“Water in a cup”

Even when the night ended I didn't close my eyes,

With the light when I woke up your thoughts weren't gone yet.

The feeling you gave continues in my mind,

Like the ground still wet from yesterday’s only hour of rain.

Across the table when we both sat,

I saw you run your hand through your hair faster,

Unequally shift your gaze faster than that,

And trying to catch your speedy voice I lost my breath.

Normal are ties that start when the hearts & hands lock,

Strange are ties that start when the eyes meet.

Somebody poured the water till the brim of cup at the tip of earth’s mound,

Even if the earth trips upside down, the water will not leave the cup.

"The Key Maker"

When the door to the room stops at walls,
I know I have taken the wrong turn,
On a whim many doors I opened,
And walked into rooms, both ugly and good.

Not to know which turn to take,
At times I felt myself standing at the lobby.
Times were there when someone will hold my hand and lead me into their house,
And now I know, I overstayed my welcome.

That time that comes at times has again come,
Now I again stand at the lobby for a door to open.
The angry ring at the foyer asked me the truth,
And hands a key to the door of my mind, which was closed.

Female Farmer

As she stepped out into the muddied soil, the sound of the night grew more darker. She looked around to confirm her loneliness and looked up to understand that even the moon was just a water mark on the clouded paper.

She entered into the farm full of paddies and sat near the dully lit motor room adjacent to her mother's strip of land with ready to harvest paddies. She was not there to check if the motor room was locked. She was just there though there was no specific task in her mind that made her visit needed. She was just there to  let her next few moments become richer by the forced loneliness.

She sat down on the grainy sand, which looked neither like the washed sand near the shores nor like the dusty soulless sand blowing off the tar road. She sat with her legs half-stretched and with her two hands locked on top of the knees to ensure that the half-stretch was just enough to have a smart negotiation with gravity.

Her hair flew up once in a while with the occasional wind that disturbed the full grown paddies and her smooth hair with the same force and cadence.

She was not a distraught daughter but a loved wife married to the present moment. She had taken a long vacation from her office work at Kolkata. It has been a month now and she was not sure if she wanted to return. Over the last 1 month, which seemed now to her as more shorter than her father's love, she helped herself by being involved in setting up her mother's land up for harvest. The lovely and at the same time worst part was that she now had to harvest the grains out of these crops lest the weight of the grains makes the crops stoop and bend to the pull of the land. She really did not want to do that. For her these crops were way better than the men she had seen in her life. The paddy crops were more patient to hear her words and told her before hand that tomorrow is a new day and they will not look and feel like what they are today.

The crops never longed for her soft hands to touch them, the crops never wanted to smell her flesh and the crops remained naked in front of her without hoping that she would reciprocate. When the wind again touched her hair, one faint memory came back; the same memory that she always wanted to relentlessly smother : "Dying fires are never dead till they die".

That memory was faint only till it surfaced. Once it surfaced there was no way she could put that memory to rest without reliving the moments with the man, who lived life in a precarious manner. Like nature that was stable when it was stable, violent when it was violent and fickle when it was fickle, he stayed and lived naturally. He would give her the beauty of life at many moments and at some moments will mercilessly extinguish her mirth as if it was a switch to be flicked on and off.

He wanted to live out of the cycle of life, but in reality his life out of the cycle overlapped in a confusing manner with the life in the cycle : A mathematical equation, simple enough to equate to a singular number but when solved gave numerous numbers as a solution often in an uncontrollable manner.

She remembered a specific moment when he was hurt by his own failings and confided to her how tough it was for him to manage himself. He was observing as he was speaking to her: She knew that he was in a singular state of observing whenever the flow of his language was fluid and his voice was earnest to the point of negating the existence of any other voice from his mind.

She liked him because he was never keen on showing any pretense in any form. He would admit to his extreme weaknesses in a matter of fact tone, requiring neither her...


To be continued...

All it takes is a day's rain!

Crushing pain makes me check my walk,
As I sit I hear my eyes close with sorrow,
I see my heart is struggling to beat,
Like coins caught inside a ceramic pot my pain is hidden.

Tried stealing the beauty from a unknown girl's face,
It failed to stop my pain.
Tried chatting up a friend to let me go light,
It failed to stop my pain.

A known call lights up the mobile,
And I hear a sweet lady say there is rain.
Out of the well lit cubicles that are cold I move,
And through the stairs I run to hurriedly reach the new world.

The leaves look recently cleaned,
I could imagine the roots of trees stabbing more deep at the now kind soil,
I see the girl with wet hair and I smell the strength of beauty,
I check to see that the concrete is more fluid than before.

More smiles on the tea shop,
More smoke from the cigarettes,
More noise from the overhead flimsy shelter,
More oxygen in the air than I can breathe in.

All it took was a day's rain to make me live,
All it took was a day's rain to make me cry,
Now all of a sudden the ceramic pot broke,
And the coins of freed happiness landed on the floor.

Hit me with a force I like

Hit me with a force I like,
I want to cry so I don't fly,
So hit me with a force I like,
Let me trip and fall.

Let me not get up so easy,
So hit me with a force I like.

Everything is down,
Enough there,
Stop hitting me now
Yes, we are done.

I am back up now,
But just let me walk for a while,
Now let us do it again,
Hit me with a force I like.

Me

All I need is me,
Safe and true and on the road,
Walking fast with the wind,
And feeling the sun on the face,
All I need is me,
All I need is me,
Only me to see me through

New Smoke & Old Fire

Smoking it up and holding it down,
All go up and I see it fly,
Smells like death; I hear the whispers,
I let the fire free my soul,
Escaping with the air is the chemical,
And with it my soul which is rushing to death.

My soul dies everyday on the mobile funeral pyre,
See this the other way, a young man's attempt to light his own way,
New is the end and the next one in my hand is not the old one,
I am here to smoke and smoke the hell out of you