It's been 3 years and 33 seconds
You must remember 
We tried so hard to make amends
But were always unclear
On persisting fundamental things
Like love and rings.

Everyday I see the mirror
agog in silent horror.

What makes an act wrong, It screams -
The motive?
Or the outcome?
What makes a doer guilty, It shrieks - 
His deed?
Or his desire?

I squeeze shades and hues out of a tube
And splash them on the canvas
My fingers join a tint with another
And keep searching for an answer.

Love is a stranger to me now,
Like the man who presents
The weather forecast of the day - 
Vaguely familiar,
But unknown.
Like a new street you encounter
In an old city block,
Like your brother, when you met him with his fiance
For that very first time.

I know this stranger much better now 
Or not at all, not at all.
 

courtesy Ess D.

Adnan, a limerick on your request. Three cheers for fond memories.





I was once an IC design much bolder,
On my to picking up hot Solder,
But I pissed Sandhya off
She roared an evil laugh -
And now am just a tarballed folder.

For the inordinately inquisitive:  This poem is not remotely autobiographical. :)







When did I last see ?
the soft hair on your neck.
I felt it in my dreams last night
As they rose to meet my fingers
And touched my lips instead.

You keep dancing in the spotlight
That shines through my thoughts
So bright
So bright that my eyes see nothing else.

Is it strange that I do not desire
to encounter a dream?
The quickening pace
of  life giving blood,
 pulsating through my arms and legs
Is too much. Too much for my simple heart.

I relish the memory of your eyes all day
But I fear their intensity at night.

We are timeless now. yesterday. Frozen
Together with our ears listening
to the sound of an ocean
Hidden inside
Our seashell fingers.

She could feel the sun burning into her face and groaned. Crackerjack dame was spreadeagled on her back and felt beat.
Her eyes seemed welded shut.
" Where am I? Why am i moving so much? What time is it? The hour of a high sun.." 
The disorientation lasted for hours as she drifted through bouts of losing consciousness and regaining it. As her eyes eventually yielded to coaxing, they met with the conundrum of a green rolling sea. She grabbed the roughly hewn wooden raft in a sudden panic and looked around.

It was nothing but sea all around, as far as the horizon stretched.

What was the last thing...?
Yes. An explosion. She had seen the mushroom cloud with living eyes and flown at near-light speed to avoid the destructive nuclear wave. This was a sudden development.

I must find Khaled. He must have reached Frankfurt by now.. if he is alive.. If he reached before the bomb went off, he would have contacted me immediately.  Those were his instructions. Was this bomb her doing too?

Little did she know that Luck, the bitch had been as shocked last night as her. She had felt in her immortal heart, the presence of Khaled in town. But not the cracker he was carrying.. and neither the thickening plot.

   


I walk, half-blinded by my imagination -
Inhaling in the world as it IS
And exhaling out a non existent vision.

I fantasize. sculpt. dream.
Therefore I am.

My fingers reach out to a uniform emptiness,
While my restless mind creates whorls
In a sequence of textured madness.

Red eyes conjure up a green field, in tandem
With toes that stub against a squalid wall
And flowers who leap from my dress to blossom.

I exist beyond a walled-in life. rules. city.
I can fight Eventuality. 

When these strangers speak and beckon
To me,
When they look at me and catch me
Wishing, Thinking, Hoping, Wondering;
Can they see - in my public eyes,
My private dreams ?

We sit oftentimes and not, on the high wall
Between quotidian fears and paranoia
Tilting one way or the other
And trying always not to fall.

   Khaled was not a mercenary. He was a poet.

          Tonight his poetic heart sought revenge for the wanton decimation
          of his birth village. It had taken him years to track down the vile
          prodigal goddess who was responsible for the death of innocents.
          He could not remember how he had done it. Just a stroke of
          good luck, perhaps.

       And some help from the crackerjack Dame. She was super.
       A little paroxysmic rage control required, thats all.
       But little did she know about his plans today.
      
    And today is the day of reckoning, The day when a nemesis dies.
And today is the day of praying, the day of no more lies.

He triggered the ticking entity lying hidden inside his jacket. He couldn't wait any longer.


And Frankfurt lay in ruins.
Khaled sang from beyond his grave. His voice echoed in the halls of luck and fate.
The conflicting twin goddesses wailed and wailed but all was barren.

"Shit", said the Super dame.

      
Somewhere, a raven was bleeding slowly into the night. A gust of wind had blown it into the thorny branches of a weeping tree. The moonlight retired into the clouds and stewed slowly in its solitude.

       It was business as usual at Frankfurt Havens that night.        Not that day or night mattered to her but she preferred the cold crawlings of the night and kept the days reserved for plotting..
                Plotting how to get her hands on Khaled.  Would he fall in love with her if she blew him another wind of good luck?
      
       He was always so distant and reserved. Cold.               
       Mercenary cold. Murderer cold. Just perfectly iced.



       She had never really considered the Dame a threat.

       Little did she know, that her old pranks and tricks were fast catching up with her. Little did she know that the tiny imperceptible breeze of ill luck she had whispered into the night 15 years ago had grown into a gargantuan whirlwind of such shocking sorrow, that at this instant, 7 men and women were baying... for her immortal blood.

The raven screeched its last.