If every ugly scar we hid
Every vice we buried
Resurfaces unprecedented,
Would we be able to stay unbothered?
Heads straightened?
Would life go on, unchanged?
Uninterrupted?
If all the internal perceptions we contemplated,
(Revised, edited, and confirmed),
Were to break out
To sneak a peek
Through the pores of our skin
Every chance they get,
Could we have survived,
Remained composed,
In the wavering tides?
Or
Is life filled with tales
Of resurfaced tokens
We simply cruise through?
Why don’t I care?
Why don’t I fervour
A tomorrow, better?
A future, brighter?
Because,
The world of words
Couldn’t bear the heaviness
Of all the days
I’m forced to endure.
For I died many times, now,
I live on the add on
Of the residue days.
Or so it feels.
As if my existence
Is a mere indolence
Of the unwrapped folds.
It glows.
From the ashes of the crumbles
Of what once my life used to be,
The edifice of perfection
Which is now a rubble of exhaustion –
The blurred fire,
The crackling ember,
The finesse of flare,
Glows and glares!
The unfailing fervor
Blazes in the fading colors
Of the ordinary madness.
The undying zest
Crackles in the demised
Version of myself.
The crackling ember
Beneath the ruins of plunder
Blazes and flares
Even brighter.
Don’t fade away
Into the mist of misery
For it is ephemeral
To feel the acute prickle
Of existence once in a while.
But it’s the numbness
And the mundane subsistence,
We persistently live for¡
Quetitude.
Absolute serenade of the inside.
While the riots of
The outside blaze out
Like the sun of the summer –
I lie.
I lie down on the floor
In a quest of tranquility
Freed from the diatribe
And the hustle of everything
Above the ground.
I cry.
I rinse my eyes
Of the sadness they harbor.
And
I brew a relief from
The lines of my words
I trace on paper.
Would my words, only, grasp
The memoir of the past
While evading the present
Devoid-ing the future?
Would my words hold
These moments of departure
Into the realm of now and then?
Would my words portray
The wander in my head
The roars of my heart
The emptiness of my soul
The stretch of my nights
And the void of my long days?
Would my words capture
All that my eyes devour?
The endless and the unbound,
Also the limited and the confound,
The unrestrained interim?
Would my words exist
In between of the two;
The beyond and the vanished
Without lodging in the present?
Is there a way to escape
The here and now,
Yet, venture in today?
Would my words flow
In the reign of tomorrow
Yet, howl the rain of the bygone?
Would my words bleed
The anguish of my wander
To hide from the heed
Of the uncontrolled further?
Would my words allow
The tales of my interim
Within the raid of the flow
In the tides of the morrow?
Aren’t we weary and
Tired of life itself?
Aren’t we all bored of
The entries into our memoir?
Aren’t we ashamed of
The obituaries
To be read?
Aren’t all our eyes
In need of a respite?
A blink, perhaps?
A 4000 little respites
For every hour
We stay alive.
Maybe a little more
Than that of resort.
A refreshment, indeed.
A break from the windows
Of vision and the doors
Of unending tales.
As time flies,
The tides of changes
Grows stronger
And stranger.
Forcing one’s focus
To depart, before it ever comes.
The too many hustles
We endure;
The multiple facades
We create;
Sometimes help with the
Heaviness of the days we carry.
But,
But the busyness never helps
With the exhaustion we bear.
The weariness we suffer.
We seek, then.
A 4000 little respite of few blinks
To keep the staggering fire
Flaming afresh.
Inspired by:
Blinking, we call it. It’s like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black; one’s eyes are moistened. You can’t imagine how restful, refreshing, it is. Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little respites—just think!
No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre
Deem to conceive a thought.
Dare to paint a picture,
Beyond the furnished depiction.
Do not give in.
Nor render the combat.
Conform not.
Instead dissent,
Into a mind of your own.
Awaken your imagination.
Fight for the original.
Reckon to excel.
Do not besought to conform.
Cultivate your conscience.
And concoct an opinion,
A notion of your own.
And by God,
Forfeit assimilation,
To its own accord.
I got up from my bed because I thought I heard a slight knock at my door. Rubbing my eyes to awaken myself, I stumbled the whole way through the door. For a second I thought, did I dream that? With my hesitation intact, I reached the door. To my relief there was no one at the door, only a lonely mail smeared on the ground. I looked left and right only to find an empty hallway.
It was an invitation to a party. The mail, I mean. I couldn’t think of anyone who would address my name in such an elegant manner. Nor anyone who would invite me to a clandestine party.
I am an art reporter. I would like to be an art collector. But I don’t own much wealth to buy all the works my eyes set upon. I travel and write about the masterpieces I get to see. But today, I’m invited to one of the secret art gallery openings. Being nosy as I am, I have heard about these events. I was never somebody enough to visit, though.
‘How should I feel about this?’ I asked myself hopping back to my bed again. Honored? Happy? Terrified? I inspected the mail. I felt like there was a secret map lodged in there. Or a riddle to find the venue. There is no detailed information. It only states I’m invited and the dressing code is enlisted. So much for my inspection. I yawned and drop the mail on my desk. I, then, lay on my back and started thinking.
