Love of my life

You are the best thing that happened to me though I didn't recognise it at that time. In the past, there were crossroads when one was left alone and this time, this heart manages to find a home in a heart where love beats in a language known to it. Though I fail to bring back our days in real, this love has become a fond and affectionate bond where we seek and find each other out with a hunger not known before or after. 

Love

I never say  I bring you only bouquets of joy,

Yellow flowers of sunshine and love.

Hidden beneath them may be flaws in me

Which may wound you and pierce your heart

Yet with the broken, tattered, torn, scarred flowers , 

Which call my soul, I bring you dreams

From the unknown land, where in the grass,

Little toes will step towards you with delight.

Perimenopause

On air

The way your memory creeps up before my eyes

The way you croon your favourite songs and mine,
The songs that have stayed despite the long years
Playful, naughty, sad, philosophical or just pleasant.

The songs that bring you back to me wherever I am
Wild dreams of being one with you body and soul
Spending endless hours in embraces like creepers
Despite the long sad years of absence and longing.

Though I long for our lost days with a heavy heart,
Those days of endless sunshine that were so perfect
Your sweet voice singing your favourites and mine
During all seasons and all times, every single day. 

The songs that I listen on the radio this morning
Brings back a smile in this era of infinite longing.

#listentotheradio

May

Peacock

Devotion

Ram Navami

Legacy

Legacy

May be it is because I lost you even before I knew what loss was. I lived years without knowing what it was to grow up without a parent. 

Then on becoming ten, I saw with sadness how parents loved their kids and it stung me that I would never have fought or answered you back had you been alive. 

It would have been a normal life with you around me and I would have grown up like the others too. But this was a life snatched away too soon only to leave a similar legacy of not being around to nurture one's offspring. 

happy easter

Celebrations

In most of the festivities, sadness cast its shadow like the ancient skeletons hung amidst sumptuous feasts. I could never let it go for this heart never knew how to let its soul soar in the skies.

Every year, this was a celebration of joys and sorrows with equanimity: for one learnt this bitter stoic attitude quite early in life. There was no better teacher than my grandmother who sang the way of the cross in her sweet mellow voice during Lent.

For it was never an easy life; always a loss between the cup and the lip and when the ancient scale of weights is checked against feathers, it is a heavy heart that upsets the balance by its inability to let go of the past.

World Poetry Day

Mehndi

Priceless

There were times when I have struggled a balance between my dreams of material wealth and spiritual happiness. Not that there were many possessions, a bare room that looked more like a scholar's study than a girl's bedroom but there was always a need to keep it spick and span.

There was this craving for possessions later always caused by an awareness of a lack looking at the wealthy and the rich. Then now, when it is possible to have possessions and objects that one wants, this strange heart wants nothing but to be left at peace, to know the wisdom of simplicity and of keeping away from needless clutter.

It wants not to learn the price of new desirables but to keep against its heart the priceless value of timeworn possessions, worn-out words, tired dreams and old loves of words, coffee, wine, music and  you.

Wisdom

You were a wanderer who left behind your hometown to start a new life, to prove yourself in the eyes of your near and dear ones. I was a dreamer who could listen with wonder to your ramblings and walk with you everywhere, one who could go places without leaving my favourite armchair. 

In the many years of absence, you and I travelled together across many exotic lands. From these wanderings, we have gathered so much of wisdom and have arrived at a place of mutual understanding. How we have changed in our lives holding close only values that which matter to both you and me!

In the long years you have been away, I have glimpsed you in many forms but not in real but I still remember your tenacity in sticking to your dreams and nothing else. For me, who have lately started following your footsteps, the world looks new and vistas inviting. 

May be this is not a dream at all but a piece taken out of tattered lives like yours and mine, but when these words come to fruition, it is more perfect than anything else heard, felt or seen.

Tonight

Tonight, it was your words, chocolate and butter, that made me drunk.Words that would bring back your bold gaze that could read more of me and weave a tapestry of desire.

I still wonder why I would spend hours in front of the mirror wondering at what you saw in me and go over in the mind, a flash of your childhood smile.

But all this magic faded away and we became two strangers fighting about what belongs to whom. Still it was your words, chocolate and butter, that made me drunk with delight, tonight.

Pic Courtesy:things sweet and wonderful to eat. wordpress.com

Fantasy: Propose Day of the Valentine week 2021

Years: Rose Day

May be it was part of my bravado to make  fun of love and how lovers feel when they meet after a long time.

Though the hourglass looks still, the days have fled so fast as if on wings. Here we are, the writer and the written, the wanderer and the dreamer, face to face, eye to eye.

I don't know where you have been and whom you have met but I would like to hear what passed day by day, hour by hour, second by second.

I might have to fight back all the tears of absence that have weighed my heart and you may have to slow down the countless words that never found a way to the lips.

But god willing, when that day finally comes,  I want it to remain still like forever and I want to tell you for sure that I know what a love story really feels like.

