Of one such GOOD BYE

The yellow leaves
Sweet October breeze and the people on the road..
All following a pace.
I take a sip of my coffee and start counting the letters I have written for you.
*

You could have come back and felt my trembling lips.
I forgot your taste.
Or how your smell lingered around me..
The mixture of cigarette smoke and men's perfume.
Or how your touch felt like.
There were times when I didn't want to talk about it.
There are things we shouldn't talk about.
Things.
You.

*
I am 22 and I feel greyish old
The funeral sized silence
Waiting for empty nights to reply
Or words to tumble down with your voice
As a lullaby..
Im still not wise but reddish annoying.

*
My mouth now reeks of nicotine and alcohol.
Turned out to be a drinking song
With rum and shots and memories of love
Or
What I would like to call it to be.

*
Reaching for my pencil to scribble down the last good bye
Tearing apart the strings that held us
And the inter dimensional love that ate us.
Brown bread.
Honey.
3 am and your broken baritone was enough someday,far away.

*
You are there over the hills
My favourite paraphrase.
Soaring in between those soggy lines that I had written for you...
Kisses.
My legs pushing yours.
Little pictures.
In love.
Till I hoped.

*
22,still
Old.
Grown
Drunk.
Out of love.
Counting days..

Can you still hold me?
Or can I?

Till Time

There are gaps when you see a perfect shadow of a tree on the street.
The gap like little boxes to be filled in with colour by a child
Its strange how they fill the boxes incessantly with only a set of 24 colours
Reminds me how I failed to use them all but still felt I needed more
A whole goddamn box of colours couldn't fix up my childhood.
Because I needed a rainbow of 100 colours or a goddamn magic moondust.
Or the light through a prism creating a bloody spectrum.

I let the colour of sunlight with dust fall on to your face
I let the light fall in without any reason.
I liked the way you smiled.
Probably I 'like' the way you smile.
I let the normal change
Change because
I never wanted normal.
Never wanted perfect.

Probably I wanted the worst.
Wanted the worst verse in my mind to
Happen
Like it's never about the light always.
Like it's always about the edge in the dark.

It's how I always spilled the edge more with colours when I was a kid.
Probably
It's always how I wanted problems.
It's about strange tinge of red yellow purple maroon etc etc..
Or only something that makes up the dark in the spark with you.

Only if we part/Remember this.

The last night had been long.
Long enough for us to think about you mouthing 'I love you' but failing.

Typing and deleting.
*How do I 'feel' while 'feeling'?*
I wish Google could answer that.
On the nights that made us google words
Words.
Words to fall in love.
Words that could make mountains.
Words that made little love notes.
Words that helped me find YOU,my favourite metaphor.

Tell me we could have spilled coffee instead of mistakes that day
We could have kissed more like the powdered paints on my floor.
We could have.
We didn't.

I have written Little letters to you in my head
Sending it without letting you know.
Tell me,can you say 'Love'till you start hating the word?
The maps that your skin made.
The laughter that we shared.
The ashtray that I gave you.
Can you break them all till I could smell the brokenness within?
Tell me, could you just tear apart the newspaper that had notes for you and come back with jiggling laugh I love?
Tell me,if you could smell me in colours and leave me while kissing with smoke filled eyes?

Call it a disorder
Or the dysfunctional 'L'word.

I have seen Autumn and loved the word more
When it comes to 'Fall'.
Im trying to figure this poem out in the dark
Reading the empty holes in my mind.
Im trying to make the last verse taste like the pungent something pouring on my tongue.

The last verse
For you.
Call it me or us.
Maybe sometimes the silence in between
the over punctuated conversations
It was us
Trying to figure out the word with four letters.
You 'feel' it or 'love' till you 'hate'.

Denial

I painted my window pane with blue and red few days back,
For no particular reason when I smoke my daily bit of Classic that I secretly steal from my father's pack of cigarettes,I feel those colours talking to me
The dogs keeps on barking constantly around 3am and I'm left alone with my thoughts and rants.
The tattered houses and the street lights are more peaceful at night.
My ashtray is technically full and I have to hide it from Ma everytime she comes to clean my room.I have been doodling way too much about myself and keep on forgetting about the people concerned. Is it just me or the circumstances that I feel so aloof?
Staring at the wall constantly for hours imagining about starts colliding,cream dough,dolls that I lost, traffic lights drifting and an imaginary someone pretty much sums up my life.

I hate to say that I miss you because I don't or maybe I do because you out of all people used to listen to my rants carefully.
Those wistful eyes,weird laughs and tiny idiotic jokes used to fill up the gap easily.
My puzzle piece that used to fit.
And now with each dawn changing the day I rant alone and preferably write it down..hoping some day it might reach you in some way.

