This Is Why We Shouldn’t Talk

Times are too confusing

Words are too shallow to reveal truth

There are times

When all I want is

To speak to you

Without using any familiar tongue

I want to let our hands speak

In their mysterious ways

Like our lips do

When I speak to you

I can’t rely on corruptible medium 

They say even faces can be deceptive

To speak to you is important

But to speak clearly is more important, love

So next time when we meet

Let our hands do the talking

While you pretend to read your book

I’ll pretend to look out of the window

Spite

In the dark nights of passion

I am no longer her moon

I’m the dying star of her past now

She took my kingdom away

And choose her new king

I’m the beggar in her streets now

The cup we drank together from once

Is broken now

The wine of my devotion is sold cheap

In the tavern of her desires

I bite my fingers in anger

I howl in pain at nights

Morning I shout at myself to live

Evening I bury myself again

I’m the corpse of her forgotten desire

She buried me without a funeral

And never marked my grave

Mail In My Mouth

She walked into my life

Like a phantom of my own dreams

From grief to grief

She sharpened her soul

Like the butcher’s knife

Slitting through my ribs

She hugged me

Like a prisoner waiting his final trial

She wrote all her fears in a letter

And dropped it secretly inside my mouth

The life in exile is a death sentence

There is no comfort in parting

I douse my anger with tears

And waste myself in a forgotten song

I woke up in the morning

With a hammer in my hand

I nailed all her memories on my wall

I wait for her now

Like a seed waiting for sun under the soil

I wonder when I come out of the earth

Will I be a forest or a fruit?

Will You Miss Me Too?

Usney Meri Diary Mai Padi

Ek Purani Adhoori Nazm

“Will you miss me too?”

Ke Aakhir Mai

Ek Choota Sa Dil Bana Ke

Mujhe Lauta Di

Ab Dekhna Ye Hai

Nazm Ki Nabz...Uthegi?

Dil...Dadhke Ga?

Umr Qaid

Tumne

Apni Zaat Ke Hisaar Se

Yun Qaid Kar Rakha Hai Mujhe

Jiss Tarah

Bachon Ke Haath Se

Choote Hue Gubaare Mai

Hawa Qaid Rehti Hai

Truth

Pain is the black vulture without wings

It perches but doesn’t fly away

From the branches of my rotten memories

It scavenges on the carcass of my heart

I’m in pain

I-am-in-pain

And that’s the only self-evident truth right now

More eminent than any other truth

Including God...

Mysterious Readers

I saw her first time on a metro

Wearing her dark rimmed oval glasses

Reading the same novel I was reading

“Mysterious Readers”

We couldn’t hide our smiles

The mystery of story reading

Brought two forbidden readers together

Mysteriously

The golden cover of the book

Brightened her brown eyes

Like the sky at sunset

I felt the dusk coming over me

Our bookmarks were positioned

Precisely around the same part of the story

Possibly we were both at the same line

“They managed to send each other

Mysterious letters coded in language

Other than love.

But that wasn’t the language of hate.”

Meanwhile I fantasized our conversation

Supposedly if it happened

But it didn’t happen

Readers are almost always bad at talking

At least to other human beings

For a long time

We both pretended to be absorbed in our books

And surprisingly after few minutes

Our smiles mysteriously synchronized

To whatever we were reading

It was a mysterious exchange of sort

A coded language other than love

But similar to love only

I met her last time in a bookshop last week

Smelling the pages of a new novel

I had come to buy

Later that evening at home

While I was getting absorbed

By the suspense of the slowly unfolding story

I had this strange feeling

She must be reading the same line right now

“Lovers don’t meet randomly.

They meet precisely at the time of death.

The death of their past life.”