of straddling tongues and more

my memory of you is of salivating tongues. and tasting the queer geometries of us.

didn't we both have our favorite holes. 

it is hard though to decide what those tongues did to each other.

it wasn't just 

sex.

eat,

crawl,

scratch,

knead,

poke, trace,

twist, nudge;

a hundred verbs would have to come together to begin to describe what they did to us.

those
straddling
tongues.

there had never been a body whose entire breadth of existence and states of matter I had been so intimate with. 

you...

are my own.

when you slept,

i would sync our breaths

so that I took yours in with every one of mine.

i tasted the nails you once clipped,

and did not you wonder,

why I kissed you so much?

it was delicious,

refreshing,

to drink your kisses.

even now the thought of it makes me drool, and renders my tongue restless.

in the places that I visit,

I practice what it would be to cup the back of your head and enter you.

tongue first.

it would be fine if you ever got paralyzed, and needed to be cleaned up when you shat yourself.

part of me wants to hose you down right now.

a thousand kinks that exist in the bizarreness that sexuality is,

to paint, pee, and pet,

to dirt, drink, and drag,

to pretend to eat,

to lick, to lash,

to cooking for you a full meal for cash,

a thousand kinks that exist in the bizarreness that sexuality is,

I want to do with you right now but most of all,

it is 

the straddling tongues that I want.

  

some worlds are just insane

in an un-invented corner of your mind,

lies the center of your being.

it is not a happy place.

for here lie your gods,

buried but not dead,

still holding the strings of your fate;

weaving uncensored rules of censorship

telling you all that you hold holy,

but it is not a sacred place.

here born are the mad mutterings,

that underly your logic,

the illusions of being valid,

but it is not an accurate place.

it is here that sits the jury,

deciding the verdict of your becoming;

for you may desire to be,

but it is not a charitable place.

here spawned are the reasons you try so hard,

and yet find that nothing has come out of it.

you may have gotten but not what you want,

but it is not a not a blind a place.

starts here the idea that that there is a ‘you’,

that faulty burden you wish wasn’t yours,

still substantial as identities might make you feel,

it is not, a very substantiated a place

it is here your insistence to not have died at all,

has created the illusions of your continuity.

and your histories have already dug in their roots,

and rendered it not so fertile a place.

coalesced here are all the times you were hurt,

and unknowingly copied its ways.

it is safe to learn the ways of the pain,

but it is not a very kind a place.

live you will, through the twistings of it,

live will your friends through its claim on your ways;

and once it is all done, it is here that you crumble,

succumbing to not having seen this place.

Lying and Lovemaking

“And so it was with us, she, moved by poetry and drink, feeding me with sweet lies, while I wove for her intricate and terrifying threads of fantasy.” 

- The Season for Migration to the North

"Just gonna stand there and hear me cry

But that's alright because I love the way you lie..." 

- Love the Way You Lie

the biggest acts of lies seemingly come from the lover,

in eminem's rap, 
in literary fiction, 
in life.
so what does love change?

is it the tendency to lie or the sensitivity to them?

is lying just a part of the overall act of love making;

a stroke in the throes of mind fucking, 

as one might,

'put it’?

a part of successful lying is in the ability to know which lies to tell,

in telling the lies,

that aren't really lies,

in telling the lies 

which aren't really truths,

but fill the gap between the truths.
and these are the lies which people are likely to believe as truths

  

for there is a beauty in these lies, 

and there is a need in these lies,

that transcends any of the truths.

for these lies have a different kind of truths.

delicate truths which cannot exist as such in the materiality of reality,
delicate truths which survive on only in the counterfactual, in lies, in a meta-reality.

