Cursive Thoughts

India Street Photography

2010-02-18T06:43:00.000-08:00

India Street Photography

2010-02-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

India Street Photography

2010-02-18T06:31:00.000-08:00

The opposite side of the sea

2010-02-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

Meet me
on the opposite side of the sea
where people live painted white
with yellow smiles, see me there
a man who isn't there
climb up that hill's thigh
the one where we didn't share a sunrise
throw me a faithful whisper
and ill decipher
with the save-my-heart glasses
the day is dimming red now
i look at my watch
and its that time of the day
when time is a great healer

Express Mail

2010-02-11T02:48:00.000-08:00

the story doesn't end here
there are letters still to come by
they'll return with answers inhibited,
with sounds that you have escaped
and a pile of broken embraces eluded.

so bear with me my love
wait for his urban skin,
pay him a handful of baksheesh,
and latch on to the scent of my seal,
learn to pronounce my city-state
then memorize

rhyme your eyes
with my September voice
and read it glamorously by the window,
let the winds return with
the chant of your honeycomb clip,
let them in your old white frock
while you eat my laments
in the quietness of your hands.

Dead Poet

2009-07-18T08:07:00.001-07:00

I am empty
colored red
with a sight of sorrow
settled quiet in my paper skin
with your name
and your photograph all over me
i drop a line
squeeze a teacupful grin
and stir the last hints within me
to conjure up a future of us together.

i am a sad poet
cajoled into still life
and loneliness evades me
within a blurred distance
where you become an impression
in a shallow depth of field
and i become the focus of a ruthless eye.

epiphany

2009-03-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Beauty lies in the names
crawling over lips like ants
marked with letters
clear and readable
but faces - they delude
like clouds
foul and illegible.

One moment you seem a ferry,
the next moment you are a jellyfish
with voracious tentacles all over my sky.

Looming

2009-03-19T22:04:00.001-07:00

Time broods
like an open book
face down and marked
on the page about still life.

from everywhere

2009-03-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

You live and lean in the English sunlight
that shines every day
from your hair down to your shadow,
buzzing with an air of freshness
tied around your wrinkled dress
like the scent of early rain showers.

You fall like a dream into revolving silkworms
gestating with breaths of flight in their skin
knitting freedom thread by thread.

You take offense like the butterflies
and cringe like the clattering pebbles at the seashore.

I wait for the arrival of your voice
to steal the deafness of the stones we skipped together,
to chase away the Indianness off your cheeks
and travel places from here, to everywhere.

Missing Pages

2009-03-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

Lost in the northern winds
that steadily careen over
known and sometimes foreign pastures
in search of regarding shores
and darkness of eyes that would lower its gaze
and caress through words
to hear me
to listen silences within me
in spaces and lines
that i'd present about my pasts.

Make my pain your story,
your unheard voices mine.
Write like i do
tear them and say that you miss
your missing page's texture,
the touch of its possession,
end it with this lie
and let the southern winds carry them
to someone careening over
known and foreign pastures
in search of regardless shores.

Catch Her in the Eye

2009-01-26T21:17:00.000-08:00

In the facade of her skin
is not her story
but know that she is made
of chalk and glass and sin
her beetle smile hums slow
in crooked noises
her voice fades
like pins dropped
on a tessellated floor
and kisses burn like
pangs of jellyfish.

Her beauty...

because sometimes words fail
and ruin instead
catch her in the eye,
curb her in blinks,
breathe, turn and return.

When the Dice rolls Twelve

2009-01-14T21:01:00.000-08:00

Speaking of life
is like drawing
intersecting lines
and coloring them.

Spill and measure
with moments gambled
in our mortal laps.

And when seasons withdraw:
Realize
our wrinkled lives
following them
will only meet
a dead end
in a full stop.

Memory of March

2009-01-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

I fucked you
until you were
mere smoke & mirrors.
Over the April lands
from dreams of my own
I conjure bits of you
in tormenting letters
and a picture of a seamstress
that smells of fog and dusty graves.
Your face daubed naked with cheap mascara
and skin battered carmine
smiles
undefeated.

