You asked:
"How you came to your dead end?"

How did I?
Perhaps too much of chasing butterflies,
or maybe running barefoot in hot, avid pursuit
of those looping, berserk kites

adrift like airborne serpents

in delirious evening skies.

Then there were those chimeric rainbows -
sedately fantastic illusions of dream jobs,
and loving homes with ambrosial glows.

They all eventually led to the same prosaic end,
for, any-which-way, all roads wound up
at appropriately conventional
and consequently beaten bend.

Till the chase went on, it was the same old story -
All fulfilled ambition promptly subject to
increasingly falling marginal utility.

After all of it was said and done,
every little crown lost and won,
the agony of the question still remained
no last words arose,
to which to exclaim and say Yay!

Life had me in its hook. See:?
while this is what it meant to be free: !

✽

Fossilized in my den, I stared wistfully
at life's irrevocable loose ends
and this is how my friend
I arrived at my proverbial dead ends.

There are times when you feel like
reaching out..............full length,
to grasp -
the ultimate;
something, which you will not like
to dispense away with
no matter who leaves or alights.

Somewhere, from where you will never waver
again -
an Equilibrium.

But most of the times, the best you can do
is to swish your hand and latch on to;
thin, slippery, lukewarm air, vanishing as a wraith
into a starless, roiled chasm......
and you are viciously abandoned
amidst the pungent whiffs
of the random metropolis.

Every night I lean against the rusted gate
of this modest rented apartment
and give a fish eye to the stillborn night.

I see a lean column of smoke from a smokeshaft
...obscure...far off;
reaching out......for the stars
cruelly dispersed by grimy draft.

I see the flickering, pale beam;
the solitary, asocial gleam
of the municipal  lamp;
reaching out meekly....towards me,
getting devoured in a frenzy
by the soft, persistent charge
of the relentless molecules of dark.

✽

And loneliness becomes admissible....
.....again

For whatever it is worth...
_____

Once upon a time
I came upon a flute;
chic, delicate and fine -
fashioned impeccably
from exceptionally fine wood
hauled discreetly
from the flourishing forest
of fumbling youth.

‘twas just one of its kind.

A surrogate to which
you would never truly find.

One scale at a time
one throb at a rhyme;
its notes ripened into
mesmeric, beatific rhymes.

✽

The day was Wednesday
and December was the month.
My fingers had gone all numb.

Aquiver...

I held the flute nimbly -
the dew on my vernal lips
caressing it gently,
when the clasp came undone
and the comely flute
split in two
or maybe five or seven.

The tally is incidental
but the occasion,
for sure,
was nineteen eighty seven.

A proxy I could never find.
‘twas just one of its kind.

✽

Just this verse remains
like a tease that dwells
amidst lost reminders
of contiguous yonder.

There are
standard connotations
of ubiquitous love:
...******,
...religious,
...platonic
and now electronic!

They
usually take us away
from the home base
and we are lost
in the mores
of colourful
or colourless
(but elusive nevertheless)
illusions...
of gods,...
of heroes
or simply pictures of people
we have met on the internet.

We do not understand it
for if we did
we would cease to seek.

...that the seeker might be the sought
and that no wars need be fought
for that which can be
calmly identified on the inside -
- is something we repetitively miss
and while we all magically have it,
it is in and through the other
that we ignorantly solicit
our abiding congenital bliss.

Dear Author:
I am posting
your 'the-then' thoughts
on this web-blog
since I do not know
where, in time
and in place
are you lost.

If,
someday,
you happen to stumble
upon this web-page,
send me a message
and I will quietly
remove this entry
in exchange
for a small fee:
The privileged readership
of your soul-stirring poetry.

❀

WE ALWAYS REMEMBER

You and I,
wherever we are
are fated to love.

No matter
whose poems are being read,
You and I,
or something of us
springs up in each one
in some way or
another.


Whatever doesn't ever
reach the lips
has reached the poems
...already...already.

There,
Do you blink?
as if to disillusion me.

You talk of bright worlds ;
unknown to me.

My side of the discourse
is limited to sighs and tears
and blushes,
and wiping off
the spreading Kaajal †
with my baby's mouth-napkin.

But you aren't even married yet.

And
by the next time we meet,
I will have painted my lips again.

You remind me
of what I couldn't be.


© The Nightingale

† Kohl

You were a tree.

Not too short but not surpassingly lanky.
The foliage wasn’t thick either
and yet not scrimpy enough
to make the tree look shorn or deciduous.

Ample light passed through the leaves.
The elements were temperate,
neither sultry, nor betraying a freeze.

It was neither day, nor night,
hard to tell the dark from bright.

There was a placid rustle
as the breeze politely shuffled
across the nubilous chaparral.

I stood there

knowing it is you
and the flowers from the tree were
profuse.

They kept falling on and around me.

As you lie on the creaky hospital cot,
there is a lot that can be thought
by listening to the uneven, rapid wheeze
and by looking at the hitherto unseen pallor
of your otherwise ruddy cheeks......

Many (im)possibilities can be perceived;
that a father I may never be;
that my father may never be
the same with me;
that you may well have entered
the last lap
in your race for that ever elusive
qualifying tag;
that come what may, one day
you shall really be a non-entity
and there may be only me
to see you lying limp and lifeless
just as you now seem to be......

Perceptions may not be real.
The only reality, is a single soul searching query:
Does any materialist passion
or for that matter, a self-effacing spiritualism,
allow anyone to cause the demise of the one
still huddled up in that warm,
allegedly safe darkness of anonymity?

Isn't a human life, howsoever insignificant it be might,
too much a price to pay
for even the rarest gain...
in this provisional little world
of putty clay?