h.o.l.d

Death blooms
in my veins
quietly.

You touched
my fingers
and scraped my soul.

I slit my eyes
open
yet dreams
are unforgiving

Fever burns
weird alphabets
in my memory.
Please tell me my name.

Whisky
etches a song
in my head
but I forget the tune.

I am fading out
frame by frame
Just. Hold. Me. 

The heart's blank verse

The city is painted in the hue of your memories
sounds echo still, every note intact.
The only thing alas, not synchronized with time
is my weary, pallid, broken heart.

The autumn of the evening dissolves
into melodies the sleepy bird sings.
The leaves are waiting to turn to amber
from dead tree trunks the winter springs.

I see a young girl puff a cigarette
and I trace my fingers for traces of you.
My eyes turn mellow like shriveling cinders
the smoke doesn't let any dream through.

The sun recedes to the hollow of your palm
it's last ray kisses the shore goodbye.
Sea waves run like madness on a high tide
a lonely moon utters a lonely sigh.

Do footsteps actually sound like cymbals
or mind plays tricks with the trickling rain?
That world is tangentially apart from ours
in which you said, you'll come again.

I can't put together the mosaic of your face
nor recreate the way you call my name.
Just wait and in waiting pet these words
the wildest ones just love can tame.

The city paint peels and memories fade
in the blank vacuum, all echos depart.
The only thing still, not synchronized with time
is my hoping, dreaming, waiting heart.

My rusty heart...

Loneliness is a very private type of sorrow. It grows in your heart, shaded from the smiles of the people who love you most. It quietly seeps in your days, dimming the  light of your eyes. It hangs like a leech from your tear-ducts, nourishing itself from a steady supply of tears till the point it becomes immune even to the salt dissolved in them.

You become an island with no docks for a boat to be tied on, you create sea-storms to prevent ships from dropping anchor near your shores. You create a world in which no people exist. You steel yourself against any warmth received from fellow human beings.

You become quiet and you let go of words in your vocabulary till the time you can't converse even with yourself. There is a huge difference between peace and quiet. The same as between loneliness and solitude. Solitude has a direction, a purpose while loneliness is the absence of either of these.

You purposefully erase all traces of your being. You lose all hope of being rescued. There is something particularly melancholic about being there on a bridge alone. It's the closest you come to being non-existent...being a passive observer of the world going around doing its business. Sure you do come a little closer to the moon, but that cannot warm your heart up.

And then one day you burn all bridges.
---
I open the book of my life and wonder through the pages that have burned through cigarette...I look at the coins I collected on my trips to countries I can no longer remember. The more I write, the more I forget, it's like a blackboard I never read again. Every time I erase the stuff I had written and start afresh, knowing very well that the writing is only going to be there for a short while of my life.

Some days back as I was in another one of my lost moods, I came across a faded, rusty postbox..there was no lock to it, the door was open...I checked to see if there are any letters in it. The last one that the postman forgot to take out but I could find none. Imagine days of being full of envelopes containing several emotions and then being abandoned. Left empty...with no secrets yet with memories that are so obstinate that they kill you but don't leave you in peace. Remember that tree in In the mood for love...the one on top of the mountain...where people would go leave a secret...this is one of the last ones of those trees.

Not with blood, soul or emotions...we are all made of memories...I dissolve in air...one memory at a time...