Anchit

Beyond Words and Paper

Tonight  

I want to write a poem

only for you.

I want to leave the pages empty

and scribble in the margins,

Tiny little words.

Your words.

The words should not talk

Of the moon,

not of the scattered stars

and not of the dark grey clouds

Who have often reminded me

of your veil.

I want the poem

to be devoid

of the river’s calmness,

of the cool sand

and of night’s mahogany fragrance.

I want the metaphors to shrink away

and similes to die and be lost to the wind

and

rise from the poem,

Only the letters which spell your name.

Tonight

I want to write a poem only for you

So that it becomes mine.

Tonight

I want the poem to begin

from the tip of your eyelashes

and flow through the night.

To the lovers who were sitting in Gandhi Maidan one evening.

 I have been sought by many

but have truly been loved

by only two women.

I have sought no one

and have truly loved only one

so far.

Seven lives it may take

and seven loves in each one of them

to understand why the leaves decide

to wilt when the clouds go away,

or why the typewriter gets

out of ink on the nights when one

sits to write a love poem.

The solutions to the mysteries of the universe

are unavailable in the local book market.

In the meanwhile;

we keep writing poems,

attaching words by the arms and commas by the head,

rearranging the clouds in the sky

and we keep falling short of

that one perfect poem.

Wayfarer

One may never completely learn

the etiquette of a language 
that has come to him 
on imported perfume bottles 
and sweetened milk cartons.
One tries though! 
'La amour'..... For example. 
(One makes funny faces
in front of the mirror pronouncing it.) 
Make a mental note. 
(Mental note: use it to have some effect on people. 
See if it’s working.)

The language, whatever it may be, 
demands a person
to nurture it with some blood
and build houses 
to make it feel home. 
(I wonder how would someone 
Feel home in something
Foreign.) 
(Mental note 2: vice-versa)

But, 
whenever a language meets a person, 
(in whatever way it visits.) 
It brings to him, 
The woes of his battles, 
The joys of its games, 
The smell of its grasslands;
and a person, 
on his tongue, can taste 
The seas of that language. 
(Mental note: make a ship so
big, it sails.)

(Die! Choke on these expressions.)

There are corners in a language 
where similes live; and
attic where metaphors hide. 
(Remembers, a ghoul lived in Ron's attic.) 
Any traveler can rest there. 
(With the journey so long 
and roads this hostile, 
One needs homes too many.) 
(Mental note: vice-versa that.)

Both are home. 
(“Excellent thought”. merci.)