00:00 Hours

And the question is whether 0000 hours an emotion?

The world is getting drunk and sick about it.

Don’t worry; I’d been just drinking about you.

The arrow belonged to the heart,

So it came flying.

The apple belonged to Eve,

It went off chasing its chemical pleasures.

Chaos belonged to me,

So it dangled from my eyelids.

I wonder why you said

stars are born out of chaos.  

2014, Oh I never saw you coming.

I often forget the new ones coming in.

I'd still be sleepwalking in the city.

As the Earth goes back

to where it was a year ago,

I'd still try and keep not settling in.

The Earth begins with its new revolution

And me with a new resolution-

Mainly, to stick one thing in my brain

And write 2014 instead of 2013.

Anyway, Happy New Year ladies and gentlemen.

Time to hang this one up behind the door.

MIND IT

A loaded gun in your own hand may not kill you

but your mind loaded with the thoughts

of your lately wrecked relationship

can destroy the shit out you.

Even if it wasn’t a relationship.

Your own flesh tires you up.

Diligently questioning about

letting it revel in his

and for making a home in it.

Your own heartbeat stares you

outside of yourself, panting and

waiting for some clichéd answers

to calm it down.

Underneath your every breath,

You hear some soft lines

Of the poem he left 

In the corners of your mouth

while kissing the last time.

Your eyes forget to function

And take up different climates

From torrential downpour

To the dessert like dryness. 

 But they never forget to open up.

Every organ turns into

An explosive device

And that’s… that’s what it does to you.

 Every passing day you just

end up surviving the series of blasts.

one night stand

We stand facing each other

in a cosy corner

of a lavish hotel.

We argue over arguing

in front of a few known

and a lot of unknown people.

We try to knock some

sense out of our tipsy senses.

You crack a line and I- a smile.

A little prayer slips off my mouth

as I extend my left hand

to catch you just right.

A hell of high spirits

is there in the air

and baby heavens

in your eyes,

while your innocent face

bathe in the moonlight.

People sell water bottles

for 200 bucks

as if it will even faintly

extinguish what’s burning

in there.

You set yourself straight

on the backseat

quietly ask me to behave

and just pass out.

I could have almost

calculated it,

if I’d not been bad at maths.

An elephant in the room

An elephant is parked on the leather couch of your living room,

and you’re trying to spot it, far in the forest.

It prefers to stay inside rather run out to you,

because running requires lifting all 4 feet at once.

It has big ears but useful only for fanning, without your words.

It has a huge trunk that waits for you to introduce first.

Its wrinkled skin gets goose bumps with just the thought of your touch.

An elephant is parked on the leather couch of your living room,

silently thinking how you’d call it, post your booming fit of laugh.

Here inside it feels lighter without the sunburn,

but deep inside - the 50 pound heart is getting heavier.

It expects your vague realities to be poured in not less than a gallon.

They make its favourite cup of tea, especially on a hot and dry evening.

Just offer them without any peanuts, as elephants don’t like them.

An elephant is parked on the leather couch of your living room,

hoping to see you before it turns into a stone, into a statue.

While its big wet eyes give a chase to the quarter moon of the night,

the eerie quietness stays and refuses to go away.

Unlike the people who go away.

They always do when they give

a fuck about the damn elephant in the room.

SERENDIPITY

They say the earth laughs in flowers. And sometimes even the earthlings get to share it. 

On a not so very special evening you’re waiting for the red light to turn green. Those 120 seconds of your life make your heart run away wearing your blue reebok shoes with a wide smile. It is like it can’t stay at its position anymore. 

Right after you use the brakes and the wheels of your car stop spinning, your inklings begin to process. And you don’t realize the window is half opened; until the process of your thoughts gets interrupted by a voice. A voice of a boy who in his adolescence is clothed in poverty. He smiles at you with a broken tooth. You give him I-don’t-want-any-nonsense look and he smiles hard in his tattered clothes. 

Even before you roll your window up, he drops a red carnation flower inside. You don’t want it, you say.  He says please and his eyes grow bright. You nod in reassurance. He compliments saying ‘it’s looking so beautiful here, please take it. I don’t want money for it’. You’re silent and he goes on. You are confused and you involuntarily accept it. The next moment he winks at you and goes behind the auto rickshaw standing next to your car. Leaving you feel awkward.  You realize the auto driver is observing everything. He seems perplexed too.  

You take the red carnation flower in your hand, give it a baffled look and pan your eyes to the side mirror. And for the next ten seconds your eyes are stuck to it because the boy peeks from behind and hides back. He is playful and you can’t stop yourself from calling him back with a grin. A huge one. You feel the different shades of a usual day and then you present it to me before I learn the sweet fragranced tale hidden in its wilted petals. And it’s only afterwards I realise how it tickled the chime of laughter inside me just because of a flower. And what it confirms is that the universe is always speaking to us. Sending us little messages, treating us with reasons to smile and causing serendipities to make us stop, look around and believe in it.

