Photo by Wolf Zimmermann
It’s Okay
To wake up
In the middle of the night
And start brushing
Your memory or picking
Your brains on where you lost
Your favourite keychain
Seven years ago
In that cold overflowing lane
Or what the symbol carved
On your college bench stood for
Or on which floor was the balcony
Where a woman puffed her age away
Every time you rode up the flyover
In residual winters
It's okay
To find out that life
Like space-time isn't flat
And gravity here is created
Not by objects but by their absences
Which compel you to orbit them
As long as you live
It's okay
To think you'll turn lonelier than yesterday
To go to hell with optimism
And drape in the season's dark
It's okay
To deduce once in a while
That god is the biggest tragedy
The world has never seen
A 2.31 AM Whisper
The new house has parked itself
in the dingy basement of my mind.
The wooden bookshelf smells like Marquez's bitter almonds.
Unrequited is the only kind of love, I tell myself.
Facebook corrects me instantly like Mrs. Augustine.
Pictures of newly married couples at Khar Social
or Olive or Fable are flecked with clichés
like "You gave meaning to my life".
They don't realize that life is as meaningless
as the omelette you forgot on the frying pan.
Why do we fancy what we fancy?
Every night, I think of any one of the women
who disappeared from my life like a suitcase in a suspense thriller.
A dog is fiddling with a bone of the shape of Italy.
I am itching to quote Dante in this line
but can't remember a word of what he said.
For the whole day, I talked to carpenters,
and my maid into making better chapatis. Mother
urges me to find a wife. At the moment,
I can't even find the keys to my drawer.
The night sheds its bra-shaped skin.
Everything seems editable in retrospect.
Love, to hell with Facebook, remains unrequited.