Proem

she was the calm
breathing storm in her skin
wreaking poetry in a world of essays
wrenching shores in the anarchy of the boisterous waves beneath her eyelashes

she was the calm before the havoc

The Fall of the Parallels

have you ever seen

what you once called parallels
meet at the very heart of the countless bylanes
cut each other at the skin
losing the other in a debauched stream of warm, bad blood


how'd it feel

Thirty Four Days of Winter

It was a late night
That December, it was colder than usual
It was a late night
A late night in December
Where it all began


There's something about nights
Dark and improbable shivering down the spines
And yet, a sleep impregnated in thoughts
Dreams of a good morning, lives better and tomorrows brighter
And, that's where it all began
The desire of many a dream long lost, finding home for once



She was the solace
Her eyes eerily calm
The wrinkles enveloped in the purposely spoiled kohl and elaborate mascara
The smile she wore cut her lips oblique
Debris of a yesterday spilled across
Remnants of another, wrenched beneath the skin


She was a queen
And like every other, she wore a crown too
A crown bedazzled in agony and anguish
A crown nevertheless
The stories she flushed down the stinking urinals
The poetries she wet her crumpled bedsheets in
The life she wished was still alive
She wore them all around her neck
The pendant of a dear dead son cutting through the ribs
Scars from a fallen dusk etched in flesh, right above the navel

She was the warrior queen




He was the inferno
His eyes seething yet numb
Somewhat like the entirety of molten lava asleep in a bottomless pit
His lips had forgotten the taste of a smile
The pages he had burned off the novel
He was smeared in the ashes that bled off it


He was an alchemist
Some called him a magician, some called him a conjurer
For what remained of the mass and the mediocre
He was just another lunatic in the crashing waved of pretended busy lives
The chapter called childhood lay wronged in the wounds beneath his tattoos
Memoirs of severed strings wrapped in the singular scar smothering his lips
The ruins of an erstwhile rebellion
The crippled crimson roses from a commonplace betrayal
He would spread them across, thorough and detailed
Somewhat like canvases from an aftermath

He'd reimagine it all in monochrome



It was an unlikely affair
Or so, it seemed in the apparent skin
A queen and an alchemist
The hordes of worldly people condemned them

But then, they had scripted their worlds in themselves
The rest, drowned in the rainbow after the rains



He made her the canvas and the muse
She made him the art and the artist
Away from the pastel lives of the neon walls
They found love in black and white


He was the fire that cleansed her
She was the tranquil he sought refuge in
Far from a world of make-beliefs
They found themselves in the differences


And, when it all felt right for once and ever
And, when the habit of being had turned home
It all fell apart, bits and crumbs that would never make sense put back together
Somewhat like a compulsive turn of acts from a repetitive history



The desires born off a robed night were buried in the naked daylight



The winter was gone at the knock of spring
It was a change of seasons; a hundred thousand lives were all the same



Somewhere, in the middle of the deafening noises of a maddening mediocrity
Something could never be the same ever again



Thirty four days of winter were a lifetime somewhere 

Crimson

and she wore the crimson
like the dawn of a dusk
as if
plucked from the skin of the setting sun

In the End

you aren't different
you are malignant
you will make a king someday
or devour your very existence

she had once said


years later
a while after he was all but bygone
she smiled to the obituary in the silence of a single tear


cancer could never tell kings from rubbles
the malignant had fallen to the malign

Moulin Rouge

elaborate kohled eyes

lips done neat 

pride well wrapped

in

the untamed flowing strands

kissing the wriggling waistline

and

the scent of petrichor

she was the goosebumps 

where the seas met the storms 

The Love Letter

in a world of red
be my beige
in a world of roses
make me a rhododendron

in a world of everyday romantics
let's pen a forever of an affair, sultry 

Posthumous

Have you ever felt immensely quenched and terribly thirsty at the very same time? Has it ever happened that your food pipe is drenched and yet the tongue and the palate feels unusually arid, somewhat a dead desert?

It was strangely odd a sensation. A vaccuum feeling.

As the seething temperatures scorched his very skin to nothing, I lost my father to ashes, once for all.



How would you feel, if, on a murky afternoon, you walked out of your room to realise, you lived a lie all along, for the last two decades, from the very inception of it?


I had never seen my mother. They said, she died fighting to let me live. The only string that led me to my roots, was my father. A father, whose identity seemed bleaker than the rapidly vanishing horizon against the overcast skies.


"Hi, madame.."
"I'm sorry for you loss. I really am."
"Some things are simply inevitable, I suppose."
"You are his son, aren't you?"
"I've been told so atleast..."
"You have questions, don't you?"
"You are the famous fashion icon Ira Dubey, if I am not mistaken."
"You aren't, my son."
"And how on earth could a life as celebrated as yours cross paths with a commoner life like his?"
"Commoner? He was anything but a commoner. Who do you think your father was?"
"Just a regular guy, who wrote advertisements for a living. Or so, I have been told."
"They called him The Renaissance Man. He was a legend."
"Outlier? Rebel?"
"He wasn't a rebel. He was the revolution."
"I don't understand..."
"Your father brewed storms in his words. Storms that rocked the seas and wrecked the sails. Poetry that turned anthems. Poetry that cut lives open, poetry that healed the charred. For a decade, he wrote and wrote. He just wouldn't stop. And then, one day, he just retired himself. But, the world had only gotten started with him. The day he exiled himself was the day that marked the beginning of a revolution."
"How do you know so much about him?"
"We used to know each other. Once upon a time."
"Estranged lovers?"
"If only definitions could put an end to the hundred thousand questions that feed off you, every single minute!" Her smile was hauntingly calm.
"Did you know my mother?"
"I had met her once."
"What was she like?"
"The sea that could contain the entirety of the storm, within."
"My father, you said, was a revolution."
"That, he was."
"They called him The Renaissance Man. What did she call him?"
"The Madman."





That night left me orphaned. All over again.

Semicolons

if i could
undo every story
i have spent
the entirety of a lifetime
in

there would be a story i could never undo
the story where we met; star crossed lovers in a sinking crowd of walking dead lives


in a rusted novel of full stops

semicolons  are a privilege

You are the Dream

you are the far fetched dream
      i and only i get to live

               - reloved -

Not Yet

have you given up already?

don't.


it takes many a rain to make a rainbow