Lets Take Fireflies Instead of the Plane

It is raining.

The city is drenched, and so is everyone else.

Drenched in their own sweat and reeking of hypocrisy and a sense of never-ending hatred.

Hate would be a small word, it would be more appropriate to call it utter abhorrence.

An exotic bird sits on the highest branch of the tallest tree in the city and looks around the soggy city clumsily melting in the sweat and stink of its own people. All the houses and the roads the buildings have been painted a slate grey. It’s a law of the city and those who dare not follow it are lavished with the army of cockroaches of the city’s mayor, and we know cockroaches.

These are a special breed, almost extinct now had not the mayor encouraged his trustworthy attendants to breed them with all the love and care that his sweat could buy. These cockroaches are 8 feet long and their tentacles are a crispy shiny black. The mayor dotes on them.

The bird’s eye is a myriad of colours as if stolen from the rainbow and he knows that if the mayor is made to notice him, he would not be treated with much respect. His eye glints as he scans the melancholy, grey and monotonous city below.

With this last glance, he spreads open his turquoise wings and glides away in search for a land more peaceful, a land where the bird can breathe freely and spread his wings without the fear of them being burned, for he is no phoenix who can reincarnate from his own ashes. He is an ordinary yet exotic bird, who dares to do what comes to him naturally; fly.

Lets Tear Their Flesh Apart Tonight

I’m engulfed by a sense of profound silence all around me. People say that silence means the absence of sound but I disagree. Silence is the sound of a blank paper, a white canvas, an empty dark room and a hungry mouth. I want to break this silence.

I want to scream and spill ink on the paper, cover the canvas in frenzied ecstasy of paint as that of Jackson Pollock. I want to illuminate the room with light so that it breathes life into the lumps of dead meat lying astray in there. I want the hungry mouth not only to be fed with the most delicious food to satisfy its hunger but also with a few questions to feed the hungry soul’s brains.

 We need food. We all need light and a multitude of ink and paint spilling and dribbling everywhere as if a pack of hungry wolves are set afree after a long time and now nothing, absolutely NOTHING can stop them from seeking what they want. I know its dark and the woods are cold, but I know for sure that the wolves would sleep a sleep of satisfaction tonight.

From Z to W

You had so much to say to me. You talked to me all the time but did I ever have a moment on my hands to hear you out, or even once. No. I never did. Never.

I close my eyes and gulp. It hasn’t been easy to explain to anyone. Apparently, they call you the keychain with the starfish made of red felt.

You talked to me of the tides that were high and low. How you had travelled in the sea and now you yearned to return to.

Your words had a halo around them as they walked over the beach towards me but I never even cast them a slight glance. I got out of the car and forgot you were lying in my lap and getting out meant you slipped down on the busy road somewhere just waiting to be squished over by some raging driver honking ludicrously.

I’m sorry or forgetting you and all that you have done for me all along and I know sorry isn’t even a word. What are words but a random combination of alphabets. I’m lost in this myriad of alphabets of languages long forgotten which are stuck in a hurricane along with our modernity.

The Limbo Between The Flood and The Drought

Its dark around me but not pitch dark. The sky outside is not starry tonight. I can barely make out the shapes of the furniture cluttered in the room. Its all cluttered; the room, the mind the cry of the night-bird outside. I close my eyes with an utter sense of relief, trying to clear my mind, but somehow i can not forget the presence of breathing and heaving furniture all around me. I lean against a dust-covered table. The layer of dust feels like a smooth piece of silk velvet against my palms. I pull myself up and sit on top of the table.

Its time to exhaust my senses, I introspect. Exhaust myself to the extent that i know of nothing around myself but the mere existence of exhaustion alone. I keep my eyes wide open staring into a dark corner of the room, determined not to blink. slowly and gradually my mouth opens up to its full extent and inhaling and exhaling. Inhaling. Exhaling. Its drying up. My eyes are brimming up too.

I inwardly smile at myself thinking that though my mouth is drying up , my face is getting this abundant shower from the eyes, keeping it balanced. Keeping life balanced. Everything balanced.

Perpetual Rhythm

Clip clop clip clop clip clop! A long impending pregnant pause followed.

Knock knock. Pause. Knock knock.                                  

A long silence ensued and crickets chirruped somewhere.

Clip clop clip clop clip clop! The sound faded into the silence somewhere.

A crack in a door creaked open. Somebody was breathing heavily.

The door shut band and thudded in the threshold abruptly.

The crickets continued chirruping and humming to their own tune.

where is IT?

mommy i heard a cry last night. a wolf's cry echoing in the valley below. i was scared.  i took my pillow's ear and chewed it fervently. i wish you were there to soothe me. i hugged my knees and silently cried. my toes became numb as i sat on the cold floor, in a corner of the room. did i tell you before, that the window i my room is broken and its a deep valley outside. it scares me on nights like this one. mommy are you listening to me. mommy !

how foolish i was to talk into a receiver of a telephone that responded nothing but echoed back my own voice and was accompanied with an occasional, haunting beep.

Im a Shadow of a Nobody

I step into a heap of fine sand that sifts through my toes and slowly enveloping my feet completely into their unknown depth. A dark depth of small particles rubbing against each other due to the mere dancing of the wind. These particles made way into the throat through my nose. I felt as if I was being chocked and muffled.

My existence was just a mere presence...or maybe just a shadow of what i was and how the air and the sand looked at me. i was a living, dark and translucent shadow that was hovering from one sand dune to another since the time when shadows were'nt dark but as bright as the golden sun and there were those days when the sparkle and glitter of the sand envied my luscious, silky darkness. I step ahead into something sticky. its cold and soothing and reminds me the sand on the beach and how i used to roll in it while making castles by the shore some time back. When did I used  to do  that, to be precise? i could'nt think , recall or remember any moment in detail but yes there were those sensory images flashing in my sloshy mind. I'm sinking in.

 Its quicksand, I guess, but nothing matters but the present itself and how the cold mixture sticks and gulps me down as if trying to quench a thirst spell it was under since the desert became what it was now. It became a desert the day the sun evaporated the river, that was once here, in a mingled state of love and rage. But for once I wanted this; the sand consuming and wanting me. It seemed as if I was being caressed for the first time. Old memories were long-forgotten today. The sand had blown them away with the particles of sand.