#43: This Be The Villanelle

Let's talk about loneliness tonight.

We talked about love for the hundredth time,

And you listened, just to be polite.

Look at this lost lover's plight,

Desolate in the triviality of his rhyme;

Let's talk about loneliness tonight.

Words never soothe what fears incite,

And my tedious litany is my biggest crime-

And yet you listened, just to be polite.

Stay a while, so I don't lose sight

Of the ticking clock and passing time,

Stay up talking about loneliness tonight.

We can say nothing, or just make light

Of my hope, and your fatalism. I'm

Still glad you listened, just to be polite.

You can ask if our solitudes might

Spare us some of their borrowed time

So we could talk of loneliness tonight,

And you could listen, just to be polite.

#42: The Idiot Ghazal

Years from now, when toothless love will no longer have stayed with me, 

I will smile back at how you almost had once strayed with me.

We could promise each other only the hands of the clock;

Will our hours that remain within still fade with me?

If your cynicism happened to cross my hope on the street,

I wonder if it would stop to have prayed with me.

Between your will to leave, and mine to remain,

Did you also sometimes feel afraid with me?

Reason beckons and bends even the straitest of fates-

I hope you are glad yours wasn't made with me.

I suspect we were each others' best kept secrets.

Did you also feel your hardest resolve being swayed with me?

I can turn and twist the ropes of shared minutes all day;

Forgive me if your time appears to have frayed with me.

My cupful of regret runs relentlessly over now.

The heavy ifs of our other lives stay weighed with me.

How Radhikaa mopes around, a child who lost her reflection.

Let her know, nobody stays to read her tirade with me.

#41: Follies.

I think I met you 

In the exact middle of today.

It was a lull in the conversation-

Some inane mundane

Moribund nothing and

There you were and I

Could almost feel the 

Air grow heavier as

It waited with bated

Breath for me to

Say something and I

(blinked and)

Smiled and shook my reverie

Ridden head and apologized

For my absence, for

Having left parts of me in

The exact middle of today and

Some aged afternoons and

A few half-dreamt-of cities ago.

I apologize to what memory 

Clings like cobwebs in the corners

Of regrets and remembrances;

Forgive me this foolish souvenir

I keep waiting to lose.

I hope you don't see me 

In the places I find you in;

In the pauses between days,

And the littlest hour of nights,

Or a tight lipped smile you know 

That always meant goodbye.

#40: Manifold

Tiny lines criss cross all our insides.

It's like my hands hardened

And creased over the years

Skin folding over skin in

Papery attempts to hide sin.

Will I ever know what wrinkles

Your unclenched fists hold?

Your presence holds universes

In the safety of my sweetened lunacies

Remaining unaware of how absences feel.

Should I have confessed 

Or left my shameless sorrow

Sitting on the sill, till

Time and (more) distance lets you know

My fingers might untwist themselves tomorrow. 

Maybes sit next to catastrophes.

A jarful of hesitation slipped 

My grip, so you found us another. 

So we sit still,

Hiding our hearts in hands

That will not touch.

#39: On Reading Language Games Today

Please go mad,

so I can build you an asylum.

- Agha Shahid Ali

I went mad looking for 

something that justifies this:

To be wanted is to have existed.

I rearranged my letters,

But yours were always better.

You were always better.

My consonants stay stuck 

To the back of the board,

(ENCHANT.

And you add another letter

Triple score, and win, again-)

st my penchant

To pretend this existed,

In my mendicant mooning,

To not be unwanted.

And I surrender.

It's nicer this way,

For me, the cowered 

Coward, covered 

In three day old excuses

For this feebleness.

It's nicer for you, too,

I hope. I hope this

Is worth all the words

In the world.