So I pause on my letters,
tear pages and condense my hurried lines
over the April skies
as the memory of March, shadows.

Before the Sunsets

2009-01-01T21:58:00.000-08:00

Find me somewhere
between precise moments
in a cellar with ancient light
fading above my notes.

Search me in the old crowds;
left alone shoes, derelict umbrellas,
a wrinkled photograph may be
resting next to a telephone booth.

In an old-fashioned bistro
sipping life in allayed gulps
hovering over genial thoughts
look for my signs
before the sunsets
and the vulgar secrets
of strangers
scribbled on the pews.

I have dropped the keys
to be lost again.

43 Words

2008-11-23T07:23:00.000-08:00

You rejoice in your scaly skin
that has grown silvery-brown feathers now
over dimming eyes
as your open-ended lips pose selfishly
I may without fail try
to curb these timely chuckles
in my lover’s rattling breast
bury them with a howl
and a nimble song of ridicule
in honor of your preceded vanity.

I may also bow down with
these forty three words
kneeling in jealousy and tame
and welcome the lurching rumor
of your recently acquired beauty
with a two-faced smile.

Ireland

2008-11-10T21:40:00.001-08:00

The bitter taste
of you and me together
has melted, its aroma singing aloof
disgusted in a cup of spilling sorrow.

You lay there cocooned
on a parched rag of earth
baited like an archaic mermaid
gleaming in hope and butterfly skin
with shreds of bones
and a tattered trousseau squirming
under sulfurous sunlight you curse
with lipstick laden lips chewed in ire.

A Glass of Whine

2008-10-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

O the glasses know it all
the make and marque
of lousy lipsticks,
bleached mustaches
and all the variety of lies,
the glamorous glances,
august smiles,
of crafty fingers
sweating tongues and palms

the glasses know
the bearable urges
gulped between
deluxe sips of wine.

Beware when they clatter
secrets among themselves.

From this gnawing distance

2008-10-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

I trim the wicks,
replenish fuel,
wind clockworks and brush windows
while you indulge
your bones of Machiavellian strength
against violet-tinted daydreams and merlot lit nights.

"God's surviving nymph.
The beautiful scar on a rock. A muse."
A mermaid dreaming of vineyards.

There are sailors
besotted
and this lighthouse keeper
a mythical being.

These parallel lives
have grown staircases
where your favorite
winds
fumble.

These 'Theses'

2008-10-28T06:29:00.001-07:00

You may not like her, in a world
where everyone jades a face
she dons
a mask of erotic truth.
Worth more than twenty one and a half thousand years
melted and weighed in gold.
A harlot for aliveness
She is.

To her
loneliness is a gift, solitude
-philosophy.
A miscarriage of several 'theses'
she walks along, carpe diem
with Valiums of life.
Old pair of shoes.

This is her prologue.

The virgin heiress
of sojourning truths
Her beauty whored
to Mediterranean's grief.

Perhaps, you may still not like her.

I Walked 45,740 Kilometers to give it to You

2008-10-28T06:20:00.000-07:00

Four billion years - since
I remained
patient
ignorant
watching the moths intimately
dissolve to dust
hourly uninformed
by lustful faiths,
myths and languid fairy tales
cried many a microscopic tear
forging
into a conforming soul
of ephemeral flesh and surviving bones
I walked
45,740 Kilometers
to give it back to You.

Now tell me, where is my Juliet?

Full-Moon Eyed

2008-10-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

So, then, how and who are we right now?
sleeping at an arm's distance,
deluged with vengeance for Zeus
and his barbarous crime.
Lets pretend to have known each other
for a hundred lives and spoken in dead languages
for eras, wearing revelatory emblems
of Hebrews and Helens
coalesced in one soul.

Lets just pretend to be strangers
as i am pretending to be asleep now,
savoring each breath you exhale
with grasp and watching you inhale
with gut-wrenching emptiness—
a chaste honeymoon.

Oh! Now a classic betrayal -
You
fading into a moonlit picture
in the night's stillness
and I stand here alone
full-moon eyed
as an anecdote to the scarf in our story.