Trouble

I wanted to find a place by the sea where I could sleep on lavenders,
Where the starlit sky and constellation would take up all the time.
I ll keep aside my cellphone in a jar and pour out my heart full of wine.
I have always wanted to be the muse.
The muse to your poetry or songs or anything that made sense,I wanted to breathe in between the lines you wrote.
I still long for the letters unwritten or written to just get saved in the draft box.
I wished for a petal and your handkerchief that reeked of love and innocence.

The streetlights and asphalt,
The pink sun and bubble wraps
The ice cream sticks and yellow wisps of smoke,
Your smile and everything else
Its all that I wanted when the daffodils were dead.. because honey you are the trouble that had me.
The trouble more like wind or waves lashing against my feet,
The trouble like my sinking legs and the sand.

Rewinding my old clock

Its strange how you left, remains as a faded memory and the person you leave for specific reasons keep talking to you without even talking..

The hard part is remembrance.
The weird part is I was nothing but yet was something to him,lately.
Time,
A bitch.
Im always late and this time too..
But this being late saved me. Probably it's better to remain far away and miss than get close and get ruined.

'Kabira'

Freud said that there are different interpretations of a dream. Its been a while that I hardly remember my dreams but there are such rare times when some dreams just carve scars minutely so that it stays and STAYS for years or so.
But this dream is much like a film sequence.

So it was a nap dream about a past figure who appeared in his weirdest way in this dream. It was a construction site later and before that a coffee shop or some kind of a shop with old green coloured checkered table cloths spread over tables and smooth timber chairs to make it look like a 'place-where-we-come-to-eat'.There was an old man sitting right beside me but it took 5 mins for that face to change into 'someone-I-knew' when I looked at him.
I remember pulling his cheeks and nagging about 'Why don't we talk anymore which ended up with a sorry for no reason'(as usual).I even remember his quirky smile and the cuddle before he gave me his plate full of chicken or something to eat.Hah! I ate that shamelessly.!!
The construction site came into the scene without any context and it's pretty dreamy weird. I saw us sitting on the edge of somewhere of that site and a fat old man climbing down the rods with a bottle in his hand trying to turn his head hard to look at us. We were having tea I suppose and there was 1 feet gap between me and him in the way we were seated. The man asked us once  "What are you doing here?"
I remember us smiling only or just not paying attention and suddenly a woman drops in who too somehow was there I suppose.
The man after a while asked all of a sudden " What is he like to you?or what are you guys"?(in bengali) ( 'O tomar ke hoy')
I remember this part so vividly..
I smiled again and said "We don't know what ARE we" (Amra ki theek janina.. amra erom e aachi).
We both looked at each other then and smiled.
The woman  who was standing there in a peaceful way added .. "I understood that" (with a smile like a goddess).
Its still so vivid..that I want to see her face again,want to hold her and cry for a moment without reasoning.

I remember after that getting up to leave and he remained there ,seated..turned to see me with a look 'One-last-time-same-as-before'..
While leaving I saw a familiar face looking at me and leaving hurriedly..I don't know who's face was it,but all I remember was that I heard somewhere far away from our place a track being played..a faded tune

'Kaaisi teri khud garzi naa dhoop chuney naa chhao,
...
Kabira,maan ja'..

Probably this means nothing,probably for one last time deep inside I wished for a dream telepathic situation.
Or for one last time I sensed an ending without a goodbye..

Drunk Rant

The whole lot of communication and fighting the urge to meet halfways had to end anyway.
Whiskey with water in my glass giving a shade of yellow, yellow of remembrance and the moments my lips touched yours.
The letters and the happy endings, my faded fantasy twirling together in the glass entailing nothing but a sound that could tear you apart inside a hollow cave. The barbed syllables that I had for you lost its track midway,I left the words wading slowly to make you feel that the maroon of our beguiling conversations are over.
Of broken chords and sweet honey whispers..
The breathing sun and running around the dingy lanes,my last peg had a dead soul dipped with a knife like word "Forgotten".
I saw cigarette smoke in between our subconsciousness and sublime kisses.
Can we just pretend for one last time that we were nothing bottled up in something?

Let's just.

Let's chase clouds together.
Let's trace a map on your skin or mine and travel to find out abandoned towns.
Towns that smell like those pages of your diary. 

Let's jump into an ocean and make love with the blue and green like never before.
Let's just skip a beat of normality and leap into the abyss.
Let's just forget everything and be nothing.
'Nothing' because it  has no weight ,
'Nothing' because we would always be able to return  to each other ,
Nothing because we would be lasting forever then.
Probably then one 'forever' would count..

YOU.

You're like the last bit of smoke before a mind storm ,
So very noxious and beautiful to taste like cigarettes and old paper books mixed with antique love , death , sins and remembrance.

They say its Valentine's week.

