Voyage: An Introduction

He had made a small hut beside the sea. On days of the tide, the sea would stretch to the place his home was. He had made two doors on the opposite sides of the wall – one from which the sea came in; the other, it went out. On these days he had plenty of sea creatures passing through his home. Some of these he really loved to watch whilst he sat on his bed – like the gray crabs, jellyfishes, fishermen and a few ships from the distant land. He had learnt quite a few languages from the foreigners on the different ships; found a few friends in the sailors who would pass in through his hut every now and then with their ships.

One day it started to rain and it didn’t stop. After a few days or perhaps, months, he found a huge ship coming in through his door.

“Which land are you coming from?” he asked them in different languages.

“Land?” they replied, surprised,  “There’s no land. The rain’s taken it all. We live in different ships. Each a country.”

So, the world started coming in through one of his door and going out of the other.

After he died, people claimed he was the greatest voyager of all times.

Love Tales

1.

He was watching her breathe, when she stopped suddenly and turned towards him. “In this breath, I hold a thought” she said, “I’ll set it free once you can guess it.”

And still when he sits before the sea, watching lovers cuddling, he thinks of that breath of hers.

2.

As she has been going down the stairs she finds that feeling returning – of becoming lighter than the air above her. And then, the fear of rising up in through the block of air and reaching the floor she had started from; of finding the door, she had closed before she left, ajar; of finding him sleeping in the green light of the night bulb. That color hurt her eyes.

3.

He dreamt of waking up.

4.

When did you fall asleep on the sand? Did the last sun hurt your eyes? Like it had burned me? And the pages on which I wrote these love tales? Will the sea water heal your hurt or my love tales? Must I hold my breath in anticipation too? Hope? Do you know to dream? Am I the one who’s asleep in it?

5.

Her blood went nowhere. It lingered a few feet away from the steps. Steps on which no one shall step in a few more hours to come. And no one shall see her blood catch the strangest of hue. Perhaps, it was the green light in her last thought. A green thought in the last light filled up her eyes. Filled up her heart. Filled up her belly. Filled up her breasts. Her fingernails.

It’s hard to tell whether she had felt dizzy or drowsy when she decided to take the easy way down the stairs.

6.

In the crowd that had gathered on the shore to watch her beautiful corpse, there were children. They understood this to be a forbidden pleasure. They all stood in the warmth of her death. But for her, it was disturbing. The shame of being watched dead. The shame of it. She wanted to crumble into herself. But death, among other things, robs you of movement.

And if he were there, he surely would have covered her naked demise with himself.

7.

When was the last time you died? Was it down the stairs? Was it on the shore? Was it elsewhere? Can you tell me the events in the order of their occurrence? How many times did you die in there? In my love tales? Does it hurt anymore? Didn’t I restore your lost immunity? Didn’t I trap all your deaths in these folded pages that the sun burnt? And yet, now, without your deaths do I have you at all? Wasn’t your life the longest dying? Broken down to smaller grains of death that flew hither and thither in the wind that blew?

When was the last time you died? When was the last time the last time?

8.

He dreamt of waking up in a dream. There was dew all over. The dew that went nowhere but was everywhere. And in every dewdrop he found her trapped. He tried to catch a dewdrop to set her free. But the dewdrop gently slipped down his palm. And as it did, it slowly transformed to a waterfall of dewdrops, turning to a green stream gushing in full force. And in that stream he found her being carried away, drowning. Desperately trying to save her he jumped into the stream and found the water to be salty.

Once in the stream, he found that there was not one but a multitude of her. And that she wasn’t drowning in the stream at all, but into herself, over and over again.

9.

And then there was a mirror in her room. One of her images was struck in it. When he stepped in her room, in the soft haze of the blue streetlight pouring in, he saw that it sat in a corner of the reflected room. One of its feet stretched towards the light. Trying to hide from the light.

When he pointed his torch towards it, it tried to crumble into itself. It was always difficult for the poor thing trying to look at the man behind the source of light. She wanted to run away from this playful rape by an unknown light. But a reflected world stretches only as far as the mirror-eyes wandered.

Slowly, the torchlight mixed with the blue light, creating the green hue. And an old, rusty feeling of discomfort returned. Somehow, she preferred this feeling of discomfort. Perhaps, it was acquaintance. Maybe, death again.

10.

When she stepped out on the road, in ignorance of a death she had descended from, she walked gracefully.

He’d be waiting at the place where the road bends.

