Just a Lament

Rarely do I find people in company of simple things

With a pencil on a scrap of paper

To sketch a favourite face, a place.

Or

To dive into a piece of poetry

May be to Frost,

To climb on his Birches,

To pick apples,

To mend a wall.

Or may be to Shakespeare

Just to admire

What a piece of work is man!

To ponder upon Ophelia’s goodnight.

Or to hear Fur Elise

To get soaked in a tub of water

Just to close one’s eyes

To retain the splash of colours

A Van Gogh, a Monet or a Vermeer.

Instead…

Fingers just tap tap tap

To fritter words on white screens

Unintelligible though you think legible.  

Clicks fatiguing new clicks

Images gobbling up moments after moments.

Just a lament

By someone who walks a college corridor

Day after day

Hour after hour

In class rooms I feel

A whiff of youth indifferent

A scent of frozen minds

A heady whirl of bewilderment at a small silence

A trail of ennui as they yawn

There crumbles my finger, my white chalk, my blackboard. 

The One and the Other

Every pair of eyes hides a world of myriad worlds within
And no one can inhabit the other
It's exclusive
Brilliant in its own way
With its own ultimate suffering
Its own version of pain
Love and longing and flaming desire
Each an enigma to the other
And still you strive
To slice out a part of it 
Or it fidgets to slide towards the other
Sometimes accidentally
Sometimes with effort
Only to slither and fall apart
Only to be returned and glued back 
It never eases itself with the other
It may coexist, entwine, and luxuriate in the other
Only to discover this and that about the other 
Which pulls back one to oneself
And acknowledge and insist on oneself
The never ending coziness of one with oneself
And never with the other.

Wanderlust

Bring me sleep and I would bring 
- Dozens of thoughts 
Nudging onto my delicate eyes
Sugar coated 
Intoxicated
As pipe dreaming 
As violet grapes
Thoughts- blossoming red and wide
I see them in dazzling colours 
In bitterness and in sweet
Puzzling to my beloved 
It scrapes my skin inside 
And baffles his vision outside 
It consumes all my sight
Burns my bones
Rips my nerves
And can upset his love ridden heart 
But I see I see its vitality
All in white and in clarity
It emerges as the only beauty of the thinker
On which you first set your eyes 
It all began there
And the thinker will always be the same
In quiet persistent unrelenting thinking 
Come and know me
The thoughts never escape the thinker
And both can only be despised together
Sleepless and wanderlust. 

The Comprehensible?

       I see that loneliness is not a quiet phenomenon. It is absolutely noisy and chaotic. The long lonely hours of my egotistic contemplations…Wait…are the words comprehensible? Many say it’s incomprehensible…hopelessly tangled with crowded images and strange feelings. May be. For it takes great effort to see things from another eye. To hear those sounds from another ear. To feel those thoughts from another mind. “To feel those thoughts”; it can be done only by the metaphysical? It’s almost impossible to be rational and emotional at the same time.

     The woman in me switches back and forth to being emotional and rational. At one time it pines for the beloved, for a small touch and the feel of that familiar breath. The other times it convinces and consoles the heart that being only emotional can bring stupidity and misery. That I should reread Donne’s Valediction Forbidding Mourning though I have taught the poem a few times in class. The poem forbids any lamentation from the beloved’s part since the man who has parted from her and the woman who is in waiting are like two legs of a compass. The very celebrated metaphor that any literary enthusiastic would always cherish and wonder. Like the fixed leg of a compass makes the outer leg draw the circle in its perfect way and would reach back the same destination, the trust, the love, and the strength of the bond would wonderfully preserve their everlasting compassion and intensity for each other.

     Longing in reality can be unromantic, miserable and a series of disturbing tantrums. Reality can be beautiful when it gets the consolation from these metaphors and valediction forbidding poems. I have always groped for beauty in reality when it starts to slowly sink into those monotonous moments. I have groped for lines, words, or may be at least the sound of those iambs. That Shakespearean rag of me comparing my beloved to a summer’s day or me imagining him sighing like a furnace as the young lover in him longs for this chaotic woman.

     I don’t know the words here are comprehensible or not. The tiredness in me has brought me on a low key where my hands shiver to dive deep and scare the perceiver, the non-existent reader, the echoing empty theatre. Whatever that is difficult has got its quality of being difficult through times of effort, keen attention and perseverance. Some may loathe it since it would challenge their comfort zones of being all “normal” and never wanting to sieve through and accept the challenge. Whatever that is easy is easily admired and applauded because it can be commercialized; call it popular, the taste of the mass, and the comprehensible sweet ticking sensation of “can be understood”. Some artists can play at both ends.  I can try to be the one.