Kyon

मोम बने एहसासों को
क्यों आंच कोई पिघलाती नहीं
सीले ठिठुरते आँगन में

क्यों धूप कोई आती नहीं

उमड़े आँखों भर ये सैलाब
क्यों गालों को नहलाता नहीं
बरबस ढह जाए ये बाँध
क्यों प्यार से कोई सहलाता नहीं

है शब्दों का कोलाहल अंतर में
क्यों कोई मगर सुन पाता नहीं
अखबारी बस्ती के बेनाम किस्सों
की खबर कोई क्यों लाता नहीं

है सबका साहिल, सबके मकाम, सबका घर
क्यों मंजिल बस अपनी ही आती नहीं
मैं हूँ बस जिसका, और जो बस मेरा
क्यों ऐसा कोई साथी नहीं

.............................................सवाल सौ हैं, जवाब एक तो मिले

Fix Me

Fix me,
for my life rotates
on loosened hinges

Wire me right,
the short-circuited brain
malfunctions ad-nauseam

Shepherd the wailing lamb
through his silences,
from the jaws of judgement

Lift this trampled flower

fallen off your Eden,

back to deliverance

Amortise my guilt,

over tranches of 

your sure-footed retribution

Take me home,

for me & my turpitude,

come off you only

Loveless, Shameless

This one goes out for all those who have loved and lost. This one is for those who can't give up, despite having been given up on. This also goes out to those of us, who can scarce attain finality in goodbyes: the ones who just can't cut the chord.

Listening to a Nashville Radio Station online, I come across this wrench of a number, that twists & turns one of our great sorrows: drunken loneliness, and squeezes out its sap, so much so that you see that its your tears that are rushing from the bottom of the mug to froth over at the surface, several times over. The song's called 'Need You Now' by a strangely named band called Lady Antebellum. 

They say one should never have alcohol on empty stomach, coz' it hits you hard. I say, its even worse when you run it through a system caging a broken, rejected & dejected heart. It pours out, and can go all over the place. Resolves flow away with it, so does ego (most of the times, self-respect too) and sensibility.

It ceases to matter how unceremoniously you were shown the door, also who was responsible to what extent, and what all has one gone through, or made the other go through. Alcohol's organic formulation has those stronger, malleable bonds amongst Carbon, Hydrogen & Oxygen atoms, that create such an alchemy that the subject of your attention is endeared to you, no matter what! So, it pains all the more to see him go, and the thought of him finding recourse in someone else's arms stabs you. Try running alcohol over your bare wounds, and you'd appreciate the searing sensation I'm talking of.

The urgency in the requisition of love, amidst drunken pining, which drowns out reason & ego, breaks all resolves, and makes you wonder, why the hell did you let it all slip outta your hands! So you reach for your phone, and try his number, or if you're feeling nobler, you send out a message: either ways, you try and reach out. Some nice souls do pick up the phone and listen, some preach, some are curt, some are ruder not to pick up, and some are coolly indifferent.

Some wonder what has gotten into the individual to be getting so desperate, so as to be going back on his words of keeping away. What perhaps we don't get is the fact its like a naked body shivering in severe cold. No sir, it doesn't get accustomed to the winter. It keeps on shivering till the warmth of a blanket encapsulates it. 

The drunken loner is perhaps most likely in his unabashed purest form. Whatever his ego, machinations, attitude, circumstances, tendency, et al are making him do in his sober times, don't matter now. He's telling the truth. He's laid his heart bare. He's ready to be shamed by you again, because he'd rather take your barbs and bleed than not feel anything running in his veins.

Alas! Some of us learn the hard lessons loss teaches us, only under alcoholic influence. We cry, plead, beg, seek forgiveness, or even punishment, but nobody takes us seriously, because we're not-sober. If only life changing realizations started dawning on mankind sans inebriation, booze would've been out of business by now.

The Pain Flotsam

आँखों के धारों में

इक खोया पहरा बहता है

पानी सा दिखता है

पर एक सेहरा बहता है

उतरा है ग़म नीचे

दिल में यूँ गहरा रहता है

कंकरों से हलचल हो न

दर्द ठहरा रहता है

Dance, I did

Advises are strange entities: they sound different each them you receive them. Sometimes what earlier felt like a balmy solution to your troubles, pokes like a hollow sermon. Happens all the time to me. Sample this song from Lee Ann Womack, called 'I Hope You Dance'.

It is full of sensible paradigms for leading a life, less stabbed by pain. Yet at some cynical moments, to me, she sounds like a crooner aloof from the tragedies she's trying to remedy through her number. But at other times, when the breathing turns heavy, the song releases a thaw inside me. It wises me to the inevitability of happenstance, and yet the power of choice.

And I buy her key advice of the song, by the truck load. Elsewhere on the net, I mentioned that, of all the places on earth, I'm happiest on the dance floor. No, I'm not the best of the dancers, not even among the better ones, but I don't have two left feet either. But, that's besides the point.

