A Thought in the Night

In a burst of paradox and flame
I harken to my warring mind,
Revealing nothing but a stark reverence
For irreverence of sparring voices -
Their awful two-sidedness, born from
Flawed yet thoughtful reasoning.

I watched as the Earth split, saw
The narcissist - reflected in the abyss.
My mind went blank and starless
The universe I saw reflected in me
Was nothing but dark and lonely -
No star reflected the smile nor tears
No light passed through my webbed hands.
Losing myself in the never-to-end darkness
The unknown night crept on.

Deceptive Introspection

Would you look deep into the mirror?
It's shiny depths - lying reflections
Of who you think yourself to be.
Don't look too far, you might just see
The faults that exist, but virtually.
You fall, expecting feathery silver,
Ripples of false identity.
Why then did solid ground hit you?
Shattering silver to a million pieces.
Your forehead cut by sharp deception-
The road welcoming your consciousness
Shaping your earlier, purer self
Into the false image you see
No longer false, now reality.
The mirror, that was your seething brain
Fearing for its sculpting hands.

Reminiscence

Did we rise too high
We fell into the engulfing abyss?
An abyss eternal,
Or one forgiving, reminiscent
Of the beautiful past?

Of change, a storm gathers
Accustomed to it by now
In dreams thoughts come
Of a better past
But actions, they escape
The transforming magic of determination.

Is this the new world?
Inside a book, perhaps -
A book I cannot close
Nor overwrite its pages.
The watcher does wonder
The wanderings of my mind
The contents of my poetry
That is my heart.

Every second ticking by
Acts against my stalling hands.
Every second ticking by
Escapes the force of my push.
A dilemma is emerging
Are the stars really dim?
Or just a figment of my shattered imagination,
Whose obscurities I can clear?

The past is out of reach,
Betrayed my hapless memory.
A few moments are a million years.

Lines of Childhood

Do you remember when, as a little child (even as a grown-up, for some), while strolling along a road on a paved footpath, you tried to keep your feet within the lines defined by the boundaries of the engraved tiles? It was a game of sorts - a challenge to yourself, your concentration, your determination. Even if a tiny fraction of your shoe stepped on a line, lo! The game's over. Some of us made more creative efforts in trying to always step on the lines or alternate lines or... The mind wandered, and the challenge always demanded more with every step the mind took.

Fast forward a few years, many of us have not exactly forgotten, but stopped playing what seems like a stupid little game. You're often branded as 'lame' or 'boring' if that's your nerdy definition of a game. Everyone has different opinions, however, I'm trying to look beyond what seems like a game we used to play as little infants and perceive it with a broader view, symbolizing the challenges we set for ourselves, when our mind wasn't blurred with the reprimanding voices of things we couldn't achieve saying, 'You can't do this.'

As a child, each one of us (I'm speaking for the people I knew) wanted to grow up and join a certain profession whose description attracted us the most - everyone had an answer to the question, 'What do you want to become when you grow up?' - an answer lost with the years gone by.

Why did this determination to become something slowly fade away with the number of years passing? It's because we tried our hand at it and realized that nothing is easy, that you have to work hard for everything you want to do in life. This is where the now-adolescent children separated into two groups - those who let the voice in their head stop them from following their dreams, duly noting the amount of themselves and their time they had to sacrifice, and those who had but one aim - to achieve their dreams, regardless of the challenges life offered them. Instead, they set challenges for themselves, and even though they couldn't attain success in most of them, they found themselves at a place which was extraordinary nonetheless.

These are the people who aren't afraid of the laughs when they answer 'an astronaut' or 'an athlete' to a question about their future career goals. The childhood dream stays as fresh as ever, because the multiple failures they overcome and the occasional successes they revel in do nothing but push them further in achieving their dreams instead of convincing them to give up. After all these years, they don't hesitate to joyfully take the path life offers them and twist it into challenges, which isn't a kind of pressure but instead lots of fun.

And that's what defines the line between a child and an adult - challenging yourself and believing you could find yourself at the top of that hill. In a world of magnets and miracles, growing up seems like giving up, but childhood seems pure, because demons who kill determination and imagination have never been allowed to enter the brain. Even if your naïve mind conjures up impossible dreams, you might end up in a place no one else has ever trodden.

Try to walk between the lines, on the lines, or far away from them. But most important of all, dare to think about them even if the world flashes scorn. Don't let that sweet child o' yours die, instead be like the ones whose thoughts stray without boundary, who burn and revel in the fireworks of their dreams and burst in blue when their words reach your ears and another dimension of this world suddenly comes into view.

