"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I have found another terrace. 

Another city-line studded with yellow lights 

from the highway beyond, and 

another song.  

Another place to call home,
if only 
for a while, 

to spend solitary nights 

asking myself 

questions, some deep, some not,

and finding vague answers

or random epiphanies

and making decisions, 

some difficult, 

some wrong.

I didn’t think I would like this place- but I'm beginning to think it’s not so bad. I could grow into it, or it'll grow into me. If you really want to know how you feel about a city, get on one of its terraces and watch the lights go out of its countless windows, one by one, like a million candles blown out in little boxes. And if you can love the city by night, you can probably tolerate it by day.

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#8 Remember

Do you remember, how it was

when you first moved to the city?

Do you remember,

how shocked you’d been

 by their sheer numbers?

You made the slow progress, however,

from surprise

 to pity and then,

 to studied avoidance.

You learned the unspoken rules-

make no eye contact, you told visitors-

 you admonished the weak-hearted,

the ones who’d surrender

to hungry eyes and

desperate nudges.

You spoke of teaching men to fish,

unsevered limbs and lazy dole-outs,

and yet, sometimes, in moments of frailty,

your fingers jangled, looking

for loose change,

and you reached out

to gingerly drop your quota

of karmic goodness,

making sure, of course,

that nothing touches.

Still, you approved of industry,

helping those who help themselves,

you bought plastic bubble-makers

and flashy ear-rings you wouldn’t wear.

You sympathized with the limbless,

the homeless, the helpless,

you read the news,

and you remembered

the bright block-buster movies,

when you saw the blinded children.

When you first came to the city,

you watched and observed,

and learnt, like them

the tricks of the trade,

the giving and the taking,

the begging, the beseeching,

the reluctant surrendering.

And slowly, the years went by,

and slowly,

but naturally,

you stopped noticing

and wondering

or caring;

but they

are still around,

in the city,

begging and besieging,

taunting and teaching,

others,

just like they did you.

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#7 Next Week

Next year, we’ll move to New York,

and we will live 

in a tiny apartment 

with the paint peeling off walls.

We’ll spend the evenings

sprawled on a green rug,

where you will write

and I will read,

and we’ll look around

at our things,

yours and mine,

books and memories and other

broken things

neatly stacked

on the steps of the ladder

in our loft.

We’ll walk bare-feet

on wooden floors, and drink

cheap wine for breakfast.

We’ll skip lunch

to make love on the terrace,

to the city lights and sounds.

We’ll look out the windows,

through pale yellow curtains 

and lean over

the potted blue-bells

that you picked

and I love

and we’ll watch the busy streets,
and the sparkling lights, we will

look up and feel small

and big, 

all at once

under the Manhattan skyline.

Next week, we'll  move to New York,

and we'll remember 

how, like children,
we were,
enthralled,

when we talked about living

in New York, and 

when we were in love.

As is wont with a heart broken like mine, I read some things over and over again.

I read them one more time, hoping that I will discover something that I haven’t caught before, some emotion that I inadvertently missed, some idiosyncrasy of yours I don’t already know so well, so bad.  I know now, more than I ever did, your favourite words and go-to metaphors. I seek solace in the way you break up your near-perfect sentences, the way you capitalize some words to personify the objects and obsessions that define you (and sometimes, us). I feel a certain warm familiarity when I predict a phrase that is coming even before you do, I seek succour in the intimacy I feel with your mind, your machine, with your “idiom”, if I may.

And as I read, as I am vindicated, I rest assured in the certain knowledge that even though everything else that I once thought infallible has been cruelly wrenched away from me now, I will always, unfailingly, have your words.

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#6 Howl

I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by their apathy, pretending to be interested, crouching and cowering, and adjusting the brightness levels of machines to ease their eyes,

fooling themselves and nodding in indifferent agreement with the rabble babble of soulless networks stealing time precious irredeemable time under their noses,

who sit up smoking everything and drinking and more and sometimes less,

only waiting for the next time their bank accounts will be topped up again, and hoping,

knowing fully well it won’t, but hoping anyway,

that it’ll make a damned difference.

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# 5 Abstract Abandon

There is art here, all around,

framed and hung strategically

on the walls

because, you see, 
they must know we are cultured.

That we pause, sometimes,

as we hurry past,

and we deeply inhale

the soothing balm 

of vague abstractions
and obscure design.

