No holiday

A solemn year, full of experience
walks shyly into disappearance.
This is an escape it stages every calendar.
It knows to the heart, that it'll be back.
Nothing like a holiday for it.
Time and again, it has to be a witness
Albeit the one who doesn't blink.
It never seems to be bored.
Moves on like a passer-by.
Its passage is marked in a life-size atlas
and the memories tied around it
are always for safe-keeping.
While it only sheds such foliage.
Neither a shoulder it offers
to the people committing more to life
nor a sigh it whispers, to the ones
inching closer to a good-bye.
It is deeply callous to our feelings.
Had it been a human
it would be in trouble
in various courts of justice.
All ye beings
it's coming again.

Birthday

OK now.
It's 12 alright.
Everyone, where's the cake?
Let's take its photo first.
Candles, one, two, three
Can't put twenty one.
Not enough girth.
Guys, you need not do this.
No no, it's for our pleasure.
That's fine. Light them now.
We are, one-two-three..fourteen
Someone is missing.
Blow, blow. A bit harder.
Yes, now, that's good.

Distant landscape

Best friend.
Even the word
belongs to a different time.
Prehistoric, animistic times
of a personal civilization.
Sifting through
the school albums in mind
I add flesh to the hollow cheeks
and bones to the balloons.
Though well connected I am
with all the gadgetry
I still lose out on some of them.
The guy who had lot of money.
The absolute failure in all classes.
The Prometheus who whispered
how children are born.
A secret he stole from the creator.
The one who had generous parents.
The one who talked a lot of pulp.
There is always, the one
who followed a girl.
The one who thought that romance
was smiling silently in a crowded bus.
There is that someone, who always felt
really out of place, so much so that
he never left to venture out.
The autistic one whom I might've made fun of.
The one who just visited during the exams
Who could move only his hands due to a spinal snag.
These and the other ones, the ones known
The ones who are vocal beyond the usual clamor
will have found their best friends.
And lost them too, to the world
so that there's an alcove
on whose window sill sitting
one can admire a landscape, that was childhood.

As if in ambition

The Past
trips and tumbles down
into a dry valley of forgetfulness.
Years beyond a certain date
wrap around and dissolve into a moment.
The little traumas lose color
and the times spent in bad taste
are touched up with golden dust.
The grip on entirety loosens up
and the winding ways of life
take their course, beyond the bend.
Not all is lost for me to be quixotic.
There are persistent memories
scaling up the heights of amnesia
to accost me in surprise and
remind me of a common spindle
from which we drew
the thread of our time.
It just spins now, emptily
like the void of a universe
that has moved on.
Spread around, as if in ambition.

Depression over Bay of Bengal

With one hand I sip tea
and the other one waves.
Sees eye to eye
a muse drenched in poetry.
Then we talk, leaning
towards each other.
And in the rainy chatter that ensues
there is a mention of sadness.
A drifting cloud, with disheveled hair
passes by our table as gloom.
Sorrows form a sludge: dark and distressing
and snakes go about, guarding
the hidden routes to happiness.
I brush off all this aside.
This regular depression talk.
There is no point in recounting
darker side in darkness.
There is light in the eyes I say
Light of yesterday, it might be.
But has its reflection on today.
I plead the tenacious one to look at
the incidents gone unrecorded.
There is happiness in motes
like the burning stars in an endless dark.
All this yapping I offer
to a sadness that has
a lot of catching up to do.

A Face

Is there an escape
for my fears of this world?
Every day and every moment
There is extinction in this world
Then, why wouldn't it apply to them?
There is a frantic knock
on the doors of my imagination
and I flutter in the ensuing wind
cutting across coldly
and burning my heart out.
I know I can't blame anyone else
I don't even have a phantom face.

Nonsense

Nonsense makes a weird sense.
Everywhere, across the universe
the sensible floats in a sea of nonsense.
Waves lash out and the storms
twisting their strong arms
look out for preys to crush.
Sense would not creep up
into a grandmother's story
without the world being the opposite
and scaring the children by twilight.
We don't understand
the nonsensical wars
and a lull, that is peace.
What sense do we make of our argument
to that leaning ear ?
It is difficult to measure and agree
that our experiment of understanding
is repeatable. When there is a smile
of approval or a smirk of satire,
there is only an inkling of non-sense
showing its viral side.
As puppets on display, we float
hanging in the air by invisible threads
shining, smiling and forming a story.
And yet there are a thousand reservations
on others' theory of life.

Heels all over

After some page in the calender
There is nothing better you can do
than fall in love.
Your head over her heels
And her heels all over your head.
It is an amazing feeling, of course.
Mind you, all this should happen
with an unclear beginning
and with no ends in sight.
You then go on.
May be a break-up or two
but stick you should
to someone for a fall-back.
And when it is too late
there is no escape
but for the rest of the journey.