Pigeons on my Balcony

Living in Delhi makes you quite used to seeing scruffy pigeon nests on the top of your air conditioner or anywhere else in the near vicinity of your room window (they don't live in trees anymore, reflecting the modern times). Pigeon poop is a popular nuisance that more often than not hits you on your head. Growing up in a middle class household, trying to oust pigeons from our house's balcony is something I'm used to.

About three weeks ago, a particularly fat pigeon gave birth to two little baby chicks right outside the window of my room (my mother almost died of the thought of handling more of the birds). All they did was sit in their thermocol nest in a pile of their own poop and look around (believe me, that's what their whole life is about. All pigeons do is flap around and sit and stare). Because of my attraction towards cute little things and because of my need to take a break from trigonometry, I used to track their growth almost everyday.

Momma pigeon was irritating at times when it pecked on my window while I was sleeping (they are curious little creatures, though). Eventually, without realising, I checked on them everyday. I used to tap on the window and watch them get scared, which was hilarious. I used to make funny noises so they would get all frenzied. But I used to check on them nonetheless.

Slowly, the baby pigeons grew up a little, their eyebrows still made of yellow feathers, and started tapping my window, their laughs forming a strange cacophony. Just a few days ago, I witnessed one of them trying to learn how to fly, which was a lesson in determination in itself. It used to flap it's wings with a frequency of about a hundred per second, but couldn't lift itself up. Later that day, I saw it fly a few centimetres, and it gave me a strange sense of happiness and wonder.

Unknowingly, I had starting seeing the birds as my pets, as my companions when I was alone in my room. All these revelations dawned on me today when, while checking on them, I witnessed that Momma Pigeon was lying flat on the nest, it's chest stock still, it's beak wide open. It wouldn't move even when I hit on the window (neither did its children, surprisingly).

Initially I thought, rather wished, that this was the way pigeons slept, but was later told that it was, undoubtedly, dead.

I never thought I would get tears in my eyes due to the death of an annoying pigeon, until today. Even though I saw them as a nuisance for the most part, I had gotten attached to them. And then I'm doing what I always do - relate this peculiar, extraordinarily ordinary experience with life.

Despite all the twist and turns and peaks and valleys and ups and downs of life, somewhere inside, all of us get attached to the idea of our life, to the idea of us surviving through the storm, however hard it may be. This is the hesitation that is born when you think of how useless your life is. Eventually, every thing you've done in life accumulates inside you to make you stronger and harder and prouder of yourself, because life's never easy and almost always unlucky. Those pigeons made me realise how I could love something I dislike, how everything is two-sided, and, in a state of natural human loneliness, we attach ourselves to ideas, more than things. To events, more than people. To an escape through imagination, more than reality.

I've probably studied too much math, haven't I?

Answers in the Abyss

In the hollow of singularity
Where Time seems slow,
I swing to the rhythm of my mind
The sound of music and
The lightning before it
Water emotions dormant in the abyss.

The darkness is the mystery
A conscious, psychotic pain
Being a psychedelic lie
Gives you wings and
Makes you fly
Searching for a broad view of meaning.

I could be faster than hope
Faster than dreams
If only I was faster than light
Time soon catches up
Snatches away my search-
Pushed into an abyss of seeming oblivion

The mystery grows and shrinks
Is there nothing here
After the end,
No food for my thought?
Or is the end the Answer itself?
For when existence ceases, the real search begins.

A Poem Sans Metaphors (hopefully)

I used to write poetry in metaphors

From chains to chimes, from freedom to silence

They came out to be too deep to define

After two days I used to question their depth

After four days I used to question their meaning

After six days I used to question my sanity.

Couldn't I have looked through the eyes of change?

The words which had flown around in my mind,

The words which had finally landed on paper,

Were too blurred a memory for me to understand,

A long-gone past I could not fathom.

I once witnessed Calvin saying to Hobbes,

'Its funny how day by day, nothing changes

But when you look back, everything has changed.'

The words I wrote, were a mark of the present

Of every second that passed, every millisecond its part.

And as I couldn't fathom those marks beneath my fingers,

Couldn't recall what I felt at that very moment,

I woefully accepted the truth which clawed at me

I couldn't get back the past, no one could, really

(Unless, of course, physics, my salvation

Provides a path which confuses everything further).

And so I penned down this poem, an effort

To write something down every mind could understand

An attempt to travel in time, to get the past back

To define the slope clearly, to give me an idea

Of the bigger picture I've been craving, but failing to arrange.