A casual hobby becomes something we can't live without,

a common tragedy becomes a life changing experience, 

an ordinary trip, the most surreal location one has ever seen;

in our re-telling of them.

 exoticising and eroticizing are, must be, the same things; 

which is why we are only too eager to fall for those lies. 

then, there are lies
which are not manipulation of truths,

but are 
its invention. 

lies, which could have been the truths, 

lies, which almost became the truths, 

lies, which become truths 

in 

their 

telling.

we all indulge in this repackaging of ourselves and in the process,

start to believe in it; 

reconstructing ourselves to the need and requirement of our lover,

become poetic with a poet, 

appreciate art with an artist.

sometimes,

growing into these new roles we have concocted for ourselves,
and finding homes in them.

and sometimes,
failing to do so.

lies, which are like dreams, 

both real and yet unreal. 

the reasons dreams are cherished is not because they can become truths,
but exactly because they can never.

those are the real dreams; 

the ones which can be lived only in the realms of mind; 

and some lies, 

are like those dreams.

lies, which are like dreams, 

both real and yet unreal. 

these are the lies that remain lies.
but they become lies we start living with.
claims of an exceptional past that never existed,
thoughts and motivations that were never there.
but their outlandishness is exactly the reason why they are used,
because they seem like the kinds that could not exist and are therefore
exotic. 

this tendency to believe in exotic lies, 

and not just believe but tell them, 

betrays a need to travel. 

the exotic experience that lovemaking is,

compared to rest of the life,

it demands a certain exotic setting that comes only through 
dreams,
through travels,
through lies,
which are all really the same.

to sex is to randomize, 

to juggle up that jar of genes and produce a new, never before created combination,
to mingle sensations in a never before experienced manners, 
to match the back with the foot, 
toes with the tongues,
things almost impossible to accomplish 
"single-handedly"

sex

is randomization, 

and travelling through lies is a way to introduce random it into our lives. 

it teleports us from our current, 

spatially and temporally.

there is this lying, and exoticising even when we dress up,

in the decoration of the bed,

in the make up,

that reflecting through the mirrors-

relocating, mutating and re-numbering of our bodies

all exercises in lying in order to shuffle ourselves,

a many times,

in multiple places,

across multiples times.

ironically, this only becomes subtler when the act of love becomes physical. 

the very act of dimming of lights before sex is a certain kind of lying. 

it is the dimming of the starkness of body’s true, clear details 

into shadows and fuzziness.

a silent allowance to your partner

to re-construct details of your body

according to their needs.

to make it easy for them to lie to themselves

about who it is that they are sharing their body with

and in return get similar privileges for oneself.

it thus plays a crucial role in making true

the fantasies that the lovers may desire but may not share.

and yet, it is also bringing out a truth of different kinds,

in lying to the eyes, one makes clearer the truths of the skin.
darkness,
is essential for one to dream.

Lying in lovemaking is not trivial, 
for it proves love in ways that no truth can.

one must care enough to lie.

it takes effort to lie, 

to live in the guilt of lie,

and therefore, is a sacrifice for someone else’s happiness. 

it implies a certain fear of loss that would not exist without the love. 

and thus, also becomes a way to glorify it.

  

it allows for a buffer between the truths one must believe 

 and the ones they would like to believe, 

it allows for the buffer between lessons one has learnt, 

and those one eventually will, 

between the altogether too slowly evolving present 

and a wiser future. 

क्या फरक पड़ता है…

क्या फरक पड़ता है कि

फ़िर लापता है तु,

तेरी शख्सीयत तो मिल जाती है अकेले चाँद में आज भी।

 खामोश उम्मीदों  में

रह न पाता युं,

तेरी गैरहाज़िरी कि गुफ़्त्गु पर मेरे साथ थी।

क्या फरक पड़ता है…

क्या फरक पड़ता है कि

छू लिया किसी और को,

रंगीन तो तुझसे भी शाम कितनो कि आबाद थी।

दिन में चाहे आज संग

कितने हि साथ हो,

बिस्तर में कल रात फ़िर तेरी ही तो याद थी।

क्या फरक पड़ता है…

क्या फरक पड़ता है कि

मुझे हि रोग समझ बैठा है,

जंग तो तेरी खुद के हि नासूरों के साथ थी।

इस बहाने हि सही

तुझे लड़ना तो पड़ेगा,

शायद यारी हो फिर कुछ जीत के ही बाद ही।

how i remember you

The ink stains the paper, trying to carve into words my memory of you. It fails. The very words fail as the memories in their denial to be constrained and captured become fluid. Turning, convoluting, escaping, each one of them splits into a thousand songs of love and the ensuing chaos. The way smoke strings break into incomprehensible patterns. How does one tie up a thousand songs and write them into one?