They mustn’t think otherwise-

it must not be said that we don’t

look at the paintings,

that we do not have time,

and that the stark white light

reflects off the glass

and all you can see, if you were to look

away from the screen,

would be your own face,

haggard, dark-circled, defeated.

They mustn’t know that all the art is dead,

that it hangs in mocking derision.

They’d rather believe that

the colours, and patterns,

can revive us,

make this worthwhile.

There is art everywhere here,

beckoning to flights

of fantasy,

but nobody looks,

nobody lingers,
and nobody flies.

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#4 I need you to know

I want you to know,

that because

I don’t say the words,

doesn’t mean I don’t feel

those emotions- intense,

that ardor, overwhelming,

frightening, even.

I need you to know why

I won’t say those words-

so trite,

so common.

I want you to know,

that, I wonder,

what if,

the passion, the experience

those feelings,

are trivialized

in utterance.

I want you to know that

I could tell you over

and over again.

I could scream into caves,

and listen for the echos

of those words, that will

barely, hardly

so inadequately express

how deeply,

fiercely,

and consumingly,

I love you.

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# 3 Write Love to Me

Write Love to Me

If you feel like writing about me,

of that fleeting moment when you slip inside,

of the flashing rapture of expectation.

and even though you're within-  you're also wrapped around,

and when I look up,

I see your eyes,

but you gently move inside, and

I turn blind

with a longing- so basal-

it’s shameful, at times.

If you feel like writing about me,

write about those fleeting, flashing moments when

your warm tongue prods and nudges, discovering

places I didn't know exist

and when you insist

on moving faster and harder and sooner

and I soar, we soar-

together, you and I.

Write about those fleeting, flashing moments,

as we summit those peaks,

and the sore slow descent,

back to our tangled heap of limbs and love,

write about the ache, barely there

that remains.

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#2 Kundalini

Thank those urges, I say,

for the “residual power of pure desire”

for lust, for passion-

for sheer physical being.

For the mental explosions

of that avid experience, in union.

Thank the fervent longing, I daresay,

for the slaves that we are.

uniting us,

in animal pursuits.

Elevating us,

reducing us-

and gently reminding us-

that evolution, notwithstanding,

progress, thought, philosophy –

and all else in between-

cannot free us from the captor

of desperate, decadent,

sometimes, even divine

Desire.

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# 1 Chase

It was, at first, a conquest-

a project, even,

the pursuit of the unlikely,

the thrill of the crazy chase,

and the vindication of my own charms.

It was, at first,

about only myself

and my obsession.

But now, by and by,

when I get better,

I also get worse -

only because

now I want more –

more than mere victory,

or reaching the finish line.

It is, now-

a dream, delirium;

a craving, even,

the pursuit of intimacy,

and the warmth of reassurance.

It is, now-

a gentler, stiller, trail

but harder,

so much harder.

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Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

                                                                                    ~ Charles Baudelaire, Be Drunk.

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I am, therefore I get drunk.

If you thirst to know who said, "I think,therefore I am,"
your thirst I will quench;
It was Rene Descartes, only what he actually said was,
"Je pense, donc je suis," because he was French.
He also said in Latin, "Cogito, Ergo sum,"
Just to show that he was a man of culture and not a tennis tramp
or a crackle barrel philosophy bum.

Descartes was one of those who think, therefore they are,
Because those who donot think, but are anyhow, outnumber them by far.
If of chaos we are on the brink
It is because so many people think that they think.
In truth, of anything other than thinking they are fonder.

Because thought requires the time and effort to reflect, cogitate,
contemplate, meditate, ruminate and ponder.
Their minds are exposed to events and ideas but they have
never pondered or reflected on them
Any more than motion picture screens meditate on the images that
are projected on them.

Hence our universal confusion.
The result of the unreasoned, or jumped at, conclusion.
People who think that they think, they secretly think that
thinking is grim.
And they excuse themselves with signs reading THIMK, or, as
Descartes would have said, PEMSEZ, and THINK or THWIM.

Instead of thoughts, they act on hunches and inklings,
Which are not thoughts at all, only thinklings.
Can it be because we leave to the Russians such dull pursuits as
thinking that the red star continues to twinkle so?
I thinkle so.

                                                                        ~Ogden Nash,  Lines Fraught with Naught But Thought.

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All You Who Sleep Tonight

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

                                                                ~ Vikram Seth, Sit.

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