13/02/17

Last year,on this day, everything that mattered changed and the change remained constant. Talking about now ,
The sillage that used to haunt ,kept on haunting. Kids living on the streets kept on dancing to the cacophony of the city.
The lost souls kept on wandering , wandering towards an aimless road and the meadows meanwhile yearned for the last bit of Hemingway which was as dead as the last beautiful autumn I witnessed.
Beautifully dead , yet alive.
I saw nothing against my window , not even a dimly lit sky but the paints on the pane.
There's a guy living opposite to my place  sitting with his phone ,staring at it for a phone call probably ,
Facebook is full of red and pink and I could rarely skip those mushy posts about "How to surprise your boyfriend on Valentine's day",
There's a girl I see , who came by to meet my  mom ,sitting right beside me messaging her crush mindlessly and smiling like an idiot ,
I smell someone baking caramel cake and ofcourse Alcohol ,
Somehow this time has a shade of too much red in it and I m seeing it in black or blue ,
All these reminded me of the spring that broke it's leg and a sleepy balcony with cherry wine succumbing to death,

Everything kept on moving , kept on being perfectly regular like morning newspapers with all the irregularities that came along with it ,And I on the other hand ,counting stars and losing count, kept on missing you.

Other drugs

As I switched off my laptop ,the screen blinked empty ,
I saw the reflection of my face there.
I have forgotten how I looked like. I have forgotten how my face used to look when I frowned , probably I stopped looking at the mirror often. Or probably this happens when you tend to find everything going around you is irrational and self depreciating thoughts start engulfing you like the monsters under your bed.

Its been a few months that my inbox is empty like a fair without people , or empty with people. Its empty because I couldn't find the fullness in it without the only text I longed for.
Insomnia starts getting on me like a crab and I couldn't concentrate anymore.
If you would have been here you would have still loved the circles around my eyes and hence I'm not even counting that!
Its been roughly three years that I miss my mother while she sits beside me.
Its been 21 years that I have lost the soul I had found in a brown bread packet but the feeling is peripheral.
I couldn't concentrate without vaguely imagining those lost faces amidst a little chaos.
Because someday , maybe someday I ll start missing myself tomorrow.
Someday I would stop drinking on my past ,
And stop time by holding it tight .
Because someday , I would make sense at 3 am and my phone would ring again like before , with that old voice waiting on the other side.

Till then the lullaby on my iPod will pretend to be soft breeze and moonlight ,
Till then we could pretend to be existing in each other's minds and over analyzing it with some background music..
Because till then let's just jump into the void and fall endlessly.

All That I Could Be .

There was a house with all its windows broken
I saw a bird flying across those shattered panes ,
The scratching on the wall reminded me of a feeling of emptiness inside my room, an emptiness you feel staring at that yellow light outside.

Everything doesn't have a purpose,
I exist and I still don't have a purpose.
Im like the old man on a wrecked ship , sitting and contemplating death.
I don't know why Im writing this but the face that would haunt me ,
The face that would be there on the wooden board of the ship would be the one
I ever wanted to be.
It would be me.

There won't be anybody judging ,
Just a slice of my life would be sailing on a bottle marked with stale wine ,
A message with some dead flowers inside it ,
That :

"It was all meant to be , even if it wasn't but I made it look like it.
The broken windows screamed off it's fear ,
And the bird stopped flying there ,
It was all that was left in my mind till I closed my eyes.
The last scene was the stars cutting through the sky ,
And the sun melting like the last orange ball squeezed hard ,
And the last thing left to say is the home I had been looking for was 'someone' where I wanted to grow up.

A home , I couldn't find. 

But all I could see is ,

I could have been dead somewhere beside an ocean but here ,

It could have been anywhere but here."

Reminiscent

And I still remember the dark cab ,the way you kissed my hand and how adorably you brushed it against your beard.

I still remember the way you looked at me in the dark and that peck ofcourse.
It all seemed like it was all meant to be because it all seemed that way,

And now there are only few words and faded kisses running through my veins with your face vanishing like the ship that sailed away ,

And now that we are in remains it seems like we still couldn't make it but ,

"In the deafening silence when I asked you if I could call you my snowflake ,
You said "Okay" .

CROSSROADS

Of Saturdays and your blue eyes ,
Dreams that are marked with chalkdust ,
The rocks that you left in the jar ,
Your faded red jacket ,
A veneer of refinement when you spoke ,
It was all you ever could be!

With your skin mixed with mud and blood spilled over the ground ,
The watchtower has marks of your scratching and the pink sun don't shine anymore ,
The radio has lost its channels ,
She saw and believed that the grass has lost its green ,
And you faded from the horizon again like before ,
While she spent the midnight there standing alone in the meadow ,
Thinking about crossroads
And bright lanterns!

