i let you touch my body one last time,
last monsoon.
But your manhood had not seeped
down to my soul.

this year i am only rainkissed,
and peeled naked by the sky.

you speak not in words,

you use the language of the blind;

you paint, you touch

you whisper with your fingertips.

and sometimes, you walk 

in and out of our deadened moments,

half-awake, and half in a dreamystupour.

drenched in moribund dreams

that shatter and break on paper.

and burn in the fragrance of candlelight.

you live and die

a million times in my poetry,

like a mythical warrior.

and i tell stories of you

that might just be lies.

you speak not in words,

you use the language of the blind,

and i have saved your poemscars

on my body.

drain.

all the myths churned,
stories died inside an unbuttoned shirt,
your barechest didn't have a skyful of stars today.
only a tiny hole in your heart.
somewhere i would never fit.
so, i passed through a hole in the backyard.
and left, left through a drain.

left. left. left.
left with a mouthful of silence,
with a head resounding of mocking laughter,
wondering why i didn't check
the warning sign near the flowers.
wondering why the only escape was through a drain.
why did i become that escape?
why?

Sepia.

You have fragments of sepia,
in your check-shirt pocket -
that green shirt that smells of candle-light.
You have music on your lips,
sepia-washed words,
with a sepia melody, cascading in between.
A sepia dream in your burnt-brown eyes,
and a sepia moment that shrouds
my running around in circles,
not kissing bubbles to make them stay,
waiting for them to take shape.
You wait for me, pensively,
near lakes, where lovers meet, clandestinely.
You take sepia pictures of the water,
of sepia-reflections,
of skyscrapers gnawing away into the
sepia-sky.
On sepia mornings like these,
you see the old peoples' laughing clubs,
and remember all the times you've laughed
without reason.
Silly meaningless laughter.
You stare at the sun,
the lousy sunshine breathing down your face,
it paints sepia-pictures on your dusky skin.
Your shadow follows you into the sepia darkness.
The sepia plays amicus curie today, it always did,
on odd spring mornings like these.
Sepia entwines us together,
just you and me,
in smoky circles,
in puffs of cigarette smoke,
round and round,
in circles, in beautiful sepia circles.

burn.

you live in this half-dead city
like a vagabond.
burn, burn, burning
like cigarette smoke in the casing air.
in the dead goodbyes of the night.
stopping at the chaiwallah's,
and breathing the serenity of the
purple hills at two am,
burying another day's story
in the papercup brew.

you burn, burn, burn
in the sepia stardust
of this old, merciless town.
thinking about the old bookshop
off our old city, a few photographs
with your newly-found friends,
and an unfamiliar scent that this city
has gifted you.

while parts of you are being
gnawed away by the night,
nibbled by the glistening stars
that eat away into the clouds,
i write dead letters to you.
knowing well that the words
are not meant to be.
crumpled sheets of words
kissed by the moonlight,
while you burn away.
in the city's glowing passion
and your throat still deliriously dry.

you live in this city
like a vagabond.
it nauseates you to be here long.
yet you burn away.
you let yourself be trapped
by the music that plays
in your head.

and someday i'm sure you'll run away.
run away to another part
of your mind
and burn away the memories
of this place.
you'll dissolve into the crowds
of the new town,
refusing to learn their mothertongue.
it gives you a high when
you cannot decipher words.
a kind of freedom, you cannot explain.

you'll leave someday, i know
with your black backpack.
burning away. like you did today.

teenage angst.

i think i'm far from teenage angst.
yet when we have our backs to each other,
i dream about the patch of dreamy rainbowsky
that surrounds you..

their voices seem to rise above the din in my head.
and even if i walked away today, trying hard
to hold my thoughts running amok, i
felt your scent pressed in between our stories.
the pages i write about you, about those eyes
that have haunted me eversince
i ran through the rain, alone.
and, whenever those buckets of moonlight
rain on me in the dead of the night
i remember your face,
staring at me during the gaps
between our mindless laughter,
half-embarrassed, half-delighted
at the jokes we crack.

maybe we are the couldhavebeen
that could have been real.
yet we might remain
just a tethered memory
in the folds of this godforsaken town.
away from the ever-bustling crowd,
we might just an die a death everyday,
our music sinking into the purple hills,
like a lullaby to the rainclouds in mid-october.

i think i'm far from teenage angst.
yet i want this uneasy silence to last.
i want our eyes to meet all of a sudden,
your eyes staring into mine for a second and a half,
and you smiling childishly, then.

i like the way your blurred photograph
weaves a distant dream unto my skin,
and even among a horde of people
you often turn back to see if i'm there.
and even if i run far far away,
your words play like tunes in my mind.
our stories running through my veins,
and that look in your eyes i cannot seem to forget.

but we are only a figment of my mind, aren't we?
you don't pine for me in the folds of the night,
and you don't think i could be the light
you need.
you might just tuck me away in your hidden past,
like a secret no one ought to know,
just a smile that bled from destiny..
for you,i will be that tethered memory,
a scar-story on your wrists,
a make-believe reality at your fingertips.

and for all you know,
you might just be the teenage angst
that i fondly built up
as i walked away today.
the teenage angst that
could not be gathered in poesy.
only a tethered memory.
only just a tethered memory.

the purple sun cannot stop the train of thoughts.

and, i write in crumpled letters about all the
shattered reveries you bring me
suddenly in between lectures.
in word doodles i create a you i want.
in word doodles i create a world i need.
perfection, my love, perfection!

but you're just a little boy. only a little boy feverishly in love.
you'll lose yourself in textbooks. in a computer game.
in a moonlit night. in monsoon.
in a chocolate fantasy-conversation we couldn't initiate.
you'll lose yourself in the words i gift you.
in lovesongs. in the sepia of the lake.
oh little boy! you cannot be a man so soon.
and your mother thinks you're too young to have a lover.
she's ignorant that way.

oh silly little boy! i've been bruised before.
and it hurts nomore.
i've cried before. now i just have tired eyes.
and celebrate my inability to dream.

but you're just a little boy. with a childish half-smile.
and a naive twinkle in your eyes.
you won't understand.

you won't understand the tears that don't show.
the words that i don't utter. the silence that speaks far too much.
you won't understand how i need to run away sometimes.

but you lose yourself. you're too young to be a man.
and in your tiny blue satchel you carry your world,
too small for me to fit in?
your music keeps me sane yes.
strumming life back into me. life tiptoeing back.
silence isn't deafening. the tunes in my head make sense.

you have a magic, little boy! and i like
how your blue sky wraps me up.. how the dreams
turn a little sepia and dissolve.
but you're only just a little boy and you won't understand.
you won't understand.