I understood today as I felt sticky in the small of my back that my inability to allow love to proceed in the natural way has been made far more apparent because of my disobedience to speech. My letters were always well received while my words seemed hollow. It is such a pity that my mouth is not paper and my voice not ink. It is ironical that acceptance be the answer to passion's impatience. How does one choose between the sea and the clouds? Which, is which?

I would give you the sea.

Trains are pounding in my chest, in intervals
Allowing lungfuls of breeze to touch the sea
Whenever I gasp.

There is no means to call, to you.
The maps are full of places I don't know
There is far too much salty blue, than any other colour.

So, when you remember my face, know,
I would give you this sea, to hold
Spill its stillness, its refusal to rage
Its awareness of how empty the flowers have become.

I would, if you attached yourself to me, affectionately.

...

I have become so impossibly old
Through the course of not resisting.

My fingers have shrunken
To lengths, where it is difficult now to paint, or hold.

The rain has been flooding
Through spaces under closed doors
And netted windows
Or sometimes fondly trickling like sadness
To make its presence known.

Once the plants learn to walk and the spiders and lizards escape overnight
The wait,
For my house to collapse, books to drown and the curious half-light under the sheets to vanish under the weight of the rain,
Shall become an indispensable ache.
Only after all the living have chosen to leave, though.

For the universe is conspiring with you
In not letting me forget.

Why you must not love me

Because, like the pillar of a temple,
Your omniscience encompasses, always,
A little more than I can embrace.

So, I press my cheek against yours
But your coolness plunges through my torrid heart
Rendering it lifeless,
for a while.

I suppose one must be content with ordinary days.

(For Ammu)

Speech during conflict

I cannot forget, even if I terribly want to,
That taste of starched cotton on your sleeve;
A taste so wonderfully mild,
So full of tinsel, from those nights
When the pillow became your cheek, and rightly.

You are the past.

And the past refuses to clip the wings of pungent memories.

They fly,
With such knowing of the alleyways of my house,
There is no escape.
Not even in the sky.

This choice to be sane, is such a curse, at times.
Even in the pleasantness of company, I fear
The graze of my own cotton on the tongue, leaving
A wound that shall grow to be time itself.

Movement shall resume, but
Not without soaking all the moisture-
All the wetness of sorrow from my tongue.

Not until, a common thief- it shall steal the last of my petty words
And my throat shall be too swollen with emptiness,
To respond.

I have only two eyes.

Someday, the trees might tilt their branches and stumps, till they're crooked,
And the clouds shall wish to burst into rain, selectively.

Probably the flowers shall all wither here,
And the old men with coffee look thence for stories.

The wind shall let itself be carried there
By birds, and ants pledging their lives for a night with wings.
The frogs shall refuse to croak, or search for food..

And then, maybe with curiosity, or with pity
I might walk on that road, with willing footsteps-
When I reach though, they will all have arranged themselves
Into a crowd.

And you know, love, every face in a crowd is yours.

For want of an excuse

Oranges from that day, 12 years, 8 months and a few hours give and take
(The seasons keep my time)
were relished innocently, some with seeds-
Like my mother had warned, one seed broke into a tree, the night you left
A willowy tree with feet for roots
Whose branches have subdued my veins, to warm tickles.

These days, the branches are wandering, often leaving holes in windows
Of quaint houses, and falling airily into soft lakes.

Their language is unmistakable, even behind veils of muslin.
Oh, the disarming sympathy of trees!

Watching with them the sky turn orange, and an orange turn into the sun
Until one is dizzy enough to pine for a face.