Tree of Life

1 January 2021

The New Year began quietly at 0001 while I was busy writing in my journal. This has been my habit for the last many years when I have found happiness in journalling about the passing year and the coming one. Unlike childhood, when the New Year began with prayers in the church with the Midnight Mass, the years since my marriage in 2009 have been blessed with midnight musings and nothing else. I have jumped like the proverbial monkey from faith to spirituality to religion to nonbelieving all the time and its hardly news that I don't go to church any longer. 

Writing in a journal often means that you are offering yourself, baring yourself completely without any kind of censure. In some of the diary writing years, I have thought of publishing mine but it never happened that way because I was too busy with many things and my journal writing endeavours mostly fizzled out before the end of January. 

This year I want to write a journal that is worth publishing and want to make consistent positive improvement in the six areas of my life namely physical, spiritual, social, emotional, financial and educational. 

true partner

Merry Christmas

Dedication

You are my other that helped me to grow, to learn more about life and even about my own self. You might be a person, an event or a book that has left an imprint on my soul.

You are my first love, this entanglement with melodies, the way my soul lifts up in the Hosannah or feels happy with the Magnificat or bursts out in a raga with the rains.

You are my ever existing dream of weaving together dreams, words and melodies into a book of poetry worthy enough to be engraved in a beautiful script and to be set before your appreciative eyes.

You could also be my love, the one that never found its way to express itself yet reaches out to you in words, gestures and memories wherever you are.

You are a lesson, a mistake, may be a chapter that I cannot forget, a memory that I cannot erase despite of all the bitter strife of these years.

You have taught me how to be, how to love yet not to lose myself and the lessons are not bad as you can see for yourself.

The Alchemist

Ecological footprint

One fine day

Were there expectations in your eager mind

As how exactly it is going to be like in real,
With you and me meeting each other to find
What the years have not taken away or heal.

Didn't your heart beat as loud as mine today
When walking down the street you saw me.
Not like in the days of beautiful togetherness
But like a pleasant surprise hard to contain.

For me, I saw you only for a few moments
But enough to keep counting even the time,
My face that cannot hide what it feels like
Or my words that might reveal what I want.

One fine day, this might become so unreal
This longing to have you beside me a lifetime.

Siesta

You and I share not just a life in common; 

Love of music, readable books and people, 

Fighting for rights of people in dire need

Of living a life together against all odds.

Dreams of sunrises, siestas and twilight, 

Our limbs entangled in sweet embraces

Your eyes that drink me up like coffee

Shared dreams of a life of togetherness. 

At times fantasies of idyllic happiness, 

That turn erotic at the slightest whim, 

Lips against lips, limbs against limbs

A longing to join heart, body and soul. 

May be a desire to lose myself fully in you

And get back to work after a sip of coffee.

@daydreaming

angel numbers

The Story of My Life

I have never seen the story of my life summarised in more poignant words than the ones on this coffee-mug at home:

 

  

Mary had a little lamb, a little toast, a little jam, a little pizza and some cake,
some French fries, and a chocolate shake, a little burger on a bun.
And that's why Mary weighs a ton. :-)

Bliss

The days of darkness are over finally.
I had waited for the dawn to come for long;
One little wrong word and too much veracity
Had killed this free spirit too early.

Thirst for knowledge and love of life lost,
The soul had shrunk as if pickled in brine
And lost its freedom, its love for life,
Become like an empty vessel thrown in mud.

Now you have brought so many joys and smiles,
You have changed the face of this terrain,
With your dash of luck you sail forward
Taking us both in your pleasant stride.

If I had not known this darkness, my dear,
I'd have never known the value of your smile.

Nostalgia

A flower of basil everyday

Plucked every morning and gifted, 

A gentle surreptitious stroke, 

On the palm of hand, 

A stolen kiss, 

Beneath the staircase, 

A glance across a crowded room, 

Caught and returned. 

A quickly scribbled message, 

And a faded rose, 

Inside a gifted book of poetry, 

Neatly kept, unread, 

Like promises unfulfilled, 

Long forgotten and buried, 

Those days of love, 

That are dead and gone.

The Wanderer

Your memory comes to me at the strangest of moments. I pause in the midst of things and smile as your thought passes my mind. Though it happened a summer long ago and I know that I am a fool to think that I lost you when I never had you in the first place. I cannot croon love-songs liked I used to nor can I waste my life wandering around searching for you in every crowd. But to get back my words, I know that I have to cure my funny little heart that has loved you with all its mighty silences of years.

turning one's back

Summer Tedium

In the midst of this summer tedium, one longs for the rain;
In the orchards, water drizzles are made to battle the heat,
The ripeness of guava fruit permeate the evening air
While heaps of watermelons call your sole attention.

The songs that you play on your guitar in summer time,
The melodies that captivate the audience under a spell,
While you try to figure me out, to fix me somewhere
Within the matrices of your growing understanding.

