THE I

Where is my core from which
spills love, anger, nothing
like a never ending lava
not necessarily in the same order
sometimes one ,sometimes the other
most times all

Voices and voices
all clamouring for attention
for being missed,heard
understood,misunderstood
bottom line -loved

I am yours
is never true
The I always remains
leaving no room for
anyone else

The I is the one sad,happy
angry,submissive
disgruntled
the prize and the prison.

OASIS

I scrub the lines on my forehead
on the Sufi's threshold
the lines of my palm burn
on the marble floor
destiny flows out

Rumi, Hafiz stand by
love is an inscription
embossed on a skin
by a pair of lips

like day and night
it grows, wanes,changes
never ceases
sometimes a wound
sometimes a weapon

I am weary of
this beating in the chest
Can the dead stop pretending to be alive?

you have knit all the wisdom
about women and men
about love and loss
in your words
my questions roam in your anecdotes
looking for an answer

"ISHQ" travels miles and miles
of my arteries and veins
to reach nowhere

and sometimes peeps out from
the corner of my eye
to blur my vision of the world

I am a sand dune
make,unmake
scatter, collect
I once loved an oasis.

boxes and hoaxes

an old melody on the radio
the strange resemblance
of a fellow morning walker
to a person 
may stir open
the Pandora's box we call past.

sometimes its nothing,
nothing and the box opens up ,
horrors and joys
 come tumbling out,
each slightly coloured
by the other ,
by remaining
in the same box for long.

Am I the instrument or
am I the subject of your experiments, life?

Like children playing cat's cradle
you twist the thread of my soul
around your invisible fingers
and I often fall twisted in myself.

Rituals and more rituals
for the beginnings and the endings,
why do we believe, why we don't?

hanging
between auspicious and inauspicious
a grey cat
scared of all the noise
waits for the traffic
to cross the road.

kids behaving like adults
adults carrying
child-like fragile egos
topsy-turvy
we live your hoaxes

Goosebumps
what did you just do?
 

GRAVES, MYSTICS AND POETS

The fuchsia queen
of some erstwhile carom board
abandoned on a sidewalk
forlorn
waiting anxiously
for a befitting
royal burial

alone
by a busy city road
which cares
for neither life
nor death

in the footsteps
of the Great Mughals
or the corridors
of the empire
in which the sun never set

thousands of souls
that are lonely together
trying to fill
that same blank
with books,lust
power

the Sufis and the poets
the revolutionaries
and the mystics

square pegs
in round holes
misfits all
hiding their rough edges

looking for
the perfect other
to fit in
to smoothen out

stories not
worthy of
any telling
live and die

phoenix-like
the myth of the city
feeds on people
and lives on

how many graves
I walk on each day.