Voyage

I love the smell of smoke in the mornings
The stony stupor of this vagabond mind
Sometimes in these macabre afternoons
I embark upon a lowly odyssey in some
Scarecrow alley, haunted by some failed god
Armed with this futile obsession to unearth
The ancient pain of this widowed night

I love to watch these hills in winter
Clothe themselves in ragged shawls
Of white. Like old women, these hills
Know things more important than
The fear of hunger or war, or love.

And as these lines die into the sounds
Of this breathless ramble, beloved
Let this evening wind confine you in
The lifeless thirst of our hearts.

Winter

These days are long and dusty
Do not blame me if I turn to stone
Like a false god. I have seen many a
Sullen afternoon die a slow death
Baring themselves to the hungry night
Like unwilling women selling love

This day, beloved, will it be any different?
Today, like other days, you shall not rouse
As this indifferent commotion recedes
Into the lull of this sunlit funeral
Today, I shall roam these streets again, this
Ancient burden of being a man, weighing
On me, like an insipid, forgotten sin

And we shall remain mere tombstones
In these dusty graves. Will this winter
Promise another bout of hazy memory?
Only these lifeless lines shall banish us
To the hope of this brutal love, and us...
Strangers in this tepid, misty rain

Pain

You do not cringe when you are young
It is a crime for men to be afraid of
Death; or things more dreadful
Like the barrenness of manhood
Before the skies became too alien to bare
Myself to its prying eyes, I never understood
The pain of being a man

Since then I want to be young, again and again
Sometimes in these desrted lands, the clouds
Come tumbling down to caress my breath. Seven
Summers have passed and still I dread
The solemn oaths of these dusty evenings

And today, when I have loved and lost
These effigies of the past still beckon me
Like a whore with whom I had shared
A wintry night in Shillong.

Poem

These times do not attract me anymore
Like old women, like faded shoeboxes
These days do not deserve love. Sometimes
In the wintry pilgrimages in this ghost town
The nefarious breeze resurrects itself from
The whirlwind of these lazy Sunday afternoons

Time and again, I have seen this town
In these faded plaques of memory. In those days
You could play with fire and dust. Now people
They do not speak of the monsoons anymore
Or throw caution to the wind. As ma says
These times are bad. You evade their company
Like the gazes of whores

Instead we talk about things which don’t matter
The insignificant ramblings of life and death; Or
The eternal promise of a poem at the oddest hour
With which I’m smitten.