Footfalls, fair winds, echoes, blue mountains….
and within the reach of the personal heaven,
a few packets of wisdom scattered here and there.

Wisdom is a very somber expression…
heavy word bending under
the weight of years of loneliness, gush of joy intertwined with a mass of silence…

Wisdom floated in and out of my perception of years
and years to follow…
wisdom ran me dry….
licked the last drop of consciousness that I had

and before I fell I could here the throbbing of uncertainty in my veins…

and I knew

wisdom would one day,

some day

take my leave,

without my knowledge beneath my crust of consciousness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And of course it would come again another day, another time from life beyond what I could see and hear…from life beyond what I could feel in the breath of my breath…and it would linger for a while and glide away into another world….

where it was I never knew…

And we shared this love hate relationship always….the mirror held us, captivated us together, growing apart from each other, caressing distance, making love, this time to time…

Together we bonded like pieta, holding each other, bleeding, weeping, flesh and tears, blood and sweat and departure…that is how it always happened…

we knew it would be the same.. enacted in the same Shakespearian manner over and over again until the curtain fell….

and I picked up another shred of wisdom from where you left…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Darkness dripping from my eyes, lonesome walking an extra mile,

and my death again…

who would carry my corpse dear friend across an extra light year?

Will you, stranger?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don’t wash away the stains of blood;

don’t wipe your brow with droplets of sweat

dripping down and touching my feet…

.....your last tribute? ....

I wonder…

Only this and nothing more

SCENE-I

~~"Ek haate law bojha, shunyo kore dao onyo haate"~~

These days, nothing moves, nothing speaks, nothing breathes. These days I have come to realize that everything translates to silence. The church bells don't chime anymore. The wind doesn't whisper tales of northern lights. The last leaf doesn't move. The shadow beneath the candle pregnant with the crimson does not flicker.

Take away your long winding roads.The bends don't excite me. The ends don't thrill me. Take them away from time's lovelorn corridors, string them in timeless chains of many journeys.

The heartbeats however woke up to the new day. Time was chained to its sighs....the solitary prisoner of silent dusks.


SCENE-II

It hurts. It always does. The first gush of pain--wild, searing and warm....she sits with the broken pieces of glass as the pain started spreading. First, the blood trickling with the mere knowledge, that there, somewhere in the deepest of veins, there is an aching need to feel and breathe. Then the pain receded and resurfaced again.More, she cried. With each pulsating second, the pain conquered parts unknown. She was thrilled.

Now that I sit here, lifeless and pale, staring at particularly nowhere, and the pain seeps in gradually, slowly, I realize once again, that I could give you even more--my colour.

For what am I without you?

SCENE-III

Then there are moments in life. Moments, like tiny packets of energy. Life comes to a standstill when they start breathing. The child lives through the moment. The woman lives, too. And then, as if nothing had happened all the while, they see each other. She recognizes the girl with a slight nod and with a gentle pat on her broken shoulder, both approach the pyre.

The urn moves with flowing tides and reaches the ocean. The last clouds fare across the twilight zone. They promise to amalgamate with her burnt out existence and spread the colour of union across the sky. Birth of yet another twilight zone.

And they remained divorced from each others orbit.

SCENE-IV

Life is peaceful.So very peaceful.For one starved of it, this is a moment. A breathtakingly beautiful one.

A gigantic serpent curled around her, almost eager and hungry. She inched closer. Consume me, she cried.

SCENE-V

She was a denveresque sad song. Take away your sunset evenings. Just take them away. Take away the rain forests too. The more she tries to make her way to the nucleus, the more difficult it is to move. And when she looked at her palms, she found them moist and blood stained. It was as lovely as an Impressionists painting.


SCENE-VI

~~"Tobuo pothik, thamo kichhukkhon"~~

Deep, deep, deep blue sea.Her body floated in opheliasque motion to the tunes of the rippling waves and the songbirds' rhapsody in her house far, far away.. Far away, in the island, the woods canopy her soul under the greenwood tree. The leaves rustle and call out her name.The birds drop twigs on her epitaph--'Here she sleeps'...the grass grows greener...all the while she floats by trying to trace her invisible footprints on the sea to the distant shore...her eyes closed and her body pale and stunningly yellow, ugly almost...and her eyes blue like death.The urn also floats with her. The pole star overhead tries to steer her by.

Suddenly she opened her eyes. There were a billion stars overhead forming a stairway!