Fairy-Tales

Fairy-Tales

The heiress leaves her charmed life
and sets off on a pilgrimage;
The princess is doomed to die in a charnel-house
and the maid steps on a throne to reign.
Nothing wrong there so long as the secret of their hearts prevails to rule over the picaresque tales of their diverse fates.
But somewhere along the line the hearts change
The narrator no longer holds the reins.
The princess, the heiress, the maid and the mistress,
all take over the burden of their tales
in a veritable kaleidoscope of doubts and trails
of doomed choices and begin to fade
in the aftermath of lies,
perceived to be true or caught up in the histories of suicidal waves.
What stays back when the tides recede is hard to tell.
Is beauty born only where the tide recedes
to expose a rubble of sea-shells
to be collected, deciphered and classified to be stored
in a museum of fiction to languish on shelves? 

The Knot

The spirit and the body are entwined
The knot is the undoing of all.

Those who live in the knot
and those who want to be free,
None has a choice to live out of it and be set free.

Both, the bondage and the freedom
end up in a beauty that is
a terror and happiness all at once.

That beauty is not our choice; it's existence :
"Just fragile, human and precious still."

Those who live

Those who live in the knand those who wa

A Birth Awaited

A Birth Awaited

She was not even born before she was claimed by blood-thirsty power- hungry history-making forces.
They expected her to be the answer to the sorrows and miseries that were ever so simple, and yet not over, following the mankind to the edge of all they knew.
Yes, they conceived that answer to be 'Beauty'.
Where was she to dwell, if at all she was allowed to be born,
with their consent, with their mutual consent which was hard to procure?
And why conceive her as 'Woman, or Man'?
The biggest hurdle was in giving Beauty a gender,
and the biggest block was finding a language that had no place for the rules of grammar,
and immunity to the aggression of power.

Somewhere along the line
some of them then began to align
into an amorphous tribe
of primitives they had learnt to leave behind
as one dread disease: 'anachronism'!
Suddenly they were ashamed
as they realized that they were closing ranks
and that the thing whose birth they were waiting for
demanded surrender before it was born!
That thing asked for
a surrender of what they called 'Identity',
a conscious giving up of their 'history',
a knowing forgetfulness of the need to exist.
And before the thing was born,
they understood the need to kill it.
It was a curse in an insidious form, and for once they all agreed.
Since then the history of the mankind is being written in terms of unspoken dualities.
The border can never be drawn,
because the world has acquired  possibilities and potentialities that take the borders out of the range of definitions.
And 'Beauty' is yet to be born.

A Domain Away from Language

A Domain Away from Language

Wounds are ancient,
They speak the classical language that has no script,
Catastrophic because they rupture the shell of the personality.
Ironically limiting,
because they are only a domain for poetry.
They have a beauty that lingers when the immediacy gone, there is no necessity for a remedy.
A loss in time but stillness at heart.

And you don't know when the wound belongs to the antiquity. Wounds are timeless.

Pilgrim:The Mystic Word

Candles snuffed out
rows and rows of them...
...wicks of lights lit up to burn along the length of the night
dedicated to float in the moonlit river
till they are swallowed by distant stars..

Images come and go'
a ceaseless yarn of surreal emblems
signifying nothing.
This is no quest my dear in-dweller.
Admit, that I am  an incomplete answer to a question you never asked,
and an unheard echo to a response I never made.

Let us agree to abide by the cruel laws we gave our consent to...
when we encountered our alter-egos in the wilderness of love..
Now it's futile for me to complain
because I never wrote the script.
I stood by , fearful and shy
and watched my shadow shrink and flee
from the demons I could not see.

It was a midnight you told me to yield to--
a midnight that stood nearby and waited and watched
while I fumbled for the way.

You always had a way with the words,
ambiguous at the best and ambivalent at their worst,
And I had nothing to show me the way except the words
vanishing shred by shred in the dark of the midnight.

It's the end of the night or the end of the day, a beginning of the midnight or the dawn of the ray,
the ray of the moon or the sun?
There is no shadow that can tell the difference between the day  and the looming dark'

Go out and have a smoke, wherever you be;
and let that be the drop of light that I may see
from my wide-open window upon the oceans of sleep
and dream that you may be thinking of me.

My in-dweller, you are a strange identity,
always along with me
and yet an enigma ,
holding my essence a hostage,
holding my secret being,
a thought living on the periphery,
half revealed and half concealed.
That is the way we always walk.
This duality is essential to keep us alive.
The light of the revelation is no candle;
it's a conflagration no rain can douse.

Peace

Peace

What portals of a world never known
have I entered, as the wings drop
and the land recedes?
What desire, what yearning?
The solitary bird has reached
the heart of the land it was moving to,
and reaching there, it has lost the wing and direction. Lost to its purpose and the dreams,
it knows the need to feel
the joy in reaching there.
But it's lost; simply lost and cannot feel. And the joy is in the losing.
Dreams can fill the journey with a spell and a charm when it's the sky that leads the way.

That there are sometimes little towns snuggled in the shadows of darkened clouds,
is something like a mystery left behind;
the only reality being the dream and the sky.

Listen my friends, my companions of the jovial days,
listen to a different tune I sing.
Listen to the ripened sadness now.
Give a hand and hold me fast
as I falter and lose my step.
Never tell me again that I lost my way and strayed away
when the gate was near and the field ripe
but the bird did not know it had reached
the land of its dreams.
There is peace in oblivion.

A Rainfall

A Rainfall

This distance and this gloom, this vacant space of the sky

Tracing a path from nowhere across my sky

A vagrant cloud has drifted here and covered all the shades of the plains

For no reason, it has brought rains,

Unseasonal, anachronistic rains.

The dried up path of the river has vanished without a trace.

Deep, deep is the fall

Deep is the call

Deep is the dark inner shrine of the mind.

The winding ways of the world

Never opened their secret path to lead me out of the maze.

The paths of the rainfall led me on

To this dim little spot of a wood.

Who planted it here and who tended it?

Do I need to know?

I feel the sigh of the wind-swept forest.

The flame of its blossom is the treasure in my heart, a crown of God that I wear on my head.

It’s the fire that’s not within me to put out,

It was lit by the hands of God.

Silly bird, singing in my heart,

Where is your home, where the nest?

Do not lose the track of your land.

A koel should not get drunk on her song.

Once she breaks out of the nest, there is no flight-path back again.