Look at me now
My once curly hair stick-straight,
My once fresh eyes Kohl-laced

Wonder at my dexterity
My pinkish tender fingers have gotten disfigured
To longish, darker, and wiser ones; you’d hear my

High, shrill laughter, that doesn’t conform
To the graceful springy adornments that it had before

gaze at my iconoclastic room
That smells of adolescent hormones
Swelling with teenage rebellion and
Punk shades of red and black,
A radical departure from my late pink paints
And Barbie shades;

Feel my feelings now
That impalpable blood red ocean
Thoughts no longer wander around Santa or snow white or
Maidens fair, instead
Just hang around vainly, hovering in midair.

But don’t you gape; it’s still that naïve little
Girl you knew, with wide eyes and a mouth adorned with
Chocolate stains who blabbered incessantly
About all things only half-understood; only that now,
All the chocolate has been licked clean
And behind it every truth that hid harshly revealed.
If you can deal with the radical, then believe , it’s still
Me.

Memories are the most
Cherished treasury of my mind but they’re
Etched on virtual postcards, printed
On the cardboard of my much too
Mortal neurons and prone
To scarring by time, and the rest of
the random company.
I sometimes worry,
But the present tension of a
Glowing flower, sweet summer peach
Rain-glazed grass lawns and
Beautiful dunes on the beach each
Steers me away, and veers me into a
World of exhilarating immensity
Where memories fade
And all that matters is the present
moment of bitter-sweet eternity
Transcending Earth’s own mortal divinity
Into the miracle of life
and infinity
                                                        -truly

there's an invisible melody
and the tinkling of laughter
always playing,
always playing.

there is comforting kindness,
and a magical sparkle of love
always singing,
always singing

free feathers fly the breeze,
and sway like fancy frills,
merrily dancing,
merrily dancing

dreamy clouds decorate their thoughts
and burst with bubbling fantasies
simply entrancing,
simply entrancing

just feast your eyes on what lies under,
invisibly breathing, living and gazing,
and you will find pure happiness and wonder
in the swaying, surprising and scintillating.

Theirs, to me, is the most scintillating language
The one without words
Without voices or verse, just
Meaning- a cosmos of it, I can see
In their naïve smiling eyes, their baby fingers, their
Ebullient “oohs” and “mmphs” and gurgles,
Their springy laughter that leaves echoing
In my ears, an intricate array of reminiscences
On the unexplained enigma of
A lost childhood; of the complex beings
They’re fated to reduce to,
Of the most familiar language I once knew
But never learnt - stupid me -
The unparalleled beauty of simplicity, sans
The scholarly sense and sensibility that men worship
And of the tacit expressions they conduct so robustly
Without speech or learning,
Filling me with their contagious emotions
Immediately as I come in its contact.

Man’s emotions are complicated, that’s perhaps why
They’re so compatible with the simple sound of innocence.

Love fuses like lightning
into the clouds
Fading away into unknown shades of
Petrifying beauty, enthralling movements
Slivers of sliver
Trickle through my body like a gentle waterfall
Sending me shivers shrouded by happy hopes.
High above from the heavens it strikes unexpectedly,
Magically, like love that comes suddenly
Like a miracle in the times of direst despair.  I need
This lightning, this silent love song
Of my deepest desires and my cheerful child,
The introverted innocence and the melody inside
Every breath I take rises
From that lightning of love that fusions into endless oceans,
And breathes them into beings of fantasy.
I feed on this fantasy, look for that love and seek that sun-like light
Blending with the nightly stars.
That’s why I live.

A paper
A bird  
A flute
A brush.  

A caper
A shirt  
A fruit
Some slush.

A finger
A box
A flirt
A rush.

Imagine
Create
Touch
Hear
Feel
See
Be
A

A slate of all the shades of blue softly
Cloaks my eyes. One glittering, fluttering star
A Diamond tear from heavenly cries.
Cotton puffs sailing through in a fabric of white
Like faceless angels. But I can see them smile at me-
A sky-candle in the night.

