I keep feeding the darkness my loneliness and soon, the night morphs into a monster, one with a hundred eyes.
Nowhere to hide now. No use pretense. No escape. Nothing to do but lie back on the grass, hold on to my shadow, gnaw my knuckles and stare these fears down.
I'm so tired.
Every minute is an exercise of tongue-biting will, every hour a recurring nightmare, every dreamless day a deliberate act of absurdity. Time agonizes, admonishes, apologizes, but it goes about its routine like only time can, quietly counting, one second at a time. Every night, I fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
Never knew this could be this hard.
So bloody goddamn hard.
I hug myself, trying to feel you in the space between my arms, searching for the memory of holding you till dawn came looking for us. I try.
So hard, so hard, so so so so ... hard.
Why is it that two people travel best hand-in-hand? Maybe I'm a little ahead of you on this road. Maybe, I'm a little behind. How would I know? You seldom call out. And so, my confessions are all a little tempered; my need carefully calibrated. Lest I get ahead of myself. Lest I lose you in the distance.
When I was little, my father bought me a pair of binoculars, the green of a billiards table.
One summer afternoon, I discovered that if you looked in the far end, where the black eye-pieces were smaller, the clouds no longer became bigger; they just grew tinier.
And if you turned the knob, the birds flew farther and farther away till all you could see was just the blurred outline of the horizon.
Have you ever done that? There was always this brief moment, before I turned the binoculars around and looked in the right end, the right way, one infernal instant when I used to think "What if ...?"
Have you ever been caught in that moment when you didn't know if your world was coming back?
Well, have you?
Because silence can eat
only so much.
only so much.
Nowhere to hide now. No use pretense. No escape. Nothing to do but lie back on the grass, hold on to my shadow, gnaw my knuckles and stare these fears down.
I'm so tired.
Because patience wrings
the heart dry.
the heart dry.
Every minute is an exercise of tongue-biting will, every hour a recurring nightmare, every dreamless day a deliberate act of absurdity. Time agonizes, admonishes, apologizes, but it goes about its routine like only time can, quietly counting, one second at a time. Every night, I fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
Never knew this could be this hard.
One touch. One whisper ...
So bloody goddamn hard.
... of eternity together.
I hug myself, trying to feel you in the space between my arms, searching for the memory of holding you till dawn came looking for us. I try.
One hug. One wish ...
So hard, so hard, so so so so ... hard.
... for lingering bliss.
Why is it that two people travel best hand-in-hand? Maybe I'm a little ahead of you on this road. Maybe, I'm a little behind. How would I know? You seldom call out. And so, my confessions are all a little tempered; my need carefully calibrated. Lest I get ahead of myself. Lest I lose you in the distance.
When I was little, my father bought me a pair of binoculars, the green of a billiards table.
Because distance breeds
demons and doubts.
demons and doubts.
One summer afternoon, I discovered that if you looked in the far end, where the black eye-pieces were smaller, the clouds no longer became bigger; they just grew tinier.
Because truth is a trickle
too little, too
fickle.
too little, too
fickle.
And if you turned the knob, the birds flew farther and farther away till all you could see was just the blurred outline of the horizon.
Because evenings grow purple
with twilight dread.
with twilight dread.
Have you ever done that? There was always this brief moment, before I turned the binoculars around and looked in the right end, the right way, one infernal instant when I used to think "What if ...?"
Because tomorrow will come
crashing through the curtains.
crashing through the curtains.
Have you ever been caught in that moment when you didn't know if your world was coming back?
And I will wake up
wishing you were here.
wishing you were here.
Well, have you?
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5 comments:
how is one to read the stuff that is aligned to the right? is it a part of the rest or is it a stand off piece juxtaposed or is it both?
Akhil
There is no "way" to read it. You just read it in the way you feel comfortable and the way you like to read it.
My experience with reading such pieces elsewhere is that the "differently aligned text" is more often than not a distraction and it requires a lot of effort on the part of the reader to make a cohesive whole out of two seemingly disparate pieces of writing.
Having said that, what I've tried to do here was to have the text and the poetry (let's call it that for now :) feed off each other and yet make sense on their own, with both making "more sense" individually when read with the "memory" of the other, sort of like a background score, if that doesn't sound too ambitious. I had no idea how to write like this and hence gave it a shot and in the process learnt a lot about what not to do and how not to go about writing something like this :)
I tried to keep the link going till the end but it required considerably more skill than I possess right now to pull it off. Things were going well till the middle, but after "One summer afternoon..." the two pieces sort of go out of sync and I gave up after a few revisions and left it at a place where they still seemed to feed off each other a little.
Hence the tag "experiments" :)
Would be nice to know if there's anything else you'd like to say about the post.
PS: Thanks for the comments on the other posts -- you sort of made my day two days back.
exactly what i was wondering about.. till about midway through it i was able to make a link between both the parts and it was coherent. but towards the end i lost the chain and i thought that may be i was looking at it the wrong way and then i tried to read them both as stand alone and even though the left aligned was making sense i could not see the continuity of the right aligned ones and so i got all confused. since this is the first time i have read something like this i thought i would rather ask the writer. but once again your language is really beautiful.
and i think you love the word "feed." :D
and yeah it would be great if you could drop by on my blog once in a while. only today i wrote a short story after about two years and would love to hear your comment on it..
"Why is it that two people travel best hand-in-hand? Maybe I'm a little ahead of you on this road. Maybe, I'm a little behind. How would I know? You seldom call out. And so, my confessions are all a little tempered; my need carefully calibrated. Lest I get ahead of myself. Lest I lose you in the distance."
I think, maybe I'm catching up or maybe I'm not there yet, or maybe, you're just too far gone now. And then I tryout a thousand different things so I do not think :)
Oh, its good to be here, to allay my silence-induced beasts of hundred eyes.
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