Checkmate

Letter:

Dear love,

If you love me

You’ll stop hating yourself...

Reply:

Dear lover,

If I love you

I’ll stop loving anyone else...

2.5 Meters

After

Our long

Maddening arguments

Endless Negotiations

Melodramatic fights

And painful heartbreaks

She and I

Agreed upon

2.5 meters

Of insanely unimaginable distance

To be maintained

At all costs

Till the seeds of sanity

Grow into a perennial tree of wisdom

But my love

Aren’t we forgetting

The tree of wisdom

Almost always

Bears the fruits of eternal madness

An Invitation To Opposition

I want you to refuse me

Defy me

In the most obnoxious ways

I want you to prove me wrong

When I tell you

In the most fashionable stoic manner

Life is a river

And we can’t stay at one place forever

I want you to disagree with me

Vehemently

In most detestable ways

If I try convincing you that

You and I are not meant to be together

And that there is a better future for you

Somewhere

Elsewhere

Away from my arms

I don’t want you to give up on me

I don’t want you to get seduced

Even if I play out magic

Through my words upon you

To persuade you

To convince you

Don’t agree with what I tell you

Sometimes in my obsessive search for the plot

I lose faith in our story

Don’t let me lose that faith

Stories don’t perish ever

Only plots vanish with the passage of time

Time is the worst storyteller

It follows no plot

So don’t believe me

When I tell you

We ought to let go of each other

Because my love

We aren’t murderers

We save lives with the weapons of our tongue

Let’s not turn our weapons upon us

Let’s not die before our story is over

Let’s leave these annoyingly perplexing plots

And meet in the middle of one simple story

Like two strangers who meet each other

At the end of an old staircase

And fall in love with each other forever

Love Is A Subtle Conspiracy

Roses conspire with thorns against me

Their fragrance and painful pricks

Remind me of you and then our painful separation

Gardens don’t console me anymore

Without you

There is no solace in this world

Sun has found its own ways of teasing me

Moon comes down every other night

To remind me of our nights of togetherness

Stars behave like gossiping women

Who have stopped loving their husbands

They gossip about us like a scandal accidentally revealed

I don’t care mostly

But when at times I feel tired

On this long endless journey

And I rest under the shade

Of the tree of your memories

Leaves fall like forgotten letters from our past

Our untimely separation has hastened winter this year

Life has become a slave to your words

I serve them blindly even today like a devout muslim

Hoping one day

The roses of our togetherness

And thorns of our love-making

Devour me completely

Before I’m conspired against again

Lessons In Burning Alive

1^st Degree Burn

KASHMIR IS A PARADISE

Populated by innocent incorruptible angels

Who can only row beautiful shikaras

And offer blind devotion in hospitality

2^nd Degree Burn

KASHMIR IS A PARADISE

Populated by malicious corruptible individuals

Who are manipulated by evil foreign forces

And cannot control themselves

3^rd Degree Burn

KASHMIR IS THE PARADISE

Populated by fanatic beef-eating fundamental Muslims

Whose only goal is to conspire mischievous schemes

And divide nation...

Prognosis

KASHMIR IS THE PARADISE

Populated by young mysteriously missing persons

And mistakenly burnt dead bodies

Who can’t speak for themselves now

P.S.: On October 9, 2015, a truck driver and a conductor were burnt alive in a petrol bomb attack in Udhampur by right-wing extremists over rumours about beef. 

Zahid, the conductor of the truck later

succumbed to the injuries and died on October 18. 

Old Picture On The Wall

I kept staring at the fading handprint

On the shiny coffee table

After she left me

I put my hand of longing over it

Feeling it elusively cold and slippery

Like memories of our togetherness

I never knew life needed a reason to be alive

Feeling empty inside like the eyes of a dead man

I crawled back to home

Dragging myself like an injured soldier

After losing a long meaningless war

Broken dreams are like an old picture on the wall

You admire it so much till you hate it there

It gathers dust of time

More than anything else in the room

You can’t clean it without feeling sad

Because pictures create a painful illusion

That time can be frozen

Into an everlasting image

When the reality is

Pictures only get old

They don’t lose memories like we do

Walking across my room like a stranger

I look out of the window

To the dark starry night

And wonder

If universe is one giant living organism

How does it remember us – You and I?

Does it remember how much we loved each other?

Stay Close

You have to stay close

The threads of my breaths are few

I can only stitch tattered old memories with them

The blanket of our togetherness is already torn

From everywhere

Life has become a coffee mug without you

Unashamedly turned into an ashtray

Every night

When I miss you terribly

Hope is a poor coin diver

On the cold abandoned shores

Of the endless river of time

Hunting for few invaluable coins 

Of your company

It’s too late now

My poems cough blood already

You have to stay close

Closer than the imminent death

Of an unknown poet

Don’t Eat, Don’t Pray, Don’t Love

My love

If we continue to consume each other

In love

They’ll lynch us too

And call it an accident

What Happens To The Day?

I love the way

After our endless hours

Of night-long arcane talks

At such intolerable distance

The dawn of silence

Breaks into a magnificent kiss

Touching us both

On our ravenous lips

If night belongs to us
I wonder
What happens to the day?

Red is Sun, Blue Square

The elliptical circles of our love

Fit exactly

Into the cubical squares of our togetherness

The sharp corners of our fights

Dissolve unhesitatingly

Into the amorous diameters of our nights

The circumference of our arms

And the overlapping spheres of our heads

Defy all the dangerous angles of this world

You and I

Together

Create the infallible geometry
Of absolute togetherness

Winter Is Coming...

You are my only secret
Even if I want to

I am hopelessly incapable

Of hiding you

You’re growing inside me

Like lilies grow in the valley

And not all seasons are good at secret-keeping

Spring is going to tell on us anyway

I just hope

Winter keeps its frosty mouth shut this year

Let Us Not Fight Anymore

Let’s be wise from now on

Let’s not fight anymore

The ribs of my anger are weak and old now

The joints of my fury are arthritic

Your ulcerated words are gnawing at my stomach

Your silences are threat to my coronary artery

I’m delusional about your powers over me

I’m suicidal when you don’t hug me

Psychotic when you stop kissing me

We can’t live like this for long...

So my love

Let’s be wise from now on

Let’s not fight anymore...