Paradise Turns Perfect Paradise

Sometimes it is okay to chase the sun with the windows down.

Your voice is the only thing carrying across the highway,

disobeying every speed law that you ever thought to enforce upon.

Sometimes it is okay to cross over all the hills, in hopes to get somewhere more beautiful.

Where the sun sets in its full glory and that is the only direction the compass knows.

This is it.

My last journey of 2012. And the very first of 2013.

Elevated at six thousand eight hundred and something feet, we swished quietly to McLeodganj and beyond.

Drove for about 12 hours only to be welcomed by a silver light of a winter skyline, beautiful enough that I didn’t remember where my home is any longer. The clouds were floating in, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colors to my sunset sky. The stars were beginning to shine. The moon was beginning to sprinkle its inner light. The foggy windows around me were only telling me that it’s the only place I ever wanted to be. The place is believed to be the land of peace and hashish abound. 

Trekked further to Perfect Paradise. There we sat with our legs stretched out besides the struggling bonfire and my lips shrank to the serenity in low temperature. Cupped the gracious Old Monk in my frosty hands when the shrill winds cut straight through the layers of my clothes, then the skin and got wrapped around my bones. I tilted my head towards the starry sky and let out my feelings with a deep exhalation. My feelings got translated into soft fog before my spectacle glasses. I wished if I could fold the sky like a newspaper and keep it under my armpit. 

the place itself is a home to a thousand mystical questions and answers about beauty, the right, the wrong, and the deserving. And music of course. Wonderfully noted, octaved and naturally composed, this place sings its own melody on a ‘high’ note.

During the last day of the year, I got to drench myself into a space, so occupied, so absorbing, and weirdly small shaped hole in the universe. The space certainly got so engaging that plunged me into the ocean of meanings. Far away from the bustle of concrete jungle into the peripherals of serene mountains. Picturesque taste was complimented by Tibetan flavours. That literally sang symphonies in the mouth.  

The morning heat brought with it the vibrancies of purity and newness, and I stood still for a while inhaling just the peacefulness. It's afterall the secret of life. I found myself lost in the oblivion thought of the faces dimmed out and mazed out and doped out and out there for me to search, at the silhouettes of the hills in front of me.

‘How was it that the birds sing, that they gloriously fly, that the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning,that the sky is not just blue but ohh bluest of blues, that the pleasant air love idling in the trees without a purpose, that every evening blooms with the songs of peaceful hymns, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?’ 

Walking down the hill in the day time and stumbling back by the bright moon light in the streets of unknown neighborhoods was more than enough to stuff my chest with immense pleasures. When there is crowd and noise, I feel there is some trouble waiting to blow up. And when there is silence and people are like localites of Mcleoganj, there is just perfection and nothing to fill the air. 

After 3 days, the time when I sat next to the driving seat, the rearview mirror framed the exotic collage of my new year. The mountains have left me feeling renewed and more content. I sat mutely among the series of sighs and the awe  just dripped from the corners of my eyes. Passing by the serenity I was positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again, as if I am tuned to savour the pleasures bestowed upon me, until the time I come back. Only if I had the talent to put the beauty in words... It was mesmerizing.   

  

The best of everything was the company I had. It was fresh, crazy, clever, eloquent, well-informed with a knack for adventure. That is what I call good company. In reality it helped me living a dream. A dream where paradise was a perfect paradise.

Catch on Cologne

The last time you were seen was when you were walking through a museum. A museum of thousand skeletons robed with skin and scars. No. It was the kitchen of a famous restaurant, rolling noodles on a shiny fork and flossing through the front teeth. No.
It was the grocery section of a huge store picking up stuff for your friend.

Last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal pole, clutching your bags with one hand. You were wearing two pairs of socks unchanged in the last one week. You were wearing clothes that were drunk on the rain and some snow. This was how you travelled.

I was the mannequin in the storefront window you looked towards, truly stimulated by the lingerie design. Your eyes crinkled with a gooey thought of me. I was the tissue paper in your denim’s left pocket until that dog found it, sniffed it and tried to lick. I was the door knob you swirled twice. No. Thrice. There I could feel a heartbeat on your fingertip. I was the newly put up glass on the wooden window of the blue house. You walked past and I chased your feet for few steps and laid myself out rightly open. You looked busy on the phone and I looked lucky.

The crumbles of the sandwich you ate while smoking your not-so-favourite brand. The blank A4 paper jamming herself through the printer, afraid to talk to you. The beggar. Sat with a hat bumming for more minutes. When I collapsed at your feet, you continued with algebraic equations in your mind and refused to look at me. The third phone number printed over an advertisement, stuck on the white wall. The small dent on the railing fixed along the river Rhine. The solitary lamppost standing diagonally across the huge Christmas tree adorned with sparkling lights.

I was the bumblebee buzzing around your head with no agenda other than a good time. And you were last seen entering the airport, boarding your flight and flying in the night sky.