Broken Conversations

Behind the mask of happiness

Only darkness exists

The salt in my eyes

Is sugar to your heart

The lips of my words speak in broken grammar

Your hair is the Christmas tree

Of the dark world

The fingers of my guitar are out of tune

Your laughter is the original soundtrack

Of coming spring

The blackness of my heart is snow-covered

Since you kissed me

A dull knife is a metaphor of our love-making

Forgetfulness is a delusion of nothingness

Freedom is a bird without the nest

Love is madness of heart over mind

Jungle

Jiss tarah

Ghane jungle ke paedon

Ki tehniyaan

Aapas mai

Lipat sapat ke

 Jungle ke andar hi andar

Pattoun ka aisa sayebaan banate hain

Jo kissi bhi insaan ki pohanch se

Unchuwa rehta hai

Tum mere aise jungle ho!

Answer

Of all the questions

That she asks me

The most frequent one is

“Do you ever talk?”

I always answer this

With a kiss

Demonetization

Do you remember love

How much we loved talking about money

Especially when we both used to go broke?

Now that both of us

These days

Are coercively broke

Let's meet again

In that same small apartment

Lie together in the same quilt

And talk about money

These long long nights…

Stages in Disorder of Love

Stage 1 (Selective Mutism)

Words creek under my tongue

When you don’t listen to me

I’m an unheard voice

Swallowed up by my own silence

Stage 2 (Crises in Self-worth)

Sponged with cotton of life

I’m not your stuffed toy

To be played with

Stage 3 (Enmeshment)

The threads of my soul

Are tangled with yours

Cut me anywhere

You’ll be undone too

Stage 4 (Obsession)

I can’t let

Our last words to remain unsaid

I can’t let

Our last meeting

Be drowned in desolate silence

Stage 5 (Schizophrenia)

The alley that leads to the heart

Begins from my lips

In this chilling cold

I want our lips to talk

Like two mad cellmates in prison

This sentence of silence must end now

Sohbat

Tum

Itne naraz rehte ho mujhse

Mai

Khud se khafa rehne laga hun

Ulajhta Jaata Hun

Tumhare mere beech ke

Jo ye unginat uljhanain hain

Tumhare milne se

Kuch lamhe qabl

Sab sulajh jaatain hain

Tumhare jaane ke baad

Sonchta rehta hun…

Ulajhta rehta hun…

Khatarnaak Item Ho Tum!

Uske haathon 

Sar-e-bazaar

Bik jaane ke baad

Wo apne maze pe

Mujhe sajate hue

Kehti hai

“Khatarnaak item ho tum!”

Midnight (Mis)Adventures

In the middle of the cold night

She wakes me up mercilessly

With her cold hands

Begs me for a cup of coffee

And insists

"We shall drink from the same cup"

I always take the first sip

She must take the last one

First sip is too hot for her lips

Last sip is too cold for mine

By the end of it

Both of us are awake enough

To mark constellations on each other

Till the morning light is welcomed

With the final kiss of the dawn

Demonetization

You may dismiss

500 kisses I sent you

You might even reject

1000 notes of love I wrote to you

But you can't forget

2000 nights we spent together

Under the shade of starry sky

Talking to moon

One by one...

Come back

and make me rich again

Rebuttal

I deny all the rumours of love

Between you and me

There is nothing between us

That can be put in words

Tum Bhool Jaati Ho Mujhe

Tum bhool jaati ho mujhe

Jaise bhool jaati ho tum

Maiz pe rakhi hui chai

Jab bhi meri yaad mai

Khoo jaati ho

What Is Different About Us?

This precocious night of separation

Knows everything about us

Life has a way of losing you

I lost you in a most fashionable way

And in a most cliched way

I’m lost without you

Without you nothing makes sense

In losing you I lost the meaning

Of what once was meaningful

What felt different about us in love

Turns out that it wasn’t any different

We loved each other like everyone else does

We fought like most couples do

We broke up like lovers do break up usually

We both cried sleeplessly for many nights

Not any different from other heartbroken lovers

And finally we moved on

Found other people to love

But this void

This barbaric savage nothingness

That opened up inside me

Makes everything different about us

Everything…

World Mental Health Day (10th October)

Dekho

Aaj world mental health day hai

Haan hai…to?

To mai kuch kahon to

Baat maanoge?

Tum kaho to sahi

Tumhara hukum aur mera sarr…

Tum na

Apna ye pagalpan chood do

Aur mujhe bhool jao

Room No. 204

Your love reduces me

To the most frustratingly meaningless state

In your love

I’m reduced to the wrinkled bedsheet

Of that infamous hotel room

You make love on

To other men

Who’ll never know

What it is really like

To love you

Beyond the comforts of selfish needs

Tumne Kaha Tha...

Mai kissi ajnabi shaher ke

Naya makaan ka pata nahi

Ki khoo jaon

Tumne kaha tha

Eid pe milenge...

Pythagorean Nightmare

This ungodly world has reduced you

My love

To a ten-digit number

Like a Pythagorean nightmare

It keeps playing like a broken record player

“The number you’re dialing is switched off”

What Is Real?

What is truth?

What fine line distinguishes truth

From everything else?

Where am I headed?

Is it real or am I wandering

In the world I made up myself?

How many times do I have to touch everything

To be sure it is real?

Is it real when someone loves me?

How many times they have to tell me

For me to believe that it’s real?

The lines between my life in my room

And the life outside are blurring

I’m not afraid of that

No I’m not

But I’m afraid of blurring of lines

Between the world inside my head

And the world I have created outside

Who is related to me in real?

Who do I really belong to in here?

They say we finally belong to God

But is God real?

