Damn it.

What was I doing? Nothing is going anywhere except the damn time.

Where is time going? Is it late for class? Does it have a date? Does she wear short skirts, accessorise with small talk? Does she have a book on her at all times? Does time's date's father have a short temper? A mother with a long face? Can she not stay out late? Is time late for work? Does time tie his tie standing in the metro? Is time looking behind her shoulder to see if there's someone following her? Is time staring intently at computer screens all day, eyes burning, selling by the second? Is she trying to keep her hair in place, while the evening breeze in filled with little boys' screams? Does time want to travel to outer space? Does time try hard to keep in line? Inside the lines? Does he not waste time online? Does she feel guilty after lying?

Does time not spend nights sighing and sighing and sighing?

What is time doing? Why is time in a rush? Who is waiting for time? Does time want to be with someone and can't? Did time not want to leave? Did time ever just want to sleep, all day, every day, till the cows came home, till the cold winds had blown, away from her? Is time trying to kill himself because he has to be everywhere, underappreciated and overburdened? Is time depressed? Does time suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Why cannot time stand still? Why cannot time be content? Does time find herself a damn bore? Is time scared and is running away, it didn't mean to kill anyone? Does time not read poetry? Is time not poetry?

Where does time go? To places with loud music and quiet hearts? Is time running across a sandy beaches with orange suns? With green mountains, blue mist, tiny goats? Is time too overwhelmed being wanted so badly? Can time not let herself be at someone's side, for all of time? Does time have commitment issues? Who does time stalk?  Does time fumble over her words in imagined conversations? Is he in a rush to get things done, because time doesn't belong to time? Is time buried inside a good book, a conversation, sitting in a corner at a railway station? Where does time go, seatbelted, looking out at midnight, at blood red skies and steel grey clouds, dawning across countries, everywhere at the same time?

Does time want to go away, get away? Go somewhere, go places? Does time want to stop and go nowhere, sit down, smile and look at faces?

What was I doing? I looked at a stranger looking at me writing in my small notebook, covered with pretty red flowers. Looking at me sitting at a window of a train on the other platform. A platform in an ephemeral station of emotions. Magnetic tracks led trains away from each and I wasn't going anywhere. Nothing is going anywhere except the damn time. Answer me.

Poem for a Cliché in Full Costume

When did you stop wanting to kiss me in elevators
When did you stop wanting to unsee the crowd of watchers, at inner circle roundabouts
When did you stop knowing which words make my breath take inroads to my trembling heart
When did you stop thinking butterfly blues shaped the maps to the stars
When did you stop demanding fingertips as fingerfood to your hungry needy love - never full, never enough
When did you stop seeing through words that meant something else, hell meant my lovely heart and go, to stay forever
When did you give up, let me slip to distant places in your mind, where you don't step in fear of looking back
Now, the waits are not so weighty
The suns are stars,
Not hot ticking time keepers to goodbyes
I cross the streets
I climb the stairs
That meld into each other
Dusty step by dusty step
A dog on ever corner 'case
Rumagging through imaginary bones
Buried in his heart
Looks through garbage
I bark a sudden tune to soothe
My worried mind
Am I an animal without a cave,
Without a street
Water is bland
The desert is sand
The forest is one tree after another
Tables and chairs and pencil sketches
On newspapers wet in unseasonal rain
Pouring on my heart like warm tepid realisations
Feet in murky depths of meaningless monsoons
I am like a bird without a song
A temple without a gong
Been away,
Far too long, far too long
I have forgotten the verses to my name
The letters to my poem
Coordinates to my frame of thought
I forgot. I stopped.
To be myself, the same the same
The blind spot
The sweet spot
Spots to be cleaned and kept that way
Nice and sweet and blind
To me
A spot unseen, behind a screen
Careen careen
Forget about it
Now we've meandered back
To our daily routine
To think, to dream
To feel too much
To wonder about
When
Did you stop doing that.

After Nap.