11.

Am I just playing with you as if you stood in my palms? Is your imaginative future a piece of marble for me? Shall I carve it the way I wish? And again? And again? Don’t I know you’d never be breathing life into none of my sculptures? But? At the same time, don’t I sprinkle you in the eyes of an onlooker? Will you not live in there? Make a home? Another room? With a mirror?

Will I close my palm when I find the answers?

12.

There was also a mother, lost in one of these tales. She had abandoned the mirror. And therefore, I guess, the author abandoned her too. But there she is, clinging onto the space above her head. Frightened it’d disappear soon, one of these days. As would her memories. And her hands.

“She danced so well”, she tells the boy “she danced.”

13.

He dreamt of waking up in a dream. They sat on a shore when she pointed with her fingers towards something that moved in the grass. It was a beautiful insect. She took it on her palm. It was then that he realized that there were more of the insects all over the place. And they crawled all over her body.

She whispered in his ear – “They’re eating through me.”

That’s when he noticed, lots of her was missing. And bleeding. Like the second last finger of her left hand. The part of her forehead where the sweet wrinkle appeared when she was in doubt. Her right foot. Bits and parts of her lips. The left corner of her last thoughts.

And yet she went on playing with the insects. She went on.

14.

The white cloth.

15.

She never understood what darkness meant. A creature of light, she loved wearing white. He called her Sanctity. When he held her hand, his hands would invariably seem dirty.

Once upon a time, there was to be a year that’d teach her the inviolability of darkness. That’d be the year of him. And violins. She’d learn a movement guided by instincts. The completed chapter of dance. Of waltzing with the winds. Of the less enchanted children.

There was to be a year.

17.

Dear girl,

I lost a very important chapter of our tale. It was almost like losing the sweetest year of all lives. And long after I’ve closed this tale with this letter, a reader will stumble onto a chapter lying somewhere on the sands. The staircase. The place where the road bends. In a dream. Trapped in a palm.

Maybe, the mirror was just another river in which you drowned amidst yourselves. Maybe, your mother caught a glimpse of you drowning in the mirror. Maybe, she’ll keep herself in the space above her head. Maybe, I’ll keep the sea. Maybe, you’ll know your last thought. Maybe, we’ll all become insects and eat through each other.

Dear girl, will a publisher buy you?

Kisses.
Him.

Death: An Introduction

He dismissed her memories as dark thoughts because she disappeared with the night.

He dismissed himself too, as dark thoughts because he disappeared within her.

Insomnia

The first raindrop fell in his eyes as he lay awake in the field.

The second raindrop fell in his eyes as he lay awake in the field.

The third raindrop fell in his eyes as he lay awake in the field.

The fourth raindrop fell…

 

And later, when it was quite late, the fountains rolled down his cheek. His tears lingered in the rain; his corpse about to catch cold.

The Roof

He seconds none in counting the minutes. Like glory passed away in some undiluted rhythm. He tells there’s a season of pearls… when the sea won’t leave you bereft.

His second wound was minute. Inside, he had found his cozy abode. Outside, where the burn remained, he applied ointment. He tells there’s a reason for girls… when they find him to be too stubborn.

After his wounds healed, he kept living under the extension of skin. His cozy abode.

Immortality: An Introduction

For the difference of one, he could never sleep the number of times he woke up.

Push

She was stuck inside her fall. So, I decided to give her a push. But the constituents that made up her body had changed. She belonged to the anti-gravity now. When I pushed her she fell back higher and higher. And the top has no bottom.

I brought down a dictionary from my book-shelves and started browsing through it. S, t, u, v. Ve. vel, ven, ver. Vertigo.

Animals – 1: Rabbit

Evenings have turned to their strands. Leaving my hands wet of the manifold orgasms. I kept kicking the pebble and went where it went. Inside you. The clumsy face of our dead children. Careless kids. They’d always keep coming to us. Breaking into sobs as they spoke -

“Dad, Alice just killed me.”

“Johnny, you should be more careful. It’s a tough time we’re living through and we don’t have enough money for a brand new coffin.”

“But she told nothing’d happen. In the end you never fall.”

“What fall are you talking about?”, we would ask, concerned that he might have hurt himself. “Where have you been?”

“I jumped with her into the rabbit hole.”

