A Lover's Prayer

Close your eyes

And think of me,

Just a flake, a memory.

Our fleeting moments, our evanescence,

All neatly tucked, away from see.

Stay a while and oblige me

Stare me down, arrest my gaze.

Let your fingers lead me on

Stop my heart,

And then make it race.

Kiss me like there’s no tomorrow

Push those juvenile curls away.

Make the world melt

Beneath my toes

While you kiss me like it’s our last day.

And when the sun shines

Up on your face,

Your eyes adjust, you awake,

I pray you take this memory

And I wish you keep it safe.

Coz we’re the other people,

Those you won’t afford the attention.

Secret, unconditional

And constituted of recollections;

We’re the lovers you cannot mention.

On why we read and write...

" Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a short dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship"

Brain Pickings. http://bit.ly/S6uLfQ

An Ode

You know who you are. 

You don’t have to be picked out.

We've had our differences. We’ve had our days when we've not spoken to each other. We've bitched.  We've gone for months without meeting. We let men come between us. We let stories come between us. We've scowled and sulked and overreacted.

But we drink. Better than fishes, we drink. Sometimes, we drink more than we talk. Other times, we drink in order to talk. We’re butch like that.

And we may never be up to speed about the all the things that bother us; our jobs, the stress of making it on your own, that boy you’re trying so hard to get over but can’t, that shoot-me-in-the-head-now marriage conversation with the parents, an existential crisis, life! Some of us get to know sooner than the others, some of us sense it and everybody understands.

And through it all, you’re there. In between the chottas and the badas and the joint. The cheap whiskey, the good Old Monk the gallons and gallons of beer; you’re there. A phone call or a What's app message away.

By some weird telepathy we understand. We provide a window, a breath of fresh… rather some booze breath but a renewed one nonetheless. The escape, into a world where everything is sorted, even if it’s only for a few hours.

For our kind that lives weekend to weekend, Janta to Carters, Brass Monkey to Kohinoor, Deepak’s to Juhu Beach - You help pause the madness, with a little help from the high.
Even if we don’t know about it.

Cheers! 

Whirrrr

If you look inside my head right now, or any other time for that matter, you'll see hundreds of thousands of tiny little machines with gears and levers and pistons chugh, chugh, chugging away with little gasps of steam coming out the little chimneys and being swallowed back up to prevent any wastage and together they resemble an air conditioning unit that provides you with an agreeable atmosphere to be in except when its late at night and you can't sleep and all you can hear is its constant whirrrrrrrr  and if you look closely you'll see that they're all moving at the fastest possible speed and if the pistons jumped any faster they'd jump right out my head and knock out some important screws with it.

So this thing has no start. There is no beginning. Its something that you experience in passing… like a huge passenger train with a big red engine that swooshes past the platform you’re on and it looks so cool and the breeze feels so great and your shaken for a bit but your hair will never be the same again.

Some things aren’t planned. Sometimes you just get lucky. And each time, we’re too naïve to realize it. We go through life trying to find logic in all that happens. Which were the words that bowled me over? Were there that many? Do those hands feel the same to everyone or is there really a story behind why it fits perfectly on the small of your back. The silly arguments, the laughter. Oh the laughter! More than enough to make lines on our faces in a few years. Random banter takes over your mind.

And then logic begins to evade you. Like a stupid drunk leprechaun… grinning yellow teeth each time and poof! So you decide to be brave. To butch up and do it. To jump, into something you have celestially no idea how it’d turn out… just to see how it would. The journey. The energy. The high. You want to be brave. You want to trust your heart, blindly. You want to feel the most honest, untainted, anti-normal feeling there is.  And then, you hope he does too.

We’re in a constant state of want. A constant state of need. We’re again too naïve to admit that we constantly need to belong. To belong to this phenomenon that’s greater that yourself. To share that high with someone who’s feeling it himself.

So you do it. You make that mark. You place that bet. You lay out you cards. And then, reality checks in.

* Scramble  *

You’ll do fine. We’re all ok. Logic, my best friend, is always one deduction away. You’re brave, you deduce, you drown out. That train’s left.

The moments passed. Arresting finality stares you in the face. But, your heart’s still racing…