privileged readership
of your soul-stirring poetry.

❀

WE ALWAYS REMEMBER

You and I,
wherever we are
are fated to love.

No matter
whose poems are being read,
You and I,
or something of us
springs up in each one
in some way or
another.


Whatever doesn't ever
reach the lips
has reached the poems
...already...already.

There,
Do you blink?
as if to disillusion me.

You talk of bright worlds ;
unknown to me.

My side of the discourse
is limited to sighs and tears
and blushes,
and wiping off
the spreading Kaajal †
with my baby's mouth-napkin.

But you aren't even married yet.

And
by the next time we meet,
I will have painted my lips again.

You remind me
of what I couldn't be.


© The Nightingale

† Kohl

??!?