A Freedom which Limits

The tracks, they danced to the roll of the train
Who, gaining momentum, wished to escape
The powerful wind neighing with tears of denial
Crossed with the calliphony of lovers' farewells.

The rocking coach did cradle my departing tears, which
Complimented the neck craned towards love
Love - now but a speck in the adventurous eye
A spectacle for the skeptical, wandering mind.

Yet reminded I was of the way that lay ahead
The 'road to freedom', is what they still say
To discoveries to explore, and marvels galore
To be gone with the wind, yet have your control.

And as the nights passed on by, filled
With new species of seeds blossoming into thought,
There came a night, when in a cherished dream I
Mused of love, of what I had left behind.

A sacrifice so selfish never had been made
Whose innocent wings, seeking enlightenment
Often fell to the ground, for they had left behind
The part they most loved, now but a hole in the heart.

And so was freedom marred by the beatings of love
Grasping for its identity, in hapless thin air
For is freedom as whole and free as it could be
When following your heart is subject to slavery?

What could be often limited wasn't freedom at all
How could then love make you question being unfettered?
Nothing could be more powerful than this devilish angel
For it was love down deep, nothing is more limiting,
Nothing is more free.

Ice Cream, and Other Clichéd Musings

This evening, my mother asked me a rather striking question which surprised me and made me excited at the same time. 'Let's go get some ice cream,' she announced, which seemed to me a perfect relief from the changing and oscillating weather and from my worries about my postponing habit during the exams.

Till now, a walk with an ice cream in hand was a common experience for me, whose school had so fortunately installed a Kwality Walls stall right next to the canteen for the hungry, sweating students. A daily detour to the stall was not uncommon, with a thought of bracing yourself to enter the deep throng instilled with the passion for ice cream.

And so, that evening, what seemed to me a completely normal 'journey' of sorts, turned into a deep revelation. When we reached the ice cream vendor, I asked for a Choco Bar and a butterscotch Cornetto through the hole in the wall the people made in our colony in order to buy ice cream from within the gates, a mark of prevalent laziness and a promise for safety.

As my mother and I walked under the deep, blue sky, each one immersed in the fresh taste of cold ice cream offering an official start to the summer, I couldn't help but notice the unusual, long-lost atmosphere that confronted me. The yellow glare of the street lights, mixed with the routine sounds of kids playing in the park and street dogs barking (with an occasional one following you, never to leave your side) stirred some childhood memory.

Here I was, with my mother, in the absence of all materialistic pleasure and electronic distractions, simply walking down the street, slurping ice cream. A moment ago, I was thinking of my prospects for the future and how I had lost any chance of getting into a good college. What dawned on me next was how thinking of the long run, I was missing this absolutely beautiful moment, which probably won't cross my mind in the future.

How could I enjoy and work for myself in the long run when I couldn't even do justice to this undiscovered pleasure of the present? Too immersed in acing the long run, I had miserably failed to take the shortest step. In an effort to offer some consolation, the next thought my mind welcomed was, 'I'm not alone.'

Sad Optimism

'I want to feel death', said a glad boy
'Free the weight pushing me down,
Let it fly, give air to a life of reality.'
In my heart, I could sense a frowning smile
How keen he is to be strong, know strength
To fall down steps, and claw back up
Embracing the world all this while,
I thought. So very naïve, that innocent dreamer
Smiling at the gift of suffering he
Was yet to receive, from skeptical hands.
My mind, it laughed with mocking pride,
'You, who deemed end as escape,
You, too weak to live with a hole
Too wise to see the innocence that
Resides in you, fearing alone.'
Easily said, I mused with apprehension.
Unexpected, heart-breaking, he knows not
About all logic turned to dust and woven into hope.
Easily said, I mused yet again
He knows not about the suffering of death.
And with an earthy jerk, I began to realize
I had reached the bottom, the end of the steps
But he was climbing, clawing towards the sky
Those steps he was preparing for all his life
Were already beneath him, vanquished with joy
For even death couldn't defeat that sad optimism
Brought on by naivety, to be nurtured by strife.

Farewell

Dimmer and dimmer and dimmer
The stars, fading from view.
The moon glittered with scrambling light
Shimmery hands failing to recall.
The stars did wish to hold on tight
In the end, they had to fall.
They shook along, with talons bright
The moon to their abyss.
Visions of hope, deceiving, blinding
Gave acceptance a goodbye kiss.
The future, hid in shadows of meaning
As empty as the brimming past,
For which the moon kept rambling
Its hugs returned by distant darkness.
So sang the moon to empty space
Retaining the little light it had,
A faded memory of the stars
Invisible, in mourning clad.