It settles on them with as much ease as dust settles on unattended corners of the house. It arrives at unsuspecting hours like uannounced guests who stay back for dinner. It intoxicates you like it is some sort of old wine. It lingers like the smell of someone even when that someone is long gone. It numbs you like when you had your first chance with fantasy. Your dreams are not dreams. Just prolonged phases of oblivion which your weak mind cannot condone. The world seems to have stopped spinning since the last time you saw the sunrise. You don't remember when. Your eyes are heavy like your jeans when you come out of the pool. They are stubborn and they shut themselves tight like a door slammed in a fit of extreme anger. They are relentless in their attempts of embarassing you like seniors on the first day of college. Such foolish games they play - these sleepy eyes on a drowsy mind!
Poems are from the heart, and they rhyme with your life
But if you have none, they you have got to strive
It takes some brains, to get that perfect sync of words and thoughts
But if you have none, they rhyme them with pans and pots
Sometimes rhymes are silly, sometimes they are fun
At times they are stories from the heart, at times unintended pun
If you have a reader, you can write as much as you can
Because no matter what you write, he’ll always be your ardent fan
Not everyone’s a poet, not everyone’s got a theme
But creativity lies, even when there’s none, in creating a scheme
Does it need to be stoked, this spark to a fire
Or is not such a strongly felt desire
How often have I started to write
And then given up, thinking it’s too trite
These thoughts of mine are now so commonplace
Who would read them, they are so out of grace
I wonder where I lost them, those words I now search for
I have traveled so much, that they seem so afar
Am tired of this travel, that doesn’t seem to end
Just when I thought it was over, it turned out to be a bend
It has no destination, race to nowhere, places none
But I’m afraid to be left behind and so I leap and I run
I left behind a part of me, I now wish I could retain
But I have let it go, and washed away my tears in the rain
I love the look on the face of the school kids - that unending gaze in their motionless eyes drowned in a thousand dreams, the supple skin on their little faces glowing in the morning sun, their tiny hands with trimmed nails gripping the cold steel bars of their school busses, bags strapped securely on their shoulders, water bottle dangling in the front, diamond shaped handkerchiefs pinned neatly to their shirt pockets and pinafores and dog-eared badges in plastic covers pinned on the other side. I used to watch a bright yellow school bus brimming with these looks every morning as I waited for my office bus & it lent me a smile in a weird way. A smile that one of these kids would have created in their art classes - used a bright red wax-crayon pressed it hard on the white drawing sheet and liberally drawn a wide inverted arc. Their life indeed is like their drawing books. Everything is well-defined with thick black boundaries and in that finite space dwells freedom in all its opulence. The same freedom that manifests itself like the spring after a cold winter during summer holidays. Life is only popsicles and candy-floss and sometimes a bag of Hershey’s kisses! It’s colorful like the balloons, the pin-wheels and the soap-bubbles outside the local park; it’s carefree like a bunch of helium balloons tossed in the air; it’s innocent and pure like the angles with little wings who rule the goodnight tales. Ever seen them at the malls -Mushroom hair, nose and lips flattened against an impeccable clean sheet of glass, hands spread at the side like an eagle and eyes round as gumballs from the vending machine and that look they hold in them – like they have just sighted the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth that ever existed! I wonder what’s so enticing about this age that makes it so enviable! Is it that life doesn’t give us a second chance to relive the moments and the times we enjoyed the most, or that it always makes the past seem more enviable, or that childhood is when life is like a clean white drawing sheet and all we know is drawing inverted arcs with our red wax crayons!