Rodin's Thinker

2008-10-28T06:14:00.000-07:00

Seated on a rock, fist against teeth,
in the rebellious robe of nakedness,
his thoughts sculpted in metal
and bones tied with bronze,
he screams...

Engraved to immortality
time flows within;
philosophy personified
seated on a rock, fist against teeth,
he dreams...

objet d'art

2008-10-28T06:10:00.000-07:00

so i leased your scent as a muse awaiting the hopeful ink
now
at the nib of this dry pen,

if not words at least the opaque incisions would blur
the duskiness of a writer's block.

Bombay Blues

2008-10-28T05:59:00.000-07:00

Hello! Operator?
Could you please
connect me to the old Bombay?
Bombay not Mumbai,
Yes, the insomniac city,
where every man has nine wives
and wakes up with the 9 o'clock siren,
the one bearing the curvaceous queen's necklace road,
and villas that seemed like unread books
with pages upon pages of people
serenading their wretched handcarts,
matching
the sight of train whistles
and the two-honked double-deckers abruptly,
not to forget the bee-like pronounced taxis
and its bona fide drivers donning secular fabrics.

Hello? Bombay, can you hear me clear?
I can hear the children in the background
once innocent with their humble bicycles
and stickered cricket bats.

A sock that never found it's missing match.

2008-10-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

[11.04.06] After a walk with you at
the Marine Drive beach, the dotted grains of sand
cohered to my sole, were delicately dispersed
on the shoe-rack; so did the sea shore foam
that clung sans hope on my shoe-laces.

[06.10.07] Until recently, when I was looking
for a missing pair of socks, an audience
of sand grains' abode, waited 7 months
with inquisitive patience, to know if
donning similar socks was more significant
than obtaining, erstwhile grains of time

spent together with you.

Starry Eyed

2008-10-28T05:53:00.000-07:00

Descended from the sebaceous
dark clouds,
shining undimmed on my cold shoulders.
Sometimes i knowingly notice you,
sometimes others remark.

It is because of you
that i have abandoned things i used to do
and clothes i used to don.

Faintly layered, scattered wafers
of embarrassment and insult,
in three weeks you will depart
as this new shampoo loftily promises.

Hereby

2008-08-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

Stop these
induced mysteries
bewildering, while your harlot mind
unfolds in my palm, your eyes
sickened to the marrow
deceive, body cold as flesh lay grim
on the landscape of your Victorian floor,
ring that meaninglessly shine
dissents your intrepid finger
and kisses held useful on the dressing table;
dust-covered moth-eaten.

Unmask the dominoes
and finish all your lies
calligraphed
by your charcoal tongue the river of Camelot awaits
to see you grow beautiful someday in reflections
and thereby
i shall paint you in verses
in the portrait of the lady of shallot.

signed-

Save one of your fucks for me.

2008-08-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

I imagine those derelict hotels
where you wrap filthy words
around your frigid lover's tongue.
The place your shadow curls,
I send my cashmere draped ghazal
as a wooden reminder
to keep you tender and virginal
until
before our intents become defunct stations
rustic hands sedate
and insect eyes cheapen.

Postcard to Quebec

2008-08-25T22:35:00.001-07:00

carving garbled hearts on wooden planks
of steel benches ghoulish in their melancholy

a stranger with no maps
just the cheerful crackle of your smile
reduced to a photograph
passing by the scandalous basilica,
the ancient tower
leaning on an idle clock
where your labyrinth soul nestled
to the thought of my assuming presence
and hurried legs jived to a pink umbrella
i stood here for a spell of near memories...
a red phonebooth on a cobblestoned avenue

revisit and walk away
but do not make the mistake of-

The I in Silence

2008-08-25T22:33:00.001-07:00

In the airs that end with silence
in the tinctures of incoherent distance
and checkerboard linoleum floors of time
I think of you squirming
like a nude-pink worm on a hook
or in a bistro writing on a napkin
your words and your thoughts
stretched taut scrutinizing
pretty boys
assessing perfumes and smoke rings

and I see myself
in front of a wall-length mirror
a photograph of sorrow
my soft beingness
pitiable in a room
of resounding volume
hoping that you dont ask me for words
rather rely on my tongue-tied gestures
i am a sad endless aria
i hope my enemies go blind.