What transpires when the floor beckons, with the DJ belting out some thumper is that some imaginary fetters unshackle from my feet, and all worry leaves me by the ringside, and I dive in, like a free bird (or maybe like a fugitive running away from morbid sorrow, which is trying to enslave him, and the only firewall keeping it off is the disco lights going above me). On the dance floor, I don't have a pestering boss demanding a report 'RIGHT NOW!' I'm also shorn off all relationships that create bondage. I also suddenly become capable of letting my inferiority complex go for a walk, while I jump, shake, head-bang, boogie and what-have-you.

So much so that I become a rivulet of sweat, flowing right 'from the top' (pun unintended). Suddenly, I cease to care if the sweat might be offensive to others (what the heck, others are getting sweaty around me too).

Number after number, the pain eggs me to go on & on. So, while Womack's lyrical fear 'God forbid love ever leave you empty handed' gives me gooseflesh, I carry on dancing, even her wish that 'Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens' doesn't despatch relief at my doorstep, I don't cease. Even when her exhortation 'When you come close to selling out, Reconsider' has been torn to titters by me in my erstwhile life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I don't pause to indulge in shame. I simply choose to exercise my option B: no sitting out, just DANCE!

The only time hope wins its bout against cynicism for a fleet is when she says,

'Living might mean taking chances

But they're worth taking

Lovin' might be a mistake

But it's worth making'

So, indeed, I have lived, and I have lost my bets on winning here, and I've loved & I've erred, but I guess I'm fine; so far, the music doesn't stop. I guess now why I dig music and booze: temporary distractions both, but very, very effective!

Hush, Love

Have you ever choked on your tears? Ever cried so much, that at some point no voice came out, but the mouth agape, and the silence felt leaden? Ever cried to a point where you said, "Give me a lot of joy, now that I've cried copious tears"?

As the saying goes, 'boys don't cry', and so can't I (often), so I imagine my tears and the catharsis they bring alongside.

So when Celine Dion asks the heavens to open up and wash away her salty stream in 'A New Day Has Come', I wait for that magic to befall me.

Like the Asian model in the video, who begins to unravel in her shower, either perchance or by will; I've tried reconciling my ego with my ether, standing under the forceful slaps of the warm waters

Just the thought of that exercise gives me goose-flesh of sudden respite.

Doth heavens actually listen to the woebegone outpourings, and answer them match for match? Thank God for that not happening, or we'd always be under a deluge, for this world is indeed Pandora's opened chest, smarting us all, turn by turn, unwarned.

And then, sometimes the wails cease, voluntarily: they've known the futility of waiting to be sheltered. They steel us, somewhere inside, oft not in a good way. The stings we received, become our antidote and soon, somebody else's poison. We pass the malady on.

.

Suddenly the resplendent sun rays in the video hit me too. A dark corner lights up. I wake from my reverie of hapless brooding. Is there something out there that actually thaws these frigid, steeled hearts, in a flow which bubbles in flute glasses and not in the moisture of the yes?

I'm still poring out of the window for an answer, a ray of light perhaps.

Will love's dawn fall on these dark horizons ever?

Blast From The Past

I'm walking back home, yet again. Another evening, and I can't get a taxi. Since the courts forced the government to phase out the old ones, I guess the numbers plying on-road has come down drastically, or so I get to feel like.

So, blessing the day I got myself a rented apartment close to office, I decide to make a move. So a la Ryan Reynolds in the starting sequence of 'Definitely, Maybe', my earphones get stuck in snuggly, and the music begins to unfold.

A song or two, to my present liking, and I keep pushing the forward button for the rest. Been meaning to write about the songs that get me, if that is what it takes to exorcise the demons within, I yen for something oft-heard yet still reassuring.

And we reach Robbie Williams' 'No Regrets'.

Suddenly the song strikes: aurally and visually. I see Robbie walking to someplace, with a leaking jerry-can of petrol (or was it diesel), leaving a trail of the inflammability behind.

How antithetical is the video to the lyrics (or have I missed the dark subtext?): he feels exonerated of the the gloom that palled his erstwhile life, in form of a reckless lover, and yet he's walking suicidally around town.

The evening has gotten inkier, and I can see my shadow looming in front of me, courtesy the pale yellow incandescent bulb hanging above a roadside tea-stall, that I've just paced by. I feel one with the protagonist in the video: been walking through these days, leaving a train of combustible vitriol in tow, which is about to catch up with me, to a fiery conclusion sometime soon.

I've neared the turn, and I'm blocks away from home, as the song reaches its climax, and Robbie is on the closing speech. I recall the trail catching fire somewhere, and running towards our man, him unaware. I sullenly pray for a similar spark somewhere in vicinity.

As Robbie delivers the coup de grâce, and pronounces his relationship "officially DEAD", the flame catches up on him from behind. I close my eyes, almost wishing myself to explode in an inferno.

It doesn't happen.

I keep walking on.