I tell myself to stop but it brings a smile on my face. Things you said, experiences you transpired always had affected my writing and continue to do so even in your absence. It's ridiculous. But at least now it feels like you are around. I don't know why I suddenly found you in this continuous failure to write these memories. Memories apparently too holy for even body's nightly angst to trespass, too convoluted for even the imagination to fiddle with. Why is this you? But I do see why I failed in the first place. What desire and imagination could not do, what luck would the words have had, bound as they are in their histories of coinage, limited in their meanings and trapped in their past contexts...they had always been used to describe the more mundane of life. The life of the blanket one covers up with on cold nights. But remember, you are that coolness that I put out one leg out of the blanket to try and catch...the coolness that allows me to sleep in comfort of the warmth. The one that apparently makes me corny as the dung of a horse feeding in the corn farms but then again, I just used "horse dung"  as a metaphor. You would have laughed your guts out. 

As always the imagination refuses to be a guide in revisiting of my time with you. I try to translate the memory into a lustful recollection of our night, try to expel it, express it in the furor of my hands on my dick. But fail again, unable to recreate the feel of your body against mine, of the taste of your contours. Defeated, like I have been many a time before, I go to our sacrosanct history of messages spanning years. Years most of which were spent not even knowing how the other looked against the reality of the world, years of the playful imagination of what it would be to be us. I try to find something in those well preserved, digital words, that do not blot like mine do now, do not fail, for they had already won us our time together; trying to find something that would maybe render some sense to the madness that you are. And like those books that we unknowingly had come to love and live together, I find details in those messages, crumbs that I never thought existed. A subtle mention of a poem by the digital you, a few keystrokes and clicks post I find myself reading it:

…Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!—

Thus leant she and linger’d—joy and fear!

Thus lay she a moment on my breast.

Then we began to ride. My soul

smooth’d itself out, a long-cramp’d scroll

freshening and fluttering in the wind.

Past hopes already lay behind.

Had I said that, had I done this,

what need to strive with a life awry?

So might I gain, so might I miss.

Might she have loved me? just as well

she might have hated, who can tell!

Where had I been now if the worst befell?

And here we are riding, she and I.

I have tried to recall many a time and yet it doesn't feel right...this cheap re-imagination of your tongue on mine. 

And I realize I have started writing prose in rhyme. 

Time, right, mine, rhyme. Reminds me of something I read in one of those Virginia Woolf's books. Something about how amazing the times would have been when people spoke in rhymes, hummed them in their luncheons.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

That's the poem she had referred to and there it was, a reference to lily. Even here I find dredges of you winking at me. You were right when you said you don't need me to be there to find me. 

You do realize I am writing this for you more than for the people out there but unlike you, they are reading this. So I am going to tell them what I realized about why I constantly fail in my remembrance of you. Words define, they describe; memories re-create what has already been created. Neither has the power to recreate chaos of the moments we had spent together when one tiny decision, one turn of the lane, lead to entirely unexpected nights. That fighting with the darkness to see the details of your eyes, the touch of your body and the unexplored odours and textures. The air thick and hazy with uncertainties, buzzing with possibilities. No remembering will allow for reliving that, remembrances are too clear, too deterministic, the cause and the effects too known. It's time I stop pitting them against each other- words and memories against what emerges when we meet. Far too much ink has been wasted in the attempt, rain forests sacrificed one ball of paper at a time. Blotted and then rejected in their inability and incompetence. The mere idea of you is moving, it's changed by the time a sentence reaches its period. Of course, the words fail in their static dictionary meanings. Of course, the memories fail in their limited knowledge of what transpired. I resort then to just describing the failure of the attempt for it is still the same. Still a failure and still drenched in its want for you.   