L.O.S.T

There's something about this city always ,
Standing on my balcony I feel the wind in my hair ,
Its the tunnels that go through my mind leaving me empty , everytime.

.............

Because it was always you and me wrapped in some old blanket that reeks of caffeine and alcohol.
The subway seems empty these days without your footsteps around.
But it was always you and me going around and chasing fireflies. 

With your breathe and mine catching up slowly , I see we are finally nowhere and finally no one.
But you see it was always you and me,
In between nowhere and somewhere.

The night drifts away and I m standing alone watching  citylights.
And my mind in a maze  flies away somewhere in the mist ,
To you ,
Or to your favourite page saved for me.
But you see it was always you and me on every page,
On every calender days and drunken clouds ,
On guitar strings or in between those lost verses of your poetry ,
It was always you and me.

Daffodils and Death

It was 6 am in the morning when you first saw your kid's dreamy smile and hair all muffed up.
It was 6 am and the horizons you thought of , didn't meet.
Your wife is sleeping cosily beside you and her bare back is visible as the soft yellow rays of sunshine touch it beautifully.  The neighbouring house , this morning is unusually quiet. Its quiet like a dead body in a deserted house.
Slowly moving towards the staircase through your drawing room with all the windows shut and curtains spread wide , you see your childhood awkwardly in polaroid flashbacks.

The last thing you remember before going    near about the edge of your roof is your kid's smile.
The taste of your wife's lips on yours ,10 years ago and the rush in you to buy roses for her.
You remember about how you forgot roses were never her favourite but daffodils.
About your last smoke and your wife's last touch.
You remember about the last page of poetry for your muse and about the lost diary that had a picture of your forgotten past.
The series of 'last things' go on as you were about to let yourself loose. The whispers in the wind and the last drop of tears that your mother tasted all came back for a second. The path to fall down now has narrowed down and the drunken clouds are now waiting for you to look at them with a smile.
You were about to fall and you did.
You did through the narrow path and through thorns that could cut.

And the last thing about the fall that you remember  being 'dead' is you actually 'never' thought about it.
You never did.

Never about the daffodils or the roses.

Never about love or wasted letters ..

Or never about the smiles that mattered 

It was all about you and never about them.

It was for the temporary looking mess and the bubble you made.

Open Windows

There is a kind of a feeling that we feel when we see an open window.
A window that has old teak wood with a colour coated green. The grills aren't the modern ones but the long ones , till the sill , the ones we get to see in Jorashanko Thakur Bari or in any house of North Calcutta.
Now as for the feeling :

As you walk through the dingy lane of a bygone place in your mind you feel that overwhelming urge to remember everything that had traced that place. Everything that touched the walls and count every footsteps that rolled on this dusty street.
You again see that window open and a thin layer of a white coloured curtain flapping.
You stand there for a second , for a second under that building in which every room had the same white curtain.
For a second the cinematic flashbacks in your mind starts speaking aloud in its own language : silence.
Its the time when the drifting curtain takes you to places in monochrome and the twilight seems to be pink and beautiful.
It takes you to a place where you can be as useless as a broken sloop .
It takes you to a place where life isn't only about dead flowers at your window but about catching fireflies laughing and thinking.
Its when you step out of the city light phase to rush into an ocean inside your mind and the veins inside you starts smiling.
You explore the galaxies under your skin then.
You see ?
Its all about closed eyes and sailing with the crimson waves to see open windows in your mind.

Hemlock

There was an alarm clock beside our bed
It had a colour close to maroon ,
You used you say "There's no such colour as maroon, it's dark reddish brown "
There was a phase when fighting over colours
And making love afterwards was like cherry wine and hushed lullabies.

By the end of July ,
The bedside table was replaced with a crammed shelf and the alarm clock was left out unwind and broken ,
The maroon had now the colour reddish brown and the beetles outside in the garden stopped their hymn probably.
It was the end of our bare foot walks and blue satin laces.
It was the end of subway dances and Hemminway's poetry and unsaid words written.

There's so much about broken alarm clocks ,
It reminds you of a smell long forgotten  and yellow moth  contemplating death .
You see it was July and not March ,
March would have had a reason for people to leave because it's the month when people actually leave ,
I used to say this often to you wryly.
I used to say this because I hated my birthday month.
(I still do )

By the end of August
I got used to nobody calling up at 3 am
And spilling out poetry like my poet in the darkness ,
And my dark window pane whispered to make me fall asleep when this came back .
I wish like you now ,
I wish it snowed here,
Sexton said that there's a strange quietness about snow, no traffic ,no songs ,
Yes there is ,
Atleast snow doesn't remind me of hemp and grass that touched your feet.

By the end of September ,
The postman in my mind got tired of letters I wrote to you ,
And it isn't winter still.
You reminded me of hