You May Never Truly Know

Must it be enunciated
Through loud speech,
Flowing wine, or a ringed finger
The love I bear for you in my heart-
        Like a tourniquet that tries to contain
        The overflowing grains
        Of sandy memories,
        Or a cloak that covers
        The back that has leaned on you
        On a hundred sunny days
        And a million cloudless nights-
Must I immortalize this love
With something as little as a word,
A sentence, an ode?
I shall fail if I try,
        For you have given me
        Mountains of contentment
        Seas of rippling elation,
        Islands of solitude where we live as one-
        Breathing together and dying together-
        But also a silent fear of the greatest loss
        I would ever know
        If you rode off into the sunset
        Without me on your horse,
        Without me in your heart.
So I will immortalize this love
With loud speech,
Flowing wine, a ringed finger,
And a vow that announces
        My unflinching devotion to the man
        Who reigns over my kingdom,
        Lights the fires in my dungeons,
        Sings the songs in my valleys.

The Simple Life Of A Know-It-All Writer

If I sat down to make a list of all the bad things in this world, it would probably end up being larger than the Great Wall of China; terrorism, wars, murders, rapes, fights, deceit, economic meltdowns, market crashes, natural calamities, epidemics, gender inequality, racial discrimination, religious intolerance- to name a few. Closer to my own simple life, I'd say daily mundanities like an angry boss, an insidious fever, a wanderlust that has remained unquenched for far too long, and a self-devised complacency that keeps me from being better than I currently am at what I do- these are the evils that I hide in my Pandora's box.
I find that we tend to ignore the answers to all our questions and the solutions to all our problems with a foolhardy determination; as if there is a special comfort we derive in knowing that there remains a task at hand, an enemy to conquer, a war to fight. Is it the process of tackling our issues the very quicksand that prolongs the problem in the first place, slowing us down and restraining us with arms of steel that keep us away for as long as possible from the peace and contentment that sits on the other side of that finish line?
As humans, do we sometimes create unnecessary walls that separate us from our goals and keep us from evolving into finer beings?
So many times when I look at my life and at the world around me in general, I find myself asking this question. My father has always said that this world tends to complicate matters merely for the sake of it, just so that there are longer forms to fill, more complex formulas to publish, more nonsensical laws to dictate, and more formalities to abide by. Do we do these things involuntarily due to some primitive form of cynicism that distrusts all things simple and believes complexity to be the guiding light towards becoming a more polished, intelligent species as a whole?
There is a quiet calmness in simplicity. Sometimes a mere yes, no or maybe can sound poetically beautiful and can soothe your mind like a remedial balm. Sometimes you must take your Pandora's box and hurl it into the ocean so you can be the best version of yourself.
Simplifying is so easy; every hurdle is a man-made construct and utterly destructible.
All we need to do perhaps is to take a step back, inhale nice and deep, and in my case- practice what I preach!

We're All Growing Up

No one ever really writes too explicitly about the effects of age on the human mind. I mean sure, there are a hundred and one accounts of how wisdom descends upon your unknowing, unprepared self with each birthday and teaches you what life is truly about. But in my eyes, such words are too succinct and too distant; they give you such a third-person's view of the whole thing that it makes you feel like this is something that only happens to people on paper. (That's the thing about literature, it can assume such an intellectual pose that you start to feel meek and stupid when you read it and begin to wish for the writer to get off his high horse).
No one ever writes about such things with that alarming honesty which you need to sense in prose so as to actually go ahead and believe the writer when he says that you won't always stay young, that age actually does matter, that no one can be Peter Pan in the real world. I won't be a pessimist and say that you start loving life lesser with the appearance of wrinkles and grey hair; that truly depends upon your brain, your thinking, and on the reservoirs of hope and happiness you carry (or don't carry) within yourself. You can love your life more over time, with the arrival of true love, good friends, material comforts and a deeper comfort under your own skin. In fact I'd go ahead and say that these things do happen for most of us.
I'm more at peace with myself than I was two years ago (knock on wood, please!) and that's largely because of certain leaps of faith I allowed myself to take in a youthful abandon which our twenties are infamous for.