“I miss you” he says…

An age had passed 

and a dream had been broken, 

in those days of silence 

before your message flashed accompanied by an electronic pop of a delayed bursting of the bubble of illusion that was us it said,

“I miss you”.

I could not help but smile as my fingers rushed with a familiar eagerness to type 

and stopped

in their lack of knowing what to say,

in their lack of understanding of what was being said. 

Three words;

and all the years of learning words and meanings, 

and grammar and sentences,

were brought down the 

the one year of knowing the vacillating you.

“I”? …

who was this “I” who had messaged from miles away when those miles had changed you?

For every step that you had traveled had shorn off portions of you that I knew,

and diminished portions of me that you loved,

until I had become insignificant and you unknown.

What was this “missing” 

that you seem to be doing 

which had been unable to breach the silence that you had let fall. 

What is it of you that suffers from this missing?

It can’t be those ears that had been deaf to my calls,

Nor those eyes turned blind to words that I had sent your way. 

How does that beautiful mouth of yours which had no kind words to say to me

or those soft hands which had taken eagerly but not realised when I wanted them to hold me, how do they miss me? 

Or is it that dick of yours which could not find in it to forgive but had given far too easily itself to others when it had wanted to...

does it miss me and the ways in which I had given myself to it and never to anyone else? 

I do not know what missing you talk of.

And what is this “me” that you miss…

the lover you found not worthy of waiting for? 

Is it the host you miss who welcomed you 

and gave you all the comfort he could 

or that source of means you didn’t have to care much about offending? 

Or do you miss the friend you found not worthy of sharing once gone or that node who brought you in touch with people who still welcome you? 

Whom do you miss I know not? Or the why of it. 

Because he is not here anymore…

he got dispensed when you left him as if he was dispensable, 

he stopped waiting when you showed him you would not,

and he walked off when you decided to dance on your own.

Score

It was 8:00 PM in the evening when she got back home from another long day at her corporate job. She knew that in the end she only made money for some rich guy. She had tried multiple times to convince herself that she needs to get her satisfaction from the work and not the result. But she never really succeeded. She had learnt tricks though, of how not to let it get her. Things she said to herself, repeatedly. But today was just one of those days when she was not in a mood to talk to herself. Not in a mood to try and reason with herself. She wanted lose herself to someone else's thoughts. For that she will need other tricks. 

It was 8:30 now. "He'll be back soon" she thought. "probably", she added as an after thought born out of experience and a habit to not let her expectations grow. With him, you can never really tell how things proceed. That was one of the reasons why she had fallen for him. He was the element of chaos in her life.  But the relationship lived in the world of hand written letters. He was hardly ever available when he was needed. She had realized his life was a constant stream of changing plans and had given up trying to keep up. Instead, she had learnt how to live in a lag.  

She took out from her purse things she needed to get his attention. Every now and then, when she needed him for herself, she would go through this elaborate ceremony. A kind of a ritual she needed to go to special markets for in order to make it happen. It was a sort of a token that she needed to provide in order to get access to the real him; a him which in normal conditions was sealed completely by wit, humor and indifference.  It was 9:00 already when she finished and his absence still present. So she decided to attack her chores. By the time she was done with them, it was 10:30 and he had still not returned.  

She left the joint she had made on the table where she knew he would find it with a note written on it. "Wake me up when you find this". She planned to have dinner with him. She woke up next morning to find him on her side, cuddled the way he always liked. He smelt of marijuana. She sighed and made a mental note to get more weed and began another day of their 15 year of relationship.  

