Poetry?!?!

Dedicated to my fellow poet friend and mentor, Mr. Pradeep Bhatt

Wish I could make these haunting words
go far away! Wish I could leave the surge
of all these incoherent thoughts behind,
buried deep, somewhere in my mind!
But they keep coming back as if
the iceberg of my subconscious world
has unleashed them all on my solitude
to be played like a hollow riff.
The hunger in my blood to fill it in
right then has never let me sleep and dream
and what is left in the end is insane,
no ideas, nothing sublime at the core,
just with the surge of words and scattered thoughts
like notes both in and out of the scale,
a song with no tune and no melody.
Until it is done an eerie agony
would never let me sleep undead and I have tried.
How I wish I could sleep for the rest of my life!

Green

Have I fallen in love with green tonight
when the soft darkness of the azure sky
had painted her face against the fleeting time
and if I have then why, when the hour came
to look into her eyes, I looked away?
Who knows! May be it is the bitter past
or the future, inevitably cold,
waiting for each of us at the day’s end!
Still, love, so it seems, is larger than both
life and death. From the whispers of the wind
I know I am in love with her tonight
as her face is painted on the azure sky
and her limbs softly clad in green and gray…
and still when I should look into her eyes, I look away!

Our Love

Our love was eternal, we said
that we could not live without each other
preferring death over a life apart.
There were more than a few others like us
who had grazed the same earth before,
some a generation while some
more than a thousand years ago
and almost identical were our words.
But life being full of twists and turns
as most of our words were undone
by fate or in the course of that wanted life
while charms and mystery grew too mundane.
How futile then our promises might seem
viewed in the clear light of posterity!

A Break

When you are dying for a break, long overdue,
weary from all those tedious nights and days
of mundane living in a stagnant life,
your eyes can no longer behold the scene
and ears grow deaf to the scrambled sound, of chaos,
the real quintessence of the shrinking world.
When too tired of the ways of human blood
and when for a break you are in dire straits,
all the earthly pleasures seem too stale,
too cumbersome to offer any threads
of joy to clamber out of this life and
the wind grows heavy with your unheard sighs.

A Lone Streetlight

Beneath my balcony a lone streetlight
with almost half its length buried underground,
paints a dome on the road in cadmium-white,
from the center twenty steps all around.

It began as a dim glow of pale red,
when by the sun, across the horizon,
a similar hue to the west was spread
and darkness descended like a giant carrion.

When that blush was gone from those ruby clouds
the streetlight had reached its maximum glow
and the dome too was in place, bright and loud,
half transparent, half orange and yellow.

The king of the ground and the air inside
that transparent dome is the lone streetlight.

When the sky has been reclaimed by the sun,
the king does not see that darkness is gone,
the transparent dome too is there no more
but the blaze is there as it was before.

I find my ways in the loneliness,
in that thick shroud of a naive arrogance
and in the obsession to a single view
that surround and define the yellow hue.

Burning in a blaze of glory, in vain, like us,
living as long as there is life, with no purpose!