In any case, age will undoubtedly break your innocence into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle which stays splattered on the floor of your mind and stares at you with confused eyes and a questioning look, almost as if to ask you what's going to happen next. And as the dots connect with time, you find the answer to that question, and the innocence which you once wore unconsciously on your sleeve slips further away into an all-consuming whirlpool where your past will live on.
There will be photographs to remind you what certain memorable days were like, old dresses which will remind you how thin you once were, sepia videos which will remind you how your grandfather sounded when he was the man of the house, moth-eaten pages from your journals which will make you smile at your naivety. And through all this, you will be informed of where you started from and how far you've come.

Life will go on and you will age without knowing it. That's the way the cookie crumbles, that's the way this story goes.

Holding Hands

Around the tremendous subterfuge
Offered by my faithful glass,
I imagined a life that had witnessed
The subtraction of
Familial obligations, moral inclinations,
And salary-slips,
And found myself failing miserably
At the seductive hands of inebriation.

My eyes scanned the circumference
Of my soon-to-be-empty vessel,
While the voice of reason screamed
An angry complaint into ears that blushed
With the flame of heated blood-
Perfection is found rarely in reality,
Much like unicorns or effortless success,
But happiness abounds in plentiful
When your imperfections are concurrent
With another,
And he loves you for these,
For the times when you speak
Of the sun and the earth,
And everything in between,
And when you dream in unison
Of ruling an empire that you wish to build
With bricks, blood and love
As you fit into one another
Like a blanket to a cold winter morning
And smile at the world,
In your imperfect glory.

The Relentless Recurrence Of The Night

Why is it that we humans don't panic when our world is engulfed by a velveteen darkness with an unflinching regularity every twenty-four hours? Why don't we wonder about the whereabouts of the sun when blackness strikes, slowly and surely like a dull knife slicing through hot butter?
Our ancestors stuffed this acceptance of the night into our blood; day follows night, and night follows day. That became the law of the land, the way of life. Not taking into consideration the scientific explanation of why we must live in blackness for half the day, I think we have accepted these few hours of the night simply as they are the providers of some much needed respite from the unrelenting demands of our daily lives. The night allows us to take off our masks, our costumes, our makeup, our pretenses and to seek comfort in the arms of an anonymity only darkness can give.
Like a heavy thundercloud that regenerates each day, laden with moisture and with concern for the parching earth, night comes to us again and again and again. And it becomes a man's friend to unwind with over whisky, a woman's ear to vent to over fences and through walls, and a poet's parchment to praise their lover and immortalize them upon.

Traveler Of Both Time And Space

Like rice-paper that melts
At the slightest touch of
A tongue,
And bows that unravel
When the right strings
Are strung,
Shadows that live
While the sun seeks to die-
I hunt for the right chances
And the right words
That I ought to write.

The words I ought to write
Might not be mighty enough,
Other poets might write poems
That are made of sterner stuff,
But I promise to make
Your reading worth the while
And for you to end each reading
With a happy thought and a smile.
For isn't that the greatness
Of the written word and of ink-
I can reach you without any knowledge
Of your joy or suffering.

You might smile or you may cry,
Or remember a long forgotten day,
But for a second your worries vanish
And you think solely of what I say.
Life is long and it's all yours,
It's all yours to seize and own-
You'll always have words for company
Even when you are alone.

Love Song

I do not wish for you
On those salty summer mornings
When the sun bestows on us
The harshest whips of its heat,
Unrelenting and merciless.
I do not wish for you
On smoky winter nights
When my fingers choose to hide
Beneath layers of refuge
And are too afraid to explore
The skin and pores of
The man who reflects my echoes.
And on evenings that are flooded
With rain and with sourness,
I do not wish for you.

I wish for you only when
The days are fresh
And smell of pinewood,
When the sun is kind
And the winds are friendly,
When the evenings are like
Old friends you'd like to meet
At forgotten coffee shops,
And when the winter
Is, in fact, a happy shade
Of autumnal orange-
Ushering snowy whiteness
That shall wash away
All despondence.
I wish well for you, my love.