What The Stars Know And I Don't

The Lake

Beseeching
I look at the stars
Twinkling as scars
On the dark landscape of my memory.

Screeching
My words in my ears
Mere seconds converted to years
From the time you left me.

Pleading
My heart to for his love
For the heaven above
To pull aside the curtain of fury.

Feeling
The arrogance turn to dust
The soul poised to burst
Into a million shreds of agony.

PC - Mohit Tyagi

I sat alone, alone with the stars, remembering the tick-tock of his steps hurrying out of our house. The tick-tock of his leaving resonated till much later in the sounds of the clock. Time serves as a reminder of his love and my envy, his embrace and my pride, his loyalty and my doubt. I’m sitting, sitting along, gazing at the stars, to spot a speck of his reflection.

I know not where he is. Probably the stars do.

Kitaabon Sa Rishta - Part 1

Main kitaabon mein uljhat-ti
Kabhi kahaani ki parton mein sulajhti
Nazm si khoobsurat
Ghazal ki nazuk
Ashaar si daqeeq
Aur sher si bebak
Meri zindagi zard panne samete
Phalsapha ban chali thi
Gham ka sabab na thi woh
Khushnuma ho chali thi
Khayalon ka anjuman
Safed chaadar se dhaka tha
Sard fizaaon ka majma
Kitaabon ke oopar khada hai
Yeh kitaabein, mulaayam baatein
Kadak panno mein bolti hain
Sardiyaan hi toh sach hain
Yeh raaz kunkuni aankhon si kholti hain

Source - bookjunkiepromotion.com

P.S. - This is the first of a four part poem. Next part to come up in a few days. 

Rewritten

Part I - Unwritten

Part II - Rewritten

There are these mornings when you step out of the bath and have your hair eerily smell of him. And this, with the smokiness of his smell alive in your shampoo. How does that happen, I have no clue, but I believe that smell makes a man. Smells help you remember people, especially those you've met only a few times and have happened to draw too close for comfort. Of course, I am not talking of people -I am talking of him, whom I had tried to breathe in via the cup of Earl Grey. Too close for comfort. At this nervous proximity, features dissolve and olfactory senses takes over. Do you remember your breath quickening the last time he touched you - not with his touch, but his vulnerabilities? The classic search and yearning for your own, personal Byronic protagonist takes over all senses - and ridiculous, smoky smells become enticing. Smoke is addictive, they said. Its bad, but addictive. So perhaps is he. And I still say perhaps.

The initial impact is always the strongest - matched in intensity by a brackish wave crashing against your senses to leave you psychologically and emotionally uprooted, with little premonition left of the good and the bad, the right or the wrong. You're submerged, and you might even begin to enjoy the floating, light sensation, scarce reflecting on the fact that in moments the salty, scratchy liquid would have entered your nostrils, choking you; your eyes, burning you; and your heart, stopping you. You're not floating, you are drowning. But do you still fight for survival? Do you shake yourself up and urge the delusions of a grand journey to vanish? Do you apply all your might and push out this thing that is choking you from the point at which lies the source of your existence? Or do you give in, and flow and hope that perhaps in time you'll reach an island all yours. Not pretty, but yours. After drowning that deep, coming alive to humanly necessities would irritate, at least for sometime.

It was not easy to grasp him, literally and figuratively. However, that the difficulty would begin manifesting as a corrosive, intense force within me so soon was something I was not prepared for. I cried, but even worse, I did not stop enjoying. It was like the romance which fatalities inherently comprise of. The ride with the jerk was getting jerkier - but would I like it as much if it were any different? He was not as indecipherable now as he seemed dubious. He was unwritten still, and gloriously so, but I rewrote him in the moment I saw him allow me to walk away. Our acquaintance was a few days old, but we had begun expecting some ridiculous, scarred part of ours to be tended to by the other. Weighed down, and weighing down.

He smelled of smoke. Not just that, I reckon he was a creature of smoke. If you could hallucinate molten smoke, that's how his eyes would look at their worst, and their best.

My memories of him are of the moments I spent with him inside my head, no necessarily in his arms. And this should change before smoke rises to narrate its own tale.

By Leonid Afremov

Unwritten

There is this clear, brown, whiskey-ish tinged glass of Earl Grey resting lazily on the table in front of me. Its been sitting like that for ten minutes now, and even though I really want to sip in the warm liquid and feel my nose and throat react to the subtle strength of the concoction like a cold child wrapped in the benevolence of a blanket, I merely inhale the aroma and stop. And smile. And remember. Wasn’t he similar to this cup of tea – magnificent in his beauty like amber in a crystal goblet, but someone to inhale, not someone to sip from too soon? Or ever?

I wasn't falling for him. I did, however, for a brief moment, fall into him. He had a careless stare, but one which could pierce right through you when he so desired. He had a million irrelevant details to talk about, but somehow, when his velvet voice touched the words, they acquired importance, even if they were mouthed out in a slumber-deprived, slurred speech. There was so much visibly wrong about him, and yet, there was nothing I could point at that I did not like. He had it, he flaunted it. And no, not in the average style of a self-possessed narcissist. I mean, narcissist he was, but strangely enough, he flaunted his vulnerabilities with, almost, a performative ease. Perhaps that’s what he was – a performer, and a darn skilful one at that. Perhaps I was seeing him exactly as he wanted to be seen by me, my own judgement feeling miniaturized under his imposing (yet not arrogant) personality. In plain terms, perhaps he was a jerk. But then, perhaps he was not. And this dint of a fiercely enticing possibility kept my senses in an overdrive – for I had to use some, and curb some. I was not yet sipping, you see.

At the end of it all, I reckon I could finally arrive at a safe inference about him. He was not a majestic idea bound in the rhythmic prosody of a refined poem. He was the gloriously unwritten plot of a novel which held the promise of indecipherability since its inception in the author’s brain. If anything, he was that. To top it, he had a cute smile. And since remembering that smile puts me off-track in a strangely lunatic sort of way, I should probably focus on gulping down the cup of Earl Grey, now cold, but also pregnant with reflections of my thoughts, or him. A cup of tea, sometimes, is all it takes.