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.

Future: An Introduction

“I can listen to the echoes from the past” she said.

“I’m thinking about you now” he confessed.

And went away.

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.

Breaking the Spell

Although she tried, the water slipped down her palms and she could never wake him up from his sub-conscious state. Inside, deep down, in the core of his sub-conscious, she lived. She tried. The water kept slipping. Everytime.

She would never leave him alone.

Immortality: An Introduction

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

Click

She was photographing her shadow in the neon lights. Her shadow posed for her on the wall.

“My shadow’s such a proffesional bitch. She lures you with her lusty frame.”

She was jealous. But her camera won’t listen to her. It kept clicking. Click – clickety – click. When she was checking out the photographs of her shadow, later, she found on the wall her shadow checking out a few photographs too, in each of which she was seen photographing a shadow, holding my hand all the while.

“You belong to the wall”, she whispered into my ear.

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.

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

Albatross

When the sail had fluttered for the first time, they had thought the winds of melancholia had returned. Chastity had frozen on her dead wings. If there ever was life before this, people sure would’ve been waiting for the sounds of their heartbeat. But the silence was denser than the sound.

In the eagles that came trailing the smell of mutilating flesh, they found the first signs of life.

…And They Lived Happily Ever After

When she walked out of his heart, she forgot to tell him where she kept the key to their cupboard. They had designed their cupboard to be airtight. To keep their memories safe from the fungus and bacteria. It was an alternative to their own hearts.

She had taken his alternative away, forever – he thought.

This morning, she had stepped down his heart and walked into the alternative. Their cupboard.

One Who Never Knew

Inquisition was a clock that tick-tocked inside his head. One night, when he dreamt of insomnia he woke up to find himself afraid of the clock. Unable to decide on how he should interpret it, he oscillated between the choice of knowledge and ignorance.

It took him a few years to realize that his inability to decide was ignorance, personified. Since then, it took him an eternity of insomnias, trying to find his way out. Never did it occur to him that the realization was his ability to know.

Cell

I dispatched your agony on a wintry morning. Patient rust on the letter-box. Yours. People tell stories these days. That you had trapped yourself in your letter-box. Thought you deserved a prison. A cell to yourself.

“Life began from a cell,” I’d told you, one day.

Destiny’s Thread

I used to live by the darkened road that led to the enchanted destinies of a fellow who was lost like a long awaited letter from my lover melting into the storm cutting its way into an alien land where the people who used to stay feeling afraid of the gathering storm and reading the first signs of their doom had decided to flee on the first car they could remember seeing which was actually a mailman’s van from which they emptied all their letters to find enough leg-space for making their longest journey comfortable never thinking for once how lost the mailman would feel when he wouldn’t be able to deliver their loved ones’ words to the people who waited like the man who stayed on the darkened road whose curse it was addressed to those who were responsible for his lover’s letter not reaching him that would ensure that their doom become inescapable on the very day they were fleeing from the storm…..

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”.

Twenty-Nine

Between the evening and the night, one day, there was no dusk. And from light to darkness, the transformation had been so rapid that it hurt their eyes. They promised they would be blind by the next day after the first drops of blood from their eyes.

A rich man hired them by the news. His palace had twenty-nine windows and they made a great exhibition. Each of his windows had automatic blinds.

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.”

Peace

Slowly, his life became denser than the graveyards. Not ’til the recent times did the townsfolk notice that the gravestones growing out of the grasses were more in number than the flowers in the grave. They had went to the mayor asking for a brand new grave, but he declined saying – “few people die in the town, nowadays. The young people, who are most frequently dead, are buried in the largest grave of them all: Agony.”

People stopped complaining after that. Not because of what the mayor had told but because they found one fine day, that the lovely undertaker whom all of them admired was living a life much, much denser than the death of their children.