‘Can this be some kind of joke? No, this is way too sophisticated for that.’ I asked and I answered for myself. ‘Do they want me to report for them? Who are ‘they’? Maybe this is all a dream and I am about to wake up. Or maybe my whole life is a nightmare and I am finally waking up from it. If this is real, my whole career could reach a milestone.’ I stopped the rattle in my head. I picked the invitation up. I read it again for the third time. I still couldn’t find a clue.
‘Before it began, where did it begin?’ I uttered this out loud. My head is buzzing from exhaustion. My eyes are itching from the few hours of sleep I got. ‘Before it began,…’ My voice trailed off. I didn’t know precisely what I was referring to. As for my writing, I don’t recall where it began. For journalism, I don’t know where that begins either. Maybe the better explanation is my yawn birthed a new dream. I was exhausted of life. My exhaustion forced me to yawn which, became a new ‘dream’. A new reality, perhaps. Is there an ultimate beginning anyway? Or is everything in a loop? Can I really know where what began?
‘Wait,’ I posed. If all life was part of a dream, as Edgar Allan Poe mentioned, ‘A dream within a dream’, then mine is a nightmare within a dream. What else could a yawn birth, anyway? Yet, why would a nightmare be all negative?
I was pacing right to left, now. I don’t recall when I get up from my bed. I paced back and forth to clear my head. ‘Why am I thinking about this, now?’ I halt and asked myself. ‘Oh, the party!’ Weakened mirth engulfed me. At that instant, the slight knock at my door was repeated. This time I was sure I heard it. I almost ran to the door. There was another mail, but no one was around. To my relief, so much detail was inscribed in this one. I saw my invite was in fact a reality. ‘This is real, too real,’ I sighed.
The letters began to convene,
Though the words are fading-
Trailing off onto the line.
The chronicles of my life
I started to scribble in forms
Of letters, once,
Are now filled with
Blank pages.
The books are deserted
Of the assembly of words
Only to become
A bound collection
Of emptiness,
A hollow box of papers.
How do letters hang
On the strings
Of lines
To form real words?
How do words conquer
The empty pages
To bind a book?
Is there a word with no letter,
Or a way to utter
A thought
With no word,
Only with letters?
Between the cracks of the walls,
Lodged are the thoughts,
Dreams and nightmares,
Daydreaming and conversations
Of ours.
Between the cracks
We are buried
Not too deep,
Nor far beyond
The surface of reality
Between the edges of the years,
Months, days, and seasons,
We are deeply carved
And engraved
To be rewarded
Of the more.
Between the cracks and creases,
We lie in peace, unperturbed.
In quietude amidst the crowd.
And in the reign of the disturbed.
Between the splits of life,
The seconds and minutes,
There, we lie awake
To the world of beyond,
Unraveled,
And un-comprehended.
Only to peek
Through the cracks
Of this world.
I welcomed imperfect guests
To my perfect universe
A realm of my own
Which I crafted
From a scratch.
I gave my approval
Of good, no, perfection
Earlier than it ought
Have been given.
And for that,
I welcomed-invited,
Imperfect company in
Accredited form of enthusiasm.
And now-
My perfect universe is bent.
My smile, crooked.
My solemn, disrupted.
My trust, defiled.
My angst, mocked.
And my remorse, failing.
For I cannot blame anyone
Absolutely no one!
For breaking and entering
The universe of mine.
None has entered
With force.
Nor was found
Without invitation.
It was I, only I,
Who inspected the list
Of the guests I wished
To have by my side.
Haven’t grown a fondness
Of any guest
I have embraced, so far.
Yet, and yet!
I haven’t thought of
A way to bid them adieu
Nor to embrace
Their quirks I so much
Detest and loath.
I wish not to bestow
The fault
On any of them, anyhow.
I, entirely, blame and
Censure, my hastened,
Uncalculated and rushed judgment
For the calibration
Of my perfect, now
Crooked universe.
Because I invited and
Welcomed imperfect guests
In my own hands.
And for that very reason,
I shall abandon,
The universe I once enjoyed,
The universe I created,
Polished and perfected,
For a whole different new one!
Coward is the soul of mine.
Afraid is the heart in my chest.
Serious is my demeanor.
Solemn is my look.
While dismayed is my through and through.
Have I ever cared for adventure,
Or a path, wilder-
Have I ever lived for the surges
And ecstasy,
I would’ve exploded
Into shrouded pieces.
My fear would’ve devoured
The sole world in my head.
The details, blundered.
The order, converted
Into unsupervised chaos.
The story of my life, that is.
Rearrange, reorder, and revert,
The small and big chunks of
The part and the parcel.
To govern the puzzle.
To make it, sound.
Not fabricated,
Or faked.
For my life is indeed
A double edged.
The sharp trenchant,
My assumption of it, that is.
And the dull flat-
The true color of it.
Unabridged Manuscripts 