Or is it that I belong

To the fiction I created in my head?

If that is true

I might as well become a story no one knows

It’s Not A Wonderful World

I see love killed by families

Kindness corrupted in holy places

Compassion poisoned in hospitals

Knowledge disabled in schools

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world!

I see creativity sold to the highest bidder

Justice cruel inside courtrooms

Freedom censored from the textbooks

Peace gangraped inside parliament houses

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world!

I see happiness auctioned to war mongers

Courage panicking right on the stage

Anger equated with rebellion

Wisdom losing it all in rage

Violence glorified as heroism

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world!

I see nature deliberately being harmed

I see children burnt alive

People forced out of their homes

War replacing politics

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world!

Kashmir

She is selfishly as promiscuous

As she is passionate in love

Her nights are like secret affairs

That never stop before the dawn

It snows every time

When she breaks her heart into flakes

There are times when

She chooses a life of ascetic piousness

Covering every inch of her spotless body

Like clouds shroud the sky just before it rains

Oh! she loves rain

When it rains

She lies down on the soil naked

Letting her soul soar higher

Above every baser desires

Leaving her body to melt away into the earth

At times she cries whole night

For someone she knows would never return

She adores her bed

Like a garden she owns

She loves God like an old hermit

Passionate yet intensely composed

She maintains a strange detachment

Of a long-distance relationship with God

At times she becomes radically rebellious

Like a teenage girl who doesn’t understand

Why she can’t go on a trip like everyone else

She is full of contradictions

In fact she exists in paradox

These days I hear

She sings songs of home-coming

While she is losing her eyesight

Mortal Grief

Shall I grieve for what is mortal?

Shall I hold on to what is temporary?

Death is a necessary distraction

A signpost

Not the destination

No one becomes great in death

No one can be argued with posthumously

Living makes everyone great
Life is the only touchstone of greatness


(In memory of Sumegha Gulati who passed on to the other side of necessary distraction sooner than me)

Old Lover Is Hard To Resist

It’s hard to resist an old lover

What she can do in a wink of an eye

Others can’t imagine getting a whiff of that

An old lover is like the old song

You remember it from all ends

From the start

The middle

Even the end note

(especially the end note)

When I saw her

I felt terribly incomplete

As if the part of self I left with her

Is still missing

And all the pleasures of the world

And all the affairs till now

Never could fill the hollow

Old lover is hard to resist

Whether she sees you or not

You end up in bed with her anyway

Frozen

Don’t mistake them for breasts

Those are not breasts you can fondle with

They are two frozen teardrops

On every woman’s chest in Kashmir

She beats them with both fists

To unfreeze them

Every time she finds Kashmir

Starving out of life

Art of living Alone

Fall in love with someone

Who doesn’t love you back

Be devoted to the idea of romantic unraveling

Invest in your work obsessively

And pretend that it makes you valuable

Get a pet to make believe

That your family puzzle is solved

Talk to people online

Share with them everything

And have them delude you they actually care

Go to the malls

Roam aimlessly

Buy meaningless things

And feel connected to the world

Through things you buy

Live in a house

Surrounded by neighbors you never talk to

But do greet them every time

With fake smiles whenever you bump into them

Judge others for their lack of freedom compared to yours

And praise in your heart secretly 

Your meaningless lack of restrictions

Read novels of love and togetherness

Hoping one day your life will be like it too

But in the name of falsely perceived logics like

“no-one-understands-me”

“she-is-not-my-type”

Or else the best one

“I-don’t-think-she’ll-be-happy-with-me”

Never let anyone in your life

Do all this repeatedly enough

Till it becomes your permanent life style

 And lo, you have mastered

The art of living miserably alone

Who’s Eid is it tomorrow?

Who sights the crescent

And not see the bloodspots on the moon?

Where is the joy for celebration coming from?

Whose guts are still hungry for the delicacies?

Why is my heart bleeding like the mother’s heart

Who lost her son

Then another son

Then another son

Then her daughters too?

Who stays up whole night to console her?

How many fathers have lost their appetite for life?

How many families lost their hope?

Who is counting the days of Ramadhan

And not the number of dead bodies everywhere?

How many dead bodies make up for a joyful Eid?

How many parents lie shamelessly to their children

And tell them it’s alright to celebrate?

Oh God of Ramadhan!

Give me wings right now

So I can fly

From Baghdad to Madina

To count all the graves freshly watered

And if I finish by morning Azaan

I’ll declare Eid for myself unequivocally

Without any shame

Even Love Can Bloom In A Therapy Room

It grows harder

It becomes softer

It turns into a nightmare

It feels unreal at times

All the force in the universe

And all the stars in galaxy

Watched it happening

The walls of my therapy room

Stood witness to it

The couch

The chair

The distance between two minds

Is all what it needed

Love can bloom in unexpected places

Of all the places I searched for it

Of all the eyes I looked into

Love bloomed in my therapy room

By the time I could realize it

The couch was empty

The session was unwantedly over

How Have You Been?

We bumped into each other

Unexpectedly

At the entrance of the dargah

Where a long time ago

We prayed together

For peace and eternal togetherness

“How have you been?”

She asked while fidgeting

With her locket

I couldn’t say anything

Not a long time ago

This question always meant

Let’s spend the whole night together… praying!

Find Me A Midpoint!

No more laughter

No more crying

No more tiptoeing

Around my life

Happiness

You’ve been too shallow

To reach my despondent soul

Sadness

You’ve been too deep

To cause a fair wound

Find me a midpoint

Will you?

Find-me-a-damn-midpoint

Sad Poem

She gave me everything

Except her heart

I gave her everything

Except my words

Now

She lives

With happy heart with someone

And I live

With my sad poems