The waves near the sea shore
Ebbing and swimming upon themselves; they fight,
Drowning each other fleetingly, but not  
The gleeful whisper of the sprinting breeze

My eyes seize
A pair of white wings
Followed by a million pairs of flying feathers
Their beaks grazing upon the
Greenish water that slowly shifts to the lightest blue.
A zillion shades of unearthly hue
Disappears softly with the sky
Like the perfect blending of souls.

Hear the unexplained, here
The scintillating brilliance of nature
Comes back to you.
Within and beyond of transient fingers is
The ethereal transcendence. Nature.
Beauty like God.

Now, Breathe.

A paper
A bird
A flute
A brush.

A caper
A shirt
A fruit
Some slush.

A finger
A box
A flirt
A rush.

Imagine
Create
Touch
Hear
Feel
See
Be
A

A slate of all the shades of blue softly
Cloaks my eyes. One glittering, fluttering star
A Diamond tear from heavenly cries.
Cotton puffs sailing through in a fabric of white
Like faceless angels. But I can see them smile at me
A sky-candle in the night.

The waves near the sea shore
Ebbing and swimming upon themselves; they fight,
Drowning each other fleetingly, but not
The gleeful whisper of the sprinting breeze

My eyes seize
A pair of white wings
Followed by a million pairs of flying feathers
Their beaks grazing upon the
Greenish water that slowly shifts to the lightest blue.
A zillion shades of unearthly hue
Disappears softly with the sky
Like the perfect blending of souls.

Hear the unexplained, here,
The scintillating brilliance of nature
Comes back to you.
Within and beyond of transient fingers is
The ethereal transcendence.

Nature.
A Beauty like God.



Breathe.

The words have eaten sugar
They dance madly at
The tip of my hands
Threatening to jump out
Before I can write them down

In an autumn leaf descending to the earth
Like a lazy parachute landing,  
I can see
A thousand little memories, etched imperfectly
Like overcrowded freckles in a smiling face, and
A thousand shades of every color, but grey and yellow
Most profound. And as it’s falling
Like a dying, man
On a bench in a teeming park
Filled with shocked, disbelieving faces trying
To hold back his departing life and
Funnily, even the most skilled rugby player cannot catch it.
His straining wrinkles like the shriveled leaf
Artfully shaped by that clever one
Reveals in its folds a million unique experiences
Reveries, hopes and memoirs all of which
Will be gone as the leaf softly lands.
But- new green leaves shall sprout, new hope reign,
Because, even when a prolonged year ends too soon,
There will follow another happy new year. And another.  
And another. That-
Is life.

The mirror in front Of
Me shatters- our eye contact
Breaks –
I **** back. You seem to
have shattered along
With the mirror,
your broken shards splattered all
over the wet floor.

And it is my hands that are
******.

The words have eaten sugar
They dance madly at
The tip of my hands
Threatening to
jump out
Before I can write them down

Lucid
Time
Stops still
Petrifying, arms
Drifting lifeless, face
Closed in concord, quiescent;
Eyes seeing and unseeing
Blue, blue whirls
Of tranquil, sailing under the
Lazy waves of
Never ending space that pops
With the popping bubbles
Flying away
Like fantasies, and nothing
Reigns, with the cool
Warmth of the
Miracle liquid of life draping
The skin like silken velvet-
Now composing flawlessly
The harmonious
Notes of the silent music-
Peace.

Little time breezes past
our conscious fingers
Which are so
busy working that they
Do not close in fast enough to catch it.

But time in excess is a
*****
It crawls past like a lazy snail and
Comes in such
abundance that to catch it then
with a bottle and
Store it for later use becomes
An impossibly boring task.

Just so you notice me in the midst
Of the bare colored walls, I wear
Florescent polka dot dresses every day.
My heart is hit on by a hailstorm when you pass
By the nook of the passage where I stand but-
That you can’t hear my loud and extremely
Audible internal calamity
Makes those thrashing hailstones bruising
My fragile flesh
Weigh a thousand tons more.

