Numbers

Slowly but surely the numbers come back to me and with the digits the realization that makes me simultaneously laugh and sadly sigh; that something that I should be trying to forget for years is the one thing coming into view through the frittering haze of inordinate drinks. I glance towards my phone and find twelve scattered cracks gazing from the useless screen back at me. The vista in front is still skimpily covered with darkness and through it comes the moans of the sea as the waves wet the shore with lingering caresses, eternally reluctant to let go; much like my absolutely lonesome heart on a beach barren of another waking soul.

Lonesome and also, I must say, craving for a long unheard voice. There must be something stirring in my soul that I feel plethora of memories rising up through a depression in my chest and watering my eyes. I shrug it off and shrug it off again, until nostalgia overcomes me and I find droplets falling upon my palm on which I rest my face.

“Hey”, I hear her jarring voice and feel the gentle shift in the aura around me; the slightest of touch upon me so starkly reminiscent, so beautifully aching. The breeze from the sea must be cold and that makes her hug herself.

“How long has it been?” she asks.

“About two years”, I say.

“No exact number of days this time?” she chuckles.

“I figured the setting was dramatic enough”. That makes her laugh softly and the sound of it pours through my ears and reawakens the forgotten slumber of remembrances. Her arm slips through mine and the inevitable scent of her hair perfumes every particle of my being.

“We should have come to sea once”, the thought emerges from my throat.

“We should have done many things”

I tremble at the stabs of time and find the staggering pace at which it moved desperately cruel. The first lights of the morning have begun to pierce through and the silhouette of the horizon moves in illusions towards the depths of the ocean.  I take a deep breath of the rusting wind and look around at the emptiness that makes me ache and blissful at the same time. Perhaps, melancholy is the poetic lover of solitude.

“Are you alright”, she asks

“I miss you”, I say.

“I understand”

“I miss you, truly and absolutely. Like the first time I felt my heart break.”

She sighs and places her head upon my shoulder. I shiver and let the remembrances of her gentle pressure against me wound me. I don’t know whether love is as abstract as a silhouette of a woman’s body against the nebulous darkness of a room or something as tangible as all the beauty of the world flowing underneath my skin.

“I am at all the places you lost me”, she says. “Won’t you come get me?”  The sound of her voice mingles with the coveting music of the ocean and as the sky above lightens up with the faint glow of vicinal yearnings, I feel her dissolving in me, bit by bit, until all that is left is a mist in front of my eyes and the fragrance of all the days and nights spent in writing verses on body and soul.

Forever and a day more

Just like the sea our consciousness is a million fathoms deep and mostly we remain complacent floating on the surface, unaware of the treasures that maybe hidden deep under. The treasures and also the abandoned chaos that we better have been not aware of and when this chaos tries to engulf the entire self clawing on the skin from the insides, we crave for some semblance of clarity to take us back to that state of utter placidness; those agents of relief, like a beautiful day when you can’t help but remain enchanted with Nature in all her glorious nudity and tell all the worries of the world: not today. With the evening the sea breeze carries tunes to fill you up with salty remembrances and suddenly a forgotten song evokes the face of the beloved.  And along the parched shore you walk, watching the sea making a run for the sun crumbling into that orange light scattered over the horizon. As the night approaches all your distant longings are washed over the white sand of the beach in a collective sigh of the ocean roaring in the reign of the lonesome queen shining more clearly than ever in the night sky. Under the silver gleam lighting up the pathways this realization dawns upon the self that it is love that matters, love that lights up the darkness within, love that is more beloved than the once beloved herself. Love in the form of poetry and prose that binds us to this limitless cosmos, forever…forever and a day more.

At the stars (throwback from the sea)

All that is around: music and the words

and the waves as they break upon the hull.

I am floating with the stars, on a quest to touch the moon

Sometimes the wind hurts my eyes and forever comes too soon.

 

The days are fine and nights beautiful as they get

Wind gets warm but still cold I sweat.

Wandering on the precipice, wondering where you are

And if differently we lived if we looked more at the stars.

 

Sometimes the words don’t come and sometimes they flow in a gush

Why do we keep running, what is the rush?

 

The surface is calm but the insides are in turbulence.

Still collecting the pieces in the aftermath of the storm,

Somethings don’t let go of us

For a part of us they form.

At the crossroads

Then my heart ripped open and memories fell in
to eventually pour out in verses
About things and
how it could have been.
Or was, but slipped through our fingers
and left the dry echoes to linger.
Or we threw it away, caught
in the life, to metamorphose
and be more accepted.
And so we went at the crossroads.
With a last few traces
on the pages
to dissemble in tiny multitudes.

The bleeding Dahlia

Soft, sweet and blossoming

O you flower of March

Oft you announce the coming

Of winds that make the ‘lyptus arch

 

These days your reflection

Sits on the ground, gazing

At you and the sky above.

That girl, taking turns, now on

The petals, now the blue of love.

 

This evening she carries within her

The yearnings of broken self

For a touch to last a lifetime

But the sun should sometime set.

 

The sky at the edges fraying

The imam in his piety praying

She hugs herself, a trembling flower.

The love metaphor: fated to wither.

 

The faint smell of blossoms

That balm on her chest

For the heart underneath

Broken, but the spirit unbent.

 

Where you had to leave, my love

To be so far to not see this:

When the girl you did so lovingly kiss

She muses, resembles a dismal dove.

 

When my body burns in the fire of love

And your memories play those sadistic tricks

When the days are spent in longings

And in the nights, the thorns on my bed I pick.

 

How I wish you would be here

Still to hold me in embrace

Look, the wind has settled down

Maybe today it shall rain.

 

And then she settles on her feet

The first drop on her upturned palms

A smile on her face

Her love leaves no qualms.

 

But one thing must be done:

She caresses the flower,

Standing under the providential shower.

The rain seeps between her body and clothes, she shivers

Then plucks the flower and crushes the love metaphor.

She plunges into the ocean of melancholia

And in her hand bleeds  the Dahlia.

 

Roads of reminiscence.

Today when I lost myself again, I took out the letters from yester years

With a wry smile I sniffed them and once again fought with the tears

With a match in my hand, burnt them for only that made any sense

And with the fumes of love, walked alone on the roads of reminiscence.

 

Came across us and laughter roared in the sky

Took a while to accept it was really you and I.

Walked a few paces further and found myself undressing you

Had to look away for it made me wonder if you think of it too.

But the sighs made me look back again

Till the view faded and climbed a different terrain:

One where we still held hands and watched the moon,

But the parting ways, did we not both rue?

The trembling eyelids and tremulous lips

The scent of your hair and the incomplete kiss

Come in my way as insane semblance,

From the roads of reminiscence.

 

Lonesome days and nights falling across as shadows

A lot of love left, through my veins in agony coursed.

All the sense of longing from the asphalt arose

Till I learnt to weep in poetry and prose.