That One, the One Mad as Birds

I always think of her when I cross this stretch
A little lost girl with a nest on her head
A nest of wild flowers and humming birds
Playing havoc with her mind
Bursting into flight with her thoughts

On stilts she walks
Looking straight over the heads of crowds
That's the only way they're meant to be seen
Bobbing up and down to the rhythm of her personal background score

Last I heard she'd flown with that flock of hers
I imagine her chirping away
Somewhere on the branch of a gulmohar tree
Perhaps that's the only place to be
And till I see her again
I'll chirp from my verandah
Hoping she hears me.

Quiet Murmurings

One came like a storm
Turbulent and all consuming
Grey clouds, rainbows, furious rain
The whole package
Cruel, exhilarating, tempestuous and breath taking
All at once came the storm
And left all at once
Never staying long enough to heal

The other came like a breeze
Nourishing, life giving, soulful
With a different kind of fire
Blew over still smarting skin
Rekindling the flickering flame
Never too hot to burn
Picking up the pieces after I fell apart
Again and again and again

And that made all the difference.

Paper boat

She won't pick up her phone and let it drop
Like she imagines she will
She won't roll down those steps she imagines hitting her head against
She won't drop in the middle of the street and wait for the fading echo of her name amidst the din
She won't fall apart like she imagines she will
Because she can drown out the noise inside her head on a single sheet of paper
And watch the paper boat float gently along in the indifferent streams of the late afternoon showers.

Veins

There are some people who blend beautifully into your life. That terrible beauty that takes over, and having taken over continues to grow algae-like over pools of once uncontaminated moments.

She was beautiful, no doubt. Her voice had the burst of freshness of freshly plucked mint on parched morning afters. And so she came into my life. I took her by hand into the freshly painted memories of my mind. She built and rebuilt the fractured fragments of my imagination as my skin itched, the purpled veins underneath growing darker. And she would brush her fingers over my furrowed brow, "it will all be alright", she said.

I watched as she picked up wooden frames, tilting, sawing edges, I helped her even with sand paper that razed my hand. I saw myself being innocuously shifted out of the refurbished frames. Quite inconspicuously at first, just an ear or a foot until it was hard to see that they were my frames at all.

And those purple veins grew thicker and longer over my swollen fingers. Stretching, spreading, spurting new tendrils, throbbing at the joints till they ached.

Finally, one day, I found a blade. What does it take to wash purple stains?

Icarus

And suddenly it scared her
The absence of foul smell
The smoke
The heat
Of burning feathers

That empty space
Where dreams resided
But a hole in the sky

At least he had feathers to melt.

Spots

I see spots, she said.

And everywhere she went, red, yellow and greenish blue spots, little, huge and just about average, throbbed sore and aching before her until she practically peeled her eyes away from the pulsing spots.

They followed her everywhere, the little, huge and just about average spots. They screamed at her from shiny billboards in flashy golden lettering, A Potion to Magically Straighten Your Hairs, and Snakes and Shakes, hissed the shady store down the street. From recieved to expresso, from goverment to grammer, the spots kept bubbling and bursting belligerently before her. So she pricked them and she poked them till she very nearly choked on them. The Es and the silent Ts dissolved in tiny pools on her now very moist pillow. Tired of splashing about in them she got up and left all in a huff down the street, round the corner, way past the shady store and stopped in sudden wonderment when a quaint little man from a quaint little shop waved out to her most exuberantly!

And as she blinked, adjusting still to the spotless little shop, what should the quaint little man hand her but her favourite book!

Eyes all alight she hugged it tight and ran all the way back home, not stopping till she was quite out of breath. And opening only now the brand new dictionary, she lay snuggly down between the crisp white sheets drifting into dreams of spotless shelves and spotless minds where all was well with the world and the letters fitted in just right.

Embrace

The tension of distance explodes in friction 

As two feet learn to dance again
Stumbling, fumbling, hesitant and clumsy 

We try at least to walk again
Chipped nails and speared tongues 

Our voices quiver in uncanny dissonance 

As the familiar is dug out of forgotten crevices 

Of a mind that had long drifted on.

Faced by the stark plurality of worlds 

Mirrors shatter as reflections stain
The strain of reliving every detail, 

Every blemish, every look, every touch, 

Every last word
Is every bit as shattering as is euphoric
And yet stung, battered and bruised 

Our war scars are dearer to us 

Than the smiles appearing with the suddenness of a rainbow, 

Lost before we can be quite sure.

Harmony, accord and treatises of peace 

Can only be black or white we realise 

As we trail blinded by mists of greener dreams and fantasies
The skin we tear at in the name of boundaries 

Is raw and slowly turning a dull shade of soft purple mornings
And we rub our eyes spreading out memories 

In thin films till they can't be told from the blotchy mascara 

That remains somewhere on a finger nail gone unnoticed
And we stretch cracked lips till they primly purse
Drawing blood and not the smiles we sought.

Eyes lowered in remembered chivalry 

We depart 

Lest the bitterness pull us deeper into an embrace
And we walk away 

The whispered silence following us.