Infinite boulevard

masterpiece

There are times still, in a distant retrospect which plays in a backward looping circle of endless memorial transitions between who I was and who I am dreaming to become.
I faintly remember watching them laugh when I painted my first masterpiece.

‘It is too blue, as if someone whitewashed it with hurt’
‘It is disfigured and asymmetrical.’
‘It is sad’
‘It is boring’

In limited ways that I could I have talked to sculptures and paintings than I have to a string of people.
But there is always a glass wall that I hit my head on because what belongs to this world will always be here and what does not is beautifully nailed into frames of gold, beyond this wall.

stretched canvas

A lot rough around the edges, I know that I am too damaged to be loved. But aren’t all of us? If only love was easy, we’d never fix the damage caused. Walking around these paintings that have probably hung onto the same nail for years, seeded in me the fact that we’re all a piece of stretched canvas waiting to painted in a way we love with the colours the major portion our wardrobes hold, framed and mounted, glazed and preserved, glassed and varnished till we find that nail and hang onto it for as long as the walls don’t crash.

And then there are days when you are missed a little more than on Sundays. So I keep a blinking light on with my eyes shut, tracing back and forth in all the places that went dark. I have loved you enough to know that there are even things that slip off our hands when we try our hardest to not let them. But to watch you belong in a moment that I know I am not a part of, puts me in a corner I’ve grown to like now. This corner’s my home. A haven for all my sob stories. Do you ever really want to love me anymore? Did it ever truly hurt? We are given brief moments of happiness until it all starts to fall back into the wormhole of neverending unhappiness.
And there are these days, when I love you a little more than on Sundays.

normality deficit

it’s only until the clock strikes two after midnight that you start feeling all lovelorn and dejected; like a sense of normality deficit occurring in your life. you want to be loved, you want to be needed, you want to be touched. you want to be wanted. and when no one ever gives you that, you begin to make your head wrap around the fact that maybe, you are in the undeserving lot, that maybe all this emotional baggage is too much to carry, that maybe you’re after all weaker than you think or maybe it’s just your childhood shoulder dislocation that makes it harder for you to carry things around. but none of that seems to frighten you enough unless people are no longer interested in you or as they say ‘in love’ with you. there are things that we can and cannot control. love is not one of those that we can

collecting storm.

It is only frequently that life is sufficiently successful in gathering up a storm that not only sweeps you off your feet but also makes you lose your grip, your sense of self control and every other form of it. In times that are significantly hard for everyone, some of us have been formidably unfortunate to be at the eye of the storm. They say when once you’re in it, you don’t give yourself the opportunity to contemplate over the weather report on the television. In just a couple of days, I’ve come to realise the scale of anguish at the loss of a person you dearly love. However known a fact it might be, nothing is as poignant a reminder as finding yourself living through it. We are given brief moments of happiness until it all starts to fall back into the wormhole of neverending unhappiness. It’s only about time that you learn to oar your boat through storm regardless of its high or low reading on the simpson scale.

Entry no: MDCCXXIX

I wake-up with eyes swelled up like that after bee stings and a stuffy nose.
Tear stained.
But it’s only until the alarm goes off in the morning,
And I hear the whistle of the cooker.
Mum is upto something again,
One of aunt Della’s recipes as I recall with boiled peas and vegetables for the breakfast.
Dad, a victim of schizophrenia after years of chronic obsessive compulsive disorder;
Prefers staying indoors, with repetitive cups of tea and lethal doses of news on the television.
Bruno comes to me wagging his hairy tail over my face, reminding of his walk I’ve been putting on hold for a week now.
It’s seven in the morning.
The walk,
That is in all likelihood, the only sixty minutes out of the fourteen forty that gives me a chance to reflect back on the choices I made-
A full retrospect.

You see, there is an entire promenade one needs to walk in order to forget something or somebody.
It begins with memory erasure, followed by selectively removal of things you desire to forget.
Things slip from the conscious, if not the subconscious.
For me, it was his voice that I first forgot,
Followed by the way his nose shone in the moonlight,
The marks on the apple of his cheek;
Eyes halfway between the top of the head and the chin,
That you could fit another eye in between.
His mouth was at one third of the distance between the nose and the chin,
The corners of the mouth line up with the centers of his eyes.
The top of ears line up slightly above the eyes, in line with the outer tips of the eyebrows
And the width of his shoulders was equal to two head lengths.

Together with all these little idiosyncrasies,
I remember the way he made a weird sound while chuckling,
And how he set his hair right up, followed by precisely two spritz of his favourite cologne.
It still takes me by surprise how he never grew weary of the same fragrance and put it on religiously.

Owing to the things that I remember and forgot over time,
There are still his habits that I’ve inculcated.
Before and since him, I’ve known that we love who we love,
With respect to all the things we are and not,
And without respect to all the things we will ever be.
People like us,
We do look for happiness but can never cajole it into something that would outlast time.

Bruno wants me to let go of the latch and let him run wild in the park.
It’s a beautiful day.
The clouds have a little bit of hue in them.

Memoirs

Bösendorfer

I ran a piano bar for angels

Who wanted a night off.

Halos glaring at them from off the table,

And their wings dipped in heavy gold.

Prayers like smoke from the sin at their lips.

Swearing by Styx, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

For it works fine but scares a little.

But are they no more than celestial intermediaries between God and humankind?

The stars are creaking, gilded with myrrh,

That soaks up to their bones.

Walking along the cul-de-sac with feet above the ground,

In realms of gravity, they perform pirouettes and barrel rolls

On melodies of liturgical clavichords.

Jiving in and around the dark corners of the bar,

I can see the wings still inflayed with gold.

They take a bow around the sidewalk, And darkness descends on me –

The mic is down,

Iliad has been brought to an end

The curtains have fallen from above,

The clock has struck twelve,

And the gig, the gig is finally done with.

I’m supposed to tune into a lament,

Searching for a place to harbour my solitude,

But I’m not used to performing alone or seeing an empty stage.

And so I bid the last farewell to my dearest Bösendorfer,

To take a night off just how the angels did.

Concoid of fragile threads

On Thursday nights, the only sound I can hear is of my lone footsteps.
The joyful laughter of kids and alike is merely background noise to me – almost nonexistent.
It is a grey-blue spiral spinning around me
Whose lines are fading within each other.

The noise of clashing swords in and around the world that I have learnt to turn deaf ears to,
Because all it does to me is ignite a sense of envy for all the merriment around.

The sound of the open road running miles away from this world to yours,
Or the voice coming out from an empty house that once had its voids filled with laughter,
Or the whistle of a train that marks the departure of someone you loved.

Loneliness is whitewashed and lustreless, hollow and eerie,
Reverberating doom and rue through these vessels that run dry.
Do you quiver when the cold winds blow, plunging your hands right inside those pockets?

The sound of a clock that’s ticking as each moment surpasses,
The alert tone of a message that my mother dropped,
My cold hands without the moisture and suppleness,
Or this broken window that I am looking out of.

The wine that sticks to my glass like glue on a paper,
These old pair of socks that have abstract patterns made on it-
I still find warmth in them.

Loneliness is concoid of fragile threads,
A nightmare of an unreal dream,
The pitter patter of tears on the ground,
And my quiet sobs against satin pillows.

I am riding a carousel of desolation and sorrow,
That I no longer wish to fathom.
This grey keeps getting darker under the sun,
While the threads entangle in unison.