Meta-

I’ve been singing into the depths of the night. Seeing them banging their heads into the blue. Until drops of blood would splash onto the bluish blue – making it turn purple. Purple. Perplexing. Dissimilar selves walking in and out of themselves. Trying to catch hold of the tears flowing from their bosoms. An investigation called past clinging onto the back of their tongue. Resisting their flow into the lungs and kidneys of being. The eternal darkness of metabolisms and metamorphosis.

I’ve been singing the songs of light into the depths of the knight.

Listen

Dear girl,

I met your mother today. She lives her days dreaming of death. When she wakes up she says the nightmare has taken her back. She asked me about some of your letters but I’ve already left them to the rivers. How she longs for you to lay down with your head in her lap, once again as you recollected the day you just lived.

Lived.

After the tide, they said the river is flowing in the opposite direction. I hope to sit beside its bank someday waiting for the letters I had left in its arms.

The river is flowing in the opposite direction, with me.

I’ll meet you on the way.

Kisses
The Clown

Divorce

Within the sameness of her two palms rested his lonesome head. Perfectly balanced. And still there was no blood. Was he this anemic? The gunmen had promised there’d be blood. She couldn’t move until there was some.

She had checked this morning with her favorite machine – she had shed a few pounds.

Grace

The broken days come in a particular weather every year. Some skins crack. A few people try to rescue their reflection from the mirrors. Trapped in the eternities of a breath.

A broken pipeline on my basement. A river in my bedroom. I watch my sinking alarm clock. Screaming. I listen to some of your sinking letters. I watch the tumbling ink pot mixing saddened hue to the water.

You had told me to rinse your memories well on a special day, once every year, after you. Tears ain’t easy for a clown.

Blanket

In a cold, cold night, he covered himself with some of his useless paintings. It warmed his outer skin. Sweats appeared. His sweats, as always, was drenched in blood. Whilst he slept.

Next morning, early morning, as early as it gets, she came to wake him up and she picked up his painted blankets. “These are your masterpieces”, she exclaimed, kissing him on his closed eyelids, softly.

The Dual

A drop of sun fell on her lap. She was metamorphosed to ashes. Even the last of her tears were burned. She stood as a perfect figurine of ash. She told she would be waiting for us, until I could come to a decision with the breeze on who loves her best.

It was one minute and a half to twelve.

Nails

The accumulation of iron inside his body was tremendous. When poverty came knocking on his door, he would melt the iron and make nails out of them. He used to sell the nails to the coffin makers. Since he was a lonely man it bought him enough money for a week.

After many weeks, the coffin makers sold him a coffin and said – “This one’s for your last nail.”

Salt

His eyes had been burning since last night. He had caught one of her tears in his eyes. When he opened his eyes the world seemed infinitely more hazy than it did when he cried all by himself.

The sensation was strange. Lately, he had come to realize that there was a taste-bud on his retina. Her tear lingered like the salty sea in his eyes. She had always been this salty….. he knew, when he looked at her.

She used to cook him meals and they would never have to buy salt. Before she applied the last of her in last night’s menu, for the last time their eyes kissed.

Betrayal

I came back to the abandoned place the pick up the last of her pieces. I was always against her metamorphosing into glass.

“You can’t hold yourself together for too long that way”, I had warned her. But my words fell on her glass ear. Cracking them. The beginning of the discovery.

Her skin had the properties of the mirror. People took some of the broken pieces for their homes. She depreciated.

I came back to the abandoned place, today. My twenty-three old mirror was broken by one careless movement of hands last night, as I made love blindfolded to my live-in partner, Medusa.

The Week Spent Inside A Palm

“I’m back”, he said. And yet, none answered.

The darkness knocked on her cheekbones. But the door was locked. She slept stagnant on her mute heart. She recognized none anymore.

He pressed his ears on her heart for the last time and whispered, “I’m back”.

A Makeshift Moment

He dreamt of a reincarnation on the exact day that he was to die. And it was exactly after he woke up from the dream, restless, that he realized that he was about to die. The only thing he couldn’t decide was whether the reincarnation belonged to his past or his future. It disturbed him. For the first time in his life he experienced a headache originating from his heart. It angered him so that he decided he needed no reincarnations.

He got up and smashed all the clocks.

Life, Thereafter

He went from, town to town selling the breeze of foreign lands. He said he had cure to every disease trapped in his transparent jars. Even death. He had brought many a corpses back to life. One day a child came up to him and said -

“I won’t have a baby brother anymore. My mother had to abort. Father told he doesn’t need another zombie in this house.”