Forever

With arms full of tenderness
A heart full of endearments
I will hold you
In my mind
Forever

In my dreams, it's the right time... Now

How quickly the seasons of dreams

have left us - Dissipating like a spent cloud –

 But when I look upon your face, I see it –

It’s all there in the hidden crinkled pools of laughter

That break open like that April cloudburst

That suddenly drenched us

In this our nameless acquaintance

In which we got caught, inadvertently.

An acquaintance I keep alive in my dreams.

In my dreams, it is the right time, now

When hand in hand, we run away

Into the face of the wind - careless, carefree.

It rains. Stinging drops. We get soaking wet. And we laugh.

Into the wind.

In my dreams

We have the wind. We have the rain. We have the song.

We have the road. That runs without end.

The odour of the brown earth. Freshly sown.

Green grasses growing wild. Spilt seeds.

Sprouting shoots. Ginger and garlic paste.

Spreading their pungent taste.

Curry and spices. Freshly ground.

Seasoning our days. Which bubble

And froth. On burning fires.

In my dreams we have

 Sun filled afternoons. Which run into each other forever.

Like golden honey trickling thick through leafy branches.

We play in sand heaps. Build mud castles in the air.

Which we flatten with our stomping feet.

The fiery buzzing wasps burn our years in the mud houses they build.

In my dreams (it really is the right time now)

We walk on forbidden forest paths. Smell the wild flowers.

Taste the wild fruit of endless joy. Poke curiously into anthills.

And watch the dark insects tumble out. Pell-mell.

And talk to the trees. Collect their resin. That ooze thick and sticky.

In my dreams, hand in hand, we race. Keeping perfect step.

Panting. Eyes dancing.

We fling ourselves across the eons

And drink the nectar of life

In large gasping gulps

Quench our thirst in the middle of summer’s beat

Whittling away our melting moments under the shade

Of mango trees where birds call long and sweet

And peck-peck all day while we play

Our endless games. In my dreams. (It is the right time)

 And.. and.. In my dreams we climb into rain clouds

And play hide and seek. And run around like happy puppies

Rolling and tumbling in the muddy earth

And learn each other's language when our eyes meet

When our minds touch. In my dreams. It is the right time.

And yet sometimes inky blue creeps in my dreams

As heavy hearted we traverse our bumpy roads

The tarmac washed away

Where it submerges under murky water

Where rivers of doubt and uncertainty flood

And spill over into festering catastrophe

Where I disembark and my feet and lungs drown

And I reach out into emptiness to grasp your hand

To break free together and run across

Into our world of cloud and laughter

Heart and throat clutched in our hands

As hope sputters and coughs awake again

In my dreams. It is the right time.

The Puppet and the Puppeteer

Who was the puppet
Who the puppeteer
Who is the poet
Who the master
Who held the strings
And controlled the dance?
Who laughed
Who was laughed at?
Everything was such a funny
Pantomime.

But when the puppet awoke
To her own existence
And rebelled against
The strings
That made her dance
And laughed at
And pulled at the puppeteer
To make him dance
Beside her, on the stage
The master sliced the strings
Trampled on the puppet's limbs
And now gloats as he
Surveys the carnage
He is the master of his realm
The empty stage.

Who's gonna sing poetry to you?

((Who's gonna sing poetry to you?
Stone man
He doesn't want my love
He chooses anonymity))

((Will the indifference be unlocked?
He kills his love
She's dead
His heart cries
But it's time for him
To sit cross legged to
Find his nirvana moksha paradise peace))

((There's nothing, she thought, without love
She invested heavily
Not in stock or in gold
But in words she created
And freely gifted
And a heart she freely
Presented
But they were undervalued
And rejected))

The koel's cry

There are times
Say, mid morning
When I drink my coffee
Or afternoon
When the day's heat
Bursts out in droplets of sweat
Or when late night's
Feverish eyes keep vigil
Listening for your silent footstep

I wonder then
With stilled heart
What is the destiny
Of this frenzy of rhapsody
That stuck melody
That repeats over and over
Like the koel's cry from a nearby branch

"Do you think of me? Do you ache for me? Do you want to hold me?"

I don't know why I do
But the song recurs anew
Morning, afternoon, night
The koel cries

"Do you think of me?"

Another past

The caretaker of fates
Was the proffered bouquet
Of your presence
As subtle as the fragrance
Of incense
Its curling fumes
Drawing me into
Your world of make believes
Which I wholeheartedly agreed
To belong in
Always knowing
It was just a temporary thing
Always knowing
No matter how fleeting
The fragrance would resuscitate
A forgotten part of me
At least temporarily

And now I listen
To stillness playing
A gentle melody
Wafting in from
An immeasurable distance
While the sun lazily
Slips through the branches
And the last of another day
Dissolves into another past

The journey

Beyond enclosed space, walls and bars
Tiptoeing through mazes of hallucinations
I come upon the threshold
Like emerging from darkness to
Sudden brilliance - of distant suns
Sudden shift in the breeze -
The stars emerge from their eclipse

The land itself is re-patterned
Burgeoning creepers, thrusting flower buds
Re-emerge from the dry kaolin, ashes
Even still celestial bodies
Begin their perambulations anew
In quiescence to new realities
Obscured by the dust kicked up
By a yesterday storm

As the dust begins to settle
The earth opens her arms invitingly
You lie supine on her soft breast
And languorously watch the spectacle
The whimsical celestial drama unfolding
Scene by scene

Arrested in this transient moment
After journeying past dust clouds
Into the embrace of Mother Earth
The reality of
Infiniteness is unveiled