For a Woman Across the Seas

You lit up yesterday's gloom,

Warming the hearts of many.

Somewhere from Africa a storm was recalled,

And it slowly coiled itself within me.

Your laughter played hide and seek

Crackling here,

Sparkling there.

Every corner of the room,

Was an open landscape,

Lit up, by flashes of lightning.

Your careless eyes,

Wandered hither,

Rested thither,

Like a traveller in an unknown city.

The Seine slumbered in your cup,

The Danube twirled in mine,

And stories flowed,

Like when old friends assault

The walls of the tavern with their tales.

There was something about you,

The sun refused to go down,

The moon too shy to wake up.

The traffic somehow wasn't loud enough,

The train couldn't wait to enter the platform.

Your skin glowed in the twilight

Like the eyes of a maiden in love,

Or a lost sailor at the sight of land.

Those sudden moments my fingers touched yours,

I knew how the men in the caves

Made fire.

We flew past our ruins,

We drove past our past,

With every tick of the clock

I knew it wouldn't last.

You are the riddle I wouldn't solve,

The poem I wouldn't end.

The morn that wouldn't dawn,

A letter I wouldn't send.

You are the storm I would ride,

Or the secret I would keep.

The bottomless depth I would gauge,

And yet take the leap.

Being with you was

Drinking verses of Khayyam,

Only better.

Tasting the first rain of the monsoon,

Only sweeter.

The Danube rose in revolt,

The Seine slept in peace,

Knowing that a man without a country 

Loved a woman across the seas.

Silence

I love it when you write silence,

In an open field, I go on sowing word-seeds on it,

Crops reaping love,

Teaching a thing or two 

To the once self- assured spring.

Like a marauder upon a hapless tribe,

I script my own story.

I love it when you write silence,

When on a white bed sheet

We act out what we never speak.

Your words rant and pant, but your lips do not move.

Like conversations between the dead

In a graveyard.

Words which wound and make love,

No last twist of the knife,

No kisses raining love.

Just the sheer fulfillment and joy

Of the waves paying their homage to the shores.

These blank spaces that you whisper between us,

A universe or two,

Unpopulated with little towns of

Stars, meteors or comets...

The emptiness of a war ravaged village

And the blank mute stare of anger.

Your silence seeps slowly in my veins

Like serpent smoke rising from burnt houses.

I get to write so much in them,

Make love all day long.

Our clothes fighting with each other on the floor.

I apologize, I demand, I Crave.

Your silence is so fertile,

Even on days when your soul

Is the fisherman praying mid-storm.

And i hold onto every blank

Every sigh,

And i put them on paper.

They weep, laugh, smirk and frown

In blue, black and red.

And when the pages flutter

The winds smacking them for mischief.

Every sinew of your soul

Speaks the symphony of what remains unsaid.

Like the only bird in nighttime forest

Or the first heartache of adolescence.

Your silence...so Loud

So Acute

So Forever.

I Won't be Ordinary

I was born for great things,
Not to be shriveled up in dusty overcoats... 
Not to be a familiar co-passenger
To a host of clerks,
Playing cards to office.
Not to know the names of small
Stations by heart,
Not to steal glances at the sleaze 
Hanging from spat upon walls.
Not to watch others win lotteries
And marvel at someone else's
Pre-Troy Ithaca.
I was born for great things
And rhyme will take me there.
Words from a poet's wine cup..
Words crackling in some Devonshire fireplace,
Or thoughts hanging from an old portrait.
Playing hard to get,
Behind webs of spiders and politics,
In a fatwa issued bedroom in Kashmir.
I've rode into the valley of death
And i have liked what i have seen.
Ordered a Che cocktail of blood and sweat,
In K.F.C where no one sees..
The weather forecasts of a revolution.
Possible thunderstorms
Maximum temperature: A Burning Cuban Cigar
Minimum temperature: A cold kitchen of an out of work miner.
To have my scratched out,
Abandoned scribbles
Be the uprising manifesto.
To love the love of Paris,
And if betrayed, build another Carthage
And have Dido perform an aria
By the only shores of my burning world.
I am destined for great things.