We were learning each other for the first time

I do not know what it was,
maybe the soundless words that asked me not to be afraid,

we were learning each other
for the first time,
and even though I was impatient

still
we were allowing the time to stretch
allowing the time to stretch
the time to stretch
to stretch

between words
between sentences
between smiles
between yesterday and the promise of tomorrow.

I was impatient
again
chased by uncovered memories
again
fearful of loosing
again
unsure of what it all means
again

until again-ness of the in-between-ness was almost unbearable
however,
we have been learning each other for some time now and so
unexpectedly
instead of falling
I began to shyly feel the ground beneath my feet.

Perhaps his feet were hanging above the ground for a very long time as well
?

?


?

?




and they
needed time to stretch stiffened muscles
slowly
and without rushing
so that
the fear of again-ness
would fly away.

We were learning each other
for the first time.
Slowly.

Rainy Day

In a descriptive mood
devoid of the penthouses touched
by the greyness of your sky

they entered (realizing that
to enter is a verb)
or
re-entered
into
those well known spaces
of tiny veins
that make my muscles clench
into a body of a fist
into a body crumpled under the gaze of other bodies
into a body that I might have forgotten
and
then
I pack myself
into cold shapes of lines
forming letters on an even colder screen
and
send myself
into you

not knowing what the weather forecast is like at your end
.
It rained here all day,
I slept with my sweater on.

Un.

For if I ever unwounded myself
                    the process might have been rather painful;
Yet,
If I
If I     could
trust   you
And
if        You
could  trust
me
.
.
.
in a jungle of dissected words
and meanings
.
If I could trust you and you could trust me
then perhaps one night
I would unstitch the stitches and show you the raw flesh and
perhaps then that night
a tiny worm of fear would climb up onto the cotton ball
that I would allow
allow you
to
to keep under the skin for a moment.

And then I would restitch the stitches until the next moment when
you could trust me and I could
un-trust my
insecurities
.
The process always remains unfinished
untill
one night
You
stitch
my words
into the forearm of your left hand.

and no words have ever been spoken

If she ever...
                   ... it was because he would open the new horizons for her,
If he ever ...
                   .... it was because she would contain his skies in her arms before they would burst into small pieces again
.
.
.
.
.
and no words have ever been spoken...
instead,
they looked at them
.
.
both with their strange looking eyes
.
.
l
o
o
k
e
d
.
.

but one day a word run and touched his skin
..
and he run as the skin of his forearm remained touched by her...
...
she knew
...
he knew
...
and no words have ever been spoken
.
.
.
two trees
..

in an open field

...............................
and a field opened its gates to free the freedom trapped in them

The Doors

The child was amazed with her new surroundings... for the house of the piano player had numerous rooms with their own separate landscapes - the house by the lake, the sea where he dolphins lived, the desert where he once walked and the oasis that reminded her of the past tense of her future memories. She wandered around the mansion and each door that opened infused her with tenderness that she never felt before. It would stay with her for long as it crawled under her skin and coiled in her sympathetic nervous system... She did not want to grow up but to remain there in the labyrinth of corridors that went it spirals to a point when her head began to spin...

She was standing on a thin line hanging from here to there or from there to here, depending on your point of you. Her hands up in the air trying to balance her steps as she walked slowly towards...  towards what? It did not matter. A wise man told her once to fix her gaze on one point ahead and allow the breath to lead her, and so she walked and each step seemed to be making her feel lighter as the coins of expectations fell one by one out of her pockets to the green grass below. The line was so thin that she almost got frightened for a moment that it might suddenly turn into something amorphous and the clearly divided spaces below shall become androgynous.
But do we need definitions? Divisions of roles that we play? Would you like to just play with me without knowing whether things are black or white? Forgetting all that you knew before and allowing me to be you and you me? Closer even than intertwined... liquid, fluid, penetrating those known unknown sides of each other. But where does one end and the other begin?

She fell. Her hands thrown to the sides as the body tried to fight the mundane forces of gravity. The sense of suspension.  Body in a moment. What would you do if you could capture the moment of existence and the non-   of it with your own eyes? The drop of sweat that already splashed but had not splashed as yet at the same time? Those moments when the real becomes so unreal that you do not know which side to turn your head to.

They sat together at the same time. Divided only by the walls of some fifteen hundred buildings that were given for rent each year. 11 months agreement. 1 month of discord.

He placed his fingers on the piano keys and the fifteen hundred seats hall became silent in anticipation. He raised his hands and as the fell down the strings began to tremble. Her eyes were fixed on a point ahead of her and the steady rhythm of her breath helped her to keep the balance as she walked on a trembling line.

He stood up and the audience began to roar with applause.
 She touched the tree.
He was packing his bags after the performance was over.
She looked back and smiled.

I closed the doors of the room on my left side. My head was spinning... so many doors closed and opened... so many walls in between... and yet...

He sat down tired after another show. The nth hundreth and nth fourth in his life. He took off his face off his faceless body and kept it on the hanger. He looked into the mirror. Unable to recognise the image he turned his head away. He shrug his shoulders and his hands dived into his pockets. he felt the cold touch of metal there. He took out a bunch of keys and with an invisible smile closed the doors behind him and threw the keys high in the air.