Love Hurt Heal Repeat

And then there was the goodbye...it was only for a night but the departure meant something far more significant than a temporary farewell. It was saying goodbye to a state of being. The hug lasted for longer than hugs have any right to and in the silent pressure they tried to convey all the affection, both existing and that which only had memories of it left. The affection which had drowned in the daily din of complaints blames and defenses. No words were said. In that one hug, he felt that love which had formed the basis of it all; for once it was not corrupted by lack of will to understand or the excess of one to explain.

As he walked away, each step painful, he also felt less heavy. The acceptance of break up brought with it the knowledge that the other would no longer have the power to hurt him, disappoint him, nor will he be capable of hurting himself by expectations he built up; depends on which side of the story you believe. He now believed in both, in his own insecurities as well as other's incapability. Most of all he believed in circumstances and its diabolic working.

It was so simple, they were screwed by queer cause and effect pair...an effect which once initiated would become its own cause and the cycle would keep repeating. There was no healing each other, it was impossible because they both were responsible for each other's sickness. They both kept passing it to each other. But distance, that was healing. He felt like a flower that bloomed only to be caught in a storm both harsh and dry, leaving it torn, misshaped and vulnerable. Night had fallen and it was finally closing up, carefully tucking each wounded petal back into a protection. Each step was closing of open gates that had led straight to his core. He felt secure. But it wasn't for long.

He dreamed of memories and hopes that night, only to wake up to find ruffled the feathers that he had thought he had tucked in last night, feathers that were too used to flying and would not stay put. And he began the process again, one by one, straightening and tucking them in till he felt secure again. He realized that for a while, he would have to keep doing this. Like a weekly theater, only the actors of the play were also the players of the act which it tried to recreate. He could have gone for the distractions, of conversations, of books; but he did not. He will not hide behind them. But look straight into the storm, learn from it and get strength from it to face the inner storm of recurring love. He will not kill the love, though, he couldn't have, it was beautiful and lasting. But to be in love and to be in a relationship are different things. It's the latter he had to learn to get used to not having.

Tomorrow

A day will come when you will realize, what all paths were deliberately chosen, what all lights had to be shown and what all stops had to be taken for you to reach that day...

and when you will, you'll finally understand, that that miracles don't happen, but are made. That even though sometimes good stories did start, they still took you to be sustained...

and that day, it will also dawn upon, that the only reason they seemed like happening on their on accord, is not because no attempts were made, not because it was written in fates, but only because when you did those things, they were effortless, and that was its grace. 

Two Love Stories

For one was love that came and went,

he lingered till the need be;

though not selfish he was for,

he gave while he stayed...

and then took it away where he had to be.

The second came all shy and scared,

he stayed till he had to leave;

selfless he was for he gave willingly,

took but never asked for it...

and left one day only to never leave.

Autumn Wind

The vast spans of golden fields, no longer they command;

an effect on the dry autumn wind grown yellow, old and bored,
of waving the mustard plants;

a game that has ceased to be a deliberate act;
of plays, of dance.

Benign, on him the leaves no longer weigh a charm,
of a little boy's curious fingers green,
but have become trivial chores to be juggled satisfaction sans;
as time flows by un-wantingly, too slow and nonchalant.

He had fallen in love once, with some tassels beautiful,
in summer hot yet he had found cool in those shadows solidified;
had his breath taken away by something he couldn't just pluck, play and leave.
Instead they had flown yet been rooted, moved yet stayed, teased yet remained chaste;
until some god strange had willed them masked, too scared to share;
and replaced them with a yard of cloth which on the first chance,
had in the autumn wind's own wake slapped away his trance.

Tired, as he goes on, his mind retreats back
to temple bells and old plans;
of youth, of defiance, which couldn't become more,
than weak attempts of collective strength to make the bell ring,
untimely, unduly, unholy noisily yet vainly;
for long after, the bell still hangs, still prayed under for fulfillment of more plans.

And now lost, he wanders to  find a purpose, 
brought down to pathetic acts;
of snatching away the balloons from little children’s hands,
by him he did them a favor, to show life's cruel reality;
for his own has grown mellow, cold and sored,
sans clans, sans love, sans stance.