After nap is a timeless space. Where you sleep 22 and wake up 12. In a few invisible hours. A precious time travelness, peopleless and thingless which is then populated with memories and feelings too large for feeling. As long as you lie in twilit darkenss, unlived moments and ones as if from dreams will fly by, slowly like migratory birds across a painted sky of remembering and non remembering. Regrets will caw, and doubly forgotten instances will scratch little claw marks in the bark of ancient tree branches dotted across the landscape of a terrible, quiet, grey mind.

As if aloneness bears heavy and natural and wanted, yet not. Like something would come and wipe the slate clean, yet under and against the window with the blue raincloud light, slivers of wet words beneath chalkdust will chide into longknown, silent, uncharted territories simmering with promise.

It starts to fade like a bad but wise dream, but now it's in words and it'll come back, looking for a haunting, ten years into the now furiously busy, moving, black and white static of things and images, not finding a crack to escape from. One day it will step across the threshold of an old house when the mind is fertile and the rain falls in sheets of mist and nostalgia, yet in nothing at all.

The garden behind it will be abuzz with tiny winged insects burrowing their bodies out of wet earth, silvery blurs of life, in a hurricane of an excited flurry pattering of rising up into the sky melding into life, out of hard grassy wombs of parched earth, now muddy and rich and cold.

Traffic noise will seep from grids of iron windows, expensive curtains, children will still shout unknown at the fact that the shout will carry to their distant futures, changing characters, as if postincarnation, postnap, post as if moments have passed in a blur of scared time running away from things that didn't happen and the scratchy slivery memory of things that did, but only jump into wrong numbers on hopscotch tables and the feet land too perfectly to be wonderingly laughed at for long.

And when the hands land on land, slowly peeling itself away from afternoon sun, emanating a heat into little palms, it almost feels as if something dirty, some bodily sensate feelings have latched on to soft skin, now chalk and dust and sunshine from hours ago, as if a nap has put decade old train rides across forests with lone little huts in the middle of nowhere, now occupied by nobody's words, staring into railway tracks where a child just crossed, staring into thatched roof, wondering about existence, its and its. Understanding neither.

Deja Vu

My heart does a blackflip, my mind a turnaround. One shrug, one smile.. That laugh, some sound. Peculiar likeness to a time.

Like a jolt, a current of realisations running through my skin, buzzing through my thighs, my arms, my insides. Some particular high.

Like the moment before a kiss, endless wait. Too soon, too late.

Is there a purpose to madness? Some sickness, some sadness. Ethereal gladness, a heart full of hadness.

Haveness, hapless.
Lose a poem, choose a poem.

Slink.

This is a classical moment. A moment in the life of writing and non writing. Days when it's okay to come very close and let it go because it was so close. And close is good. When it's okay for it to be left just out of reach and see it become smaller and smaller in the distance. The thought and the will and the intention to be written down in black and white.

Words about nothing.

Then it's a moment in time of perfection to be put down. The multiple meanings of being put down. On paper. Or just put down. Of deliberate forgetfulness and deliberate fecundity. Of words coming in and going out. In an endless stream of tireless tirades of feelings and thoughts and findings and leanings and deliberations.

Sitting pretty. Sitting tight. Sitting down. Sitting up. Sitting straight. Sitting silent. Sitting speaking.

On paper. In small time machines, across epochs of small night time deliberations, across smells of songs and silent slinking.

With the music and the muse and the moon. An extended aberration of still lives and live stills.

Life grows longer and nostalgia grows shorter with a disappearing wick, smaller and smaller in the distance.

Up to finito

Flinging fire, observing softly settling dust on long ended moments of passing doubts.

Slipping up into a normal, stepping down to surfaces of surety and singing lispy lullabies, of mundane privations, pertinent, pleading porous boundaries of need and unneed.

Lighting lamps across a lake, on a window, on a stage. Of the painfully plain and elaborate truthing of the matter at hand, like sand on a windy morning. Admiring varnished little corners of a made up mind.