I will not tell him

I will not tell him,
for he had already left for the wilderness,
yet the softness of his lips infused me with innocence that glowed in his eyes.
I became slender that day for the first time.
We sat holding hands and I was that sixteen year old girl whom he kept close to his chest when she wanted to sleep.
I listened to the heartbeat - it spoke of being.
I loved these words.

There was no rush of torn clothes nor words cutting through my skin like a razor.
They still played in my mind though.
Unerasable memories.
I froze in fear as they creeped up my neck.

He failed to see that a sixteen year old girl tried to fill the negative spaces of his body with her presence.
He left for the wilderness that day.

I kept a leaf in my notebook.
It shall turn brown with time...
He shall see so many leaves to pluck in the forest.
They will all be greener than mine.

How to...

A horse died.
They took the dead body and the match began...
The head of the well known team threw the corpse into the playfield.
The impact was so great that the opposing team took  three steps back before their strategist came out with the idea of amputation.
They cut the leg with an ax and threw it back at the opponents.
The crowd was roaring at the stadium.
The match was fascinating.
Better even perhaps than the one in which they decapitated the cow.
The game was so amusing.
They hanged the street dogs by their legs and asked the willing ones to pay rupees 5 for a shot.
It allowed them to gather the funds for the games that were to take place in the coming year.

The greatest being on earth... that knows how to conquer the space, that knows how to build machines, that knows how to... how to... how to...

A horse died.
A cow died.
A dog died.
How to... they did not know.

Perhaps, yet, and then...

I like my house. Just like I like my name.
I like them in the future and the present.
I have chosen them myself and we grew into each other.
The house. The name. The I.

I shall not invite you,
it is my space, not yours.
Yet,
the land next door is empty.
Perhaps,
one day there shall be a house there.
And then,
we might stand by the fence and talk.
We might even build a gate and go out from our houses and walk,
till we find another piece of land
and we make it our own.

The spirals.

It is like a drug.
I tasted it and my body is craving for more.
I wish I could tell you about the experience yet the dictionary failed to provide appropriate words.
Rollercoaster without fear.
Trust.
The whiteness of the cat turning to yellowness in the light of a night lamp.
My eyes chasing after my big toe as it runs to follow the rest of the body.
Residual awareness.
Muscles relaxed as physics and gravity found themselves to be in perfect constellation in the center of my body.

I need to breathe as the very memory of it makes me feel high.

Straight lines of the daily routine make me run for a blade that would cross them out from the pages I write.

Touch of the floor beneath my feet.
Spaces.
Spaces, spaces, spaces that are waiting to be filled with my movement and emptied again.
Discovered. Found. Rediscovered.

I covered my mouth pondering over the sense of the words I had written.
They fail to understand.

Only the spine still has some memories.
Fading.
Craving.
Dreaming.

The art of storytelling

I've always been poor with languages. Unlike so many of you who are able to dissect the world into neat multi-syllable words that you ate for lunch in that tiny foreign restaurant just around the corner I struggle with my daily bread. It's often coarse and hurts your delicate palate yet my mother cannot teach me more sophisticated ways of cooking anymore.
I mixed jaggery with bananas for lunch today.
It was sweet and had a smell of a village house. We ate it together - you and I and then the story came to sit down by our side. We gave her a cup of tea. She was feminine for sure - the story I mean, the tea was more masculine in nature - black with lemon and just a single spoon of sugar in it.
She was distressed she said. I asked her why, but she remained silent for a long time.
A man was passing by. He was carrying his proposal for a government grant for a revolutionary project about the art of storytelling. We offered him tea, yet he refused. He was too busy comparing grant opportunities offered by some far away countries and the discussion had to turn towards the semantics of proposal writing. The story was silent. I think she turned her head away.
A lizard climbed inside a paper lampshade. I could see each part of her body being lit. Black mark of ink on red paper.
The project was intense. It was based on the concept of taking the words out from random pages of a dictionary and applying them to white sheets of paper. The task was so deep that the participants began to worry if they manage to stay with it for the whole day.
A tiny fish touched my foot as I stood in the blue waters. I giggled in response. The butterfly flapped its blue and black wings. I watched it hiding in the grass.
The project was a success. New methodologies of the art of story writing were invented and all the participants discussed the lack of such way of communication in our culture. Apparently we sold everything to cater for the foreign tastes. Disturbing... don't you think?
The dogs barked. I patted one of them. He licked my hand.
The man got up. He was in hurry to finish his project before the dead line. It was important. The future of mankind could be depending on it.

She opened her mouth but could not say any word. They got stuck somewhere near the larynx. She coughed. And coughed. And coughed. And... and each time her torso was torn by the spasm her body would shrink a bit. She was becoming smaller and smaller until she became an almost invisible point hidden between the dust of the earth.

The cup of tea stayed on the table.

And you and I engrossed in our thoughts about the art of story telling...