Perhaps it was too soon
but time will tell me that
it was the right time when
it got loose out of my pocket.

The agony of the lost ink pen
given to me by my grandfather
is not that it had a thick nib
that glided though sheets
of stories, gave track
to trains of thoughts.

The agony is that, I wanted
the pen to be the living proof
in his posterity, or mine
that he was a good man, and
only grabbed by the ills of habits
and inability to control one's mind
did he speak bad with others.

I had a hard time, gulping the loss
like the hardened blob of mucus
too difficult to shove down the throat
but too difficult to push it out.

But then I had no other option,
I could sulk in the moment for long,
or I could imagine that these poems,
are what would show him a good man,
despite his odds of the world against.
I'm the ink and the ink pen
and not what got lost.

For this body too is borrowed,
expenses not more than
what bought the ink pen.
Of course grandfather would
probably get angry if told.

So the agony of the lost ink pen
is that it got lost, but also found
by someone. May the person
find good use of it.

Waiting for that paper, a light
A cursor that keeps blinking for the next word
Even when the screen arranges to sleep in daylight
Fingers begin to itch and start being febrile.

An email, such a pity,
is more accessible than
a post box.
All the handwriting fonts that I did try, couldn’t,
Just possibly couldn’t mirror the impeccable tries
To struggle to be parallel to the top
Or bottom of a page.

The improbability of what the next thought would be
The prediction  of where the addressee would smile
Or frown, or pick up eyes to stare at the wall for a while,
To embrace what had just been conveyed.

Letters are like light, they reach us later
From when they were born, but the spaces
they illuminate or burn on their arrival!
I wonder if our pupils shrink.

They more than just tag along, they tap in,
They’re the result of cleaning the ink from
the nib, a thousand times, over thousands
of sentences, or maybe just a few, but they do.

And don’t dare ask the pen for proof!
It’ll track down wrinkled pages
Who had their thirst quenched by
The swipes of fountain pens’ fountainheads,
And pictures of the fingers
Bathed in red, and black, and blue,
And occasionally of table clothes
Spilled over by the consequence of imperfect handles.

Imagine if light came as soon as it was made,
It would be difficult for our eyes to handle such bait
Sometimes, a pause is necessary,
Imagine a world without commas!

I’d like to peek into the writer’s letters,
Not to read, but to sense the shapes of emotions
And stretches of As and Ns, or the reach of commas
On the next line, and then, close my eyes
And shove my nose in it, to sniff hard
The paper and the blue smells,
And die doing so if it was eventual.