The vacant pages of the titanic
Book I open today will
Tomorrow be over-packed with
My entire little fist sized heart

Hush.

Don’t speak.

Your heart beats
Beats against my ear
Speaks
Sweet, sweet
Secrets
My ears can’t hear.  But

I understand.  
Sigh. How
It all makes sense.
You breathe.
I smile.
Your heart doesn't lie.

In its whispers
You’re alive.

That was my pen, before.
Lapped up every last drop of ink hungrily
And spewed them all out in just the right
Shape, the right amount, for the right meaning,
Blowing life into its royal blue color recipe
To craft breathing alphabets that animated
Into words that I remember
Were mischievous, but adorable babies:
They used to talk, walk, play, cry and sleep;
Oh, they used to live on their vast white landscape,
Reviving my memories with their
Own connotation- my innovators.

But my pen is a teenager: unpredictable and moody,
It now creates stubborn, sterile letters that just want to besiege
The tip, clog right there and not drop out.
Even if I ****** it awake now, my pen would just puke some
Little droplets shaped like letters that would
Blot the paper ugly, or, the words would exit deformed, like
Their genes had gotten affected by a nuclear bomb.

Oh, what have I done to enrage you, my love?
Did I over-feed you, or under-appreciate you
That your self-esteem decided to turn upon me,
Or become so dependent on you that my mind has dulled
Its imaginations far too dry now,
For you to shape them well?

My verses now wilt and die,
New lands in the paper just get wasted, alarming me
For land is a limited resource in my house, the earth.
But land is not the ultimate problem,
For there are a thousand landscapes I could pull out of my imagination;
Only if my pen would love me once more
And reproduce my ink faithfully,
I could be a writer again.

Struggle, struggle
With toil and trouble
Go through it all, then
Pop like a bubble

Scintillating depth paints the luxurious fabric
In a vista that drowns in
Its own sophistication
Thick, spicy flavor drips from the petals of
Soft indigo ink
Wetting the paper (that sweats with
Hard work and furrowed concentration,
Eyes do not waver
External cacophony mutes
The only tunes being the hymn
In the skilled artisan’s mind)
Art materializes into
Real beauty- an irrational, existing,
Hypnotizing magnificence,
A piece of pure worth, ready made-
To be sold cheaply in the local market.

They say
Only the fittest survive, sardonically.
The whole enchilada’s pressing on my throbbing
Head. Like a drained sponge, dehydrated
I can only hear jeers, see mocks, talk
Nothing with my quivering lips, to the
World that says I am drowning to doom in the
Tough Ocean of the world. But they know not
That I can swim

Beside the strident, turquoise waves
Under the dying embers of that ******* fire lighting the sky
Who slowly drowns into water like a blue, ripened mango,
You and I are left vulnerable, with only a fragile, lacy blanket;
No words exchanged but our effusive hearts seem to be
Chattering away, their blood, veins, skin and all
Intertwining, till there’s nothing left.
Our arms are welded with brash intimacy by
The warmth of the dusk, as
The sunlight merges slowly into darkness in
The marriage of twilight-us; Oh,
How our palms labor, sweat and tire each other, and yet,
All familiarity is insufficient for
Mere skin feels like too much clothing,
All time too short and all cacophony music:
Silence drugs, and intoxication silences, but love,
I don’t want to understand anything at all, insanity is enough.
The entire universe seems to have gotten ******
Into a black hole
With only two of us still existing somehow,
As if all gravity has gotten defeated by ours,
But for me,
Beyond this colossal void
What’s only left is just everything I wanted.

The skin of the blue sky is imperfect
Blemished with irregular patches of grey
And snowy white that look puffed up,
Like lazily drifting fantasy;
And when they do fall on me,
All that dreamy
Cotton candy; I am ****** awake.
They tingle on my cold skin
Then evaporate, like they never were
But a cotton candy left out too long in front
Of the starving mouth of air.