"Everything I told you was a lie."

2008-08-25T22:32:00.001-07:00

One day
I will walk up to you
and say - "Everything I told you was a lie."
Would you
believe me
Or think I was honest enough
to tell you that?

Your love
on trial.

War Bride

2008-08-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

Through the kohl-eyes
of an engine driver
i see the everyday man
as a pale morning moon,
a quarter burnt page
like yesterday's bride
(and) todays bird
flared for no Arabian tale
but a Koranic verse
misconstrued.

And the bereft nations-
a paralyzed piano,
a pile of seeking bones
for the rustle of skilled cuffs
and measured keystrokes.

The amber streets dyed
a silent gray, a cloud
of train-smoke withers;
the coffee rings on the ledge
desire
an incidental world in my chemical eyes
and I smile
a 10 o'clock smile
every working day.

Coffee and Vodka

2008-08-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

To have 24 hours with you
visiting harbours
in rafts, houseboats and canoes

for once symmetry would rule
as your night becomes mine as well
not a topsy turvy 10 and a half hour
of separation

we find our rhythm
our surges teach us
to make a hotel room
a home

the avenues
are cobblestoned
amber-rose streetlights
accompany us at dusk

pitched fevers
that won't be lulled
even after you kiss me
insistently, I awaken
with your taste on my swollen lips

and all I want
is more
of you and your poetry
from coffee flavored lips,
vodka laden tongue.

The bilingualist who preferred to ignore

2008-07-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

And after breathless torrents of laughter
you dress languidly and resume
your walk towards bilingual islands
all your right steps were wrong
and the left ones more subdued hushed
on your wilted trails
i murmured shards of hints
mouthed secret cues,
shared ivies and balmy breaths
(which you inferred for purple dust)
I am a mere color now
a forgotten praise,
a pile of brickbats your eyes cannot
r a r n e
e r a g

so i let a drop of tear
to inform you of my aeonian scent
and your oblivious mind
strayed it
for a fucking raindrop.

guillotine

2008-07-23T05:58:00.001-07:00

this is where i leave her,
footsteps receding
shoeshines blurred
props tumbling
from a handkerchief world

A miasma under a dim streetlight:
rough pictures and tinged whites,
burnt sketches with chewed outlines

this is where i stop being a painter
and gather my incapable skin,
exiled from colours;
a green lizard
on a brown window pane.

What if

2008-07-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

(The books that you read
are actually reading you?)

voluntary rustings

2008-07-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

When our identities are lost
in crowded ménages
when these silver threads
of analogous time
chime
disgusts for each other
when our words become to rust
my touch corrodes

We speak in silent stares
every detailed regard effaced
and our shadows no longer meet

We can wear verses
avoiding sameness of each other's rhyme
and seek to become
lain strangers again.

masquerade

2008-07-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

These cheerless pinch of rays
are subdued glints
of a distant pyre

An envious lover in flames,
a prowler on his shire.

Hence, hide your sycamore skin
and the ancient mirror aside

delude;

in your bridal box of iniquity.

Drawstring

2008-07-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

As our poems converge
the sentences brim with paroles
in this grim distance of
your cornered room
and my paper walls secluded
in my own skin

I thought of your body
as a costume and sashayed
as a man of poetry for a while
from emptiness to doors of withdrawal,
hotel suites and unfrequented tables
although afraid your words
might turn up where i'd laid them aside
lurking between empty glasses,
smoke rings and ruffled bed sheets.

For Sam,

2008-07-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

These inviting hatchways
mundane words
scattered futilities
in black and white

plastic torsos
monochrome lives
blind clangor
and contrived voice

You intriguing poet
dont need words
these signifiers
these loud paroles

Merely read my lines
and fall asleep
reprise in dreams
that words are cheap.

Lifespan of a Glimpse

2008-05-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

Girl in Fulton Street

Still waiting
amidst a crowd of cold shoulders,
teasing each pair of vacant eyes,
and every forehead forlorn
with meddling thoughts.
Vacuous sights nailed
on mundane paths
romance
my cobwebby beingness.