One sole glance from your sprightly eyes full of laughter
One smile that could restore the energy lost this season
The longing that fills your heart in the summer nights
To be with the one you love and to be his companion.

Part illusion, part dream but this growing understanding
Of an affection brings back life in this summer tedium.

stupidity

A story

diary of a female quixote

Ineffable

Eternal and strong, water-like, your love comes to me,
With the aid of silences and a few gestures of affection.
Where else can you come, when denied a real meeting,
You choose to drape yourself with words in dreams.

Ideal and true, my shy one, you shine bright in words,
When all the others have gathered here around me,
To know the truth with its many facets and versions,
Your memory lights up my soul with more words.

Witty and understanding, you past antics bring laughter
And so many words piled up on pages and pages,
So many lost, so many forgotten, so many yet to be,
All that found shape around an unforgettable you.

The one behind the words is ineffable, magical, eternal,
So apart from all the ones who think they spur words.

Journal: Serious and Trivial

A thousand blank pages wait to record a few lines,
Some serious, some trivial, some mixed like life,
All gathered from the same rambling mind,
Which has loved to dream, to love and to lose.

The serious thoughts were all about your loss
A vacuum that I have never been able to fill,
A turning point from the fact that I was loved, 
Into a world full of options and crossroads.

The trivial thoughts were all written in joy,
A bundle of words on a beautiful morning,
When the fresh air and bright blue sky
Was more than enough to make me high.

But the best was always the mixed ones,
Not too sad or happy; just real like today's.

From Your Valentine: Dedication

I love you! 

These are the words that might start a relationship; a turning point from where there is no return. At the same time, many dread these three little words as it might be the beginning of a commitment and the end of freedom. But I guess there are bonds that need no words, loyalty that transcends time and true love that goes beyond death. 

For me, I thought that such things were things of the past yet when I caught affected with a happiness virus from you, what I realized is that it is a time-sent present for all grief. Just like a bout of chicken pox later in life can be very severe, your virus has not been very benign as could be seen from the fact that I am not cured yet. 

Yet in an intensely private world, my sore unfulfilled desire might be a restoration of the status quo, of just being the air around you and nothing else! 

the universe

hope

Pic courtesy : the web

Harmony

In the first three months of marriage, there was no reason for disharmony. Theirs was a marriage that was the fruition of five years of love that began somewhere at college.

Yes, they had kissed under the stairs at college and they had fun at times. But they had troubles that began when their names and their religions clashed against each other.

Akash Nair and Meera George were not meant to be together, so said her parents. When Meera ran away one morning it was not at all surprising to her parents.

It was an ordinary day like all the other days. It was Akash and Meera who made it special by getting married in an empty church. He loved making her happy.

The church was open and they said the prayers, Meera reciting them from memory. Afterwards, they went to see Akash's parents who received them with love.

The days of love were lovely and beyond words. But when she started retching, she felt sad. May be it's the food, it might not be suiting me, she thought.

Then the days began on thinking of her mother getting up in the morning and running to work while managing to survive with her sloppy cooking.

What do you want? Akash asked her. In her mind, she said, I want my mother's sloppiest cooked pickles, the better ladies finger fries and the best potato fries.

Nothing, she replied and went on sulking. Was there any way in which her cravings could be answered? With the newly understood feeling of carrying a baby inside, she thought.

She hated the smell of Akash's sweat and even his shirts could make her puke. He walked out angrily on seeing her puke and slept anywhere but near her.

Tears began and so did sleeplessness. Then one day, she bought some raw mangoes and tried to pickle it in the sloppiest way possible.

The aroma was unmistakable, the same sloppy smell of home. She ate them hungrily and hastily. As she found herself happy again, she felt a nauseating feeling and she puked.

She puked in the kitchen and ran to the bathroom, where she puked again and again. When Akash turned up, he was horrified at the sea of vomit around her.

Mango pickle, she said and as he swept and washed the floor, he swore and swore at the stink. She felt a movement in her belly and she felt the baby kick.

Look at this, Akash, baby is kicking. Though there was danger written on his face till a while ago, he came near her and said, “It's my boy learning how to head”.

No way my dear, it's going to be a woman, may be she will join police, Meera said. She thought harmony was restored at least for some time.

Seasons

How can you live like this,

Anywhere but here in this moment,

Held together by a million voices,

Glueing your existence,

In a life that doesnt move,

Yet with plans that astonish,

And never fail to astonish,

With perfect names for baby faces,

In the right order, too perfect.

How could you make it more perfect,

When beneath the resounding words,

The intent is hollow and changing,

With the moon, with the seasons,

Before deities that dont reply,

An emptiness chanting promises,

Yet at a loss for words,

For that which matters most,

True, close to the core.

There lies silence and a spirit,

That expands in directions,

And grows inward and inward only,

Eyes blind to the future and past,

Not even this moment alive,

Just there, for another dawn.

In another dawn, when the sky is red,

The spirits may call each other to a tryst,

That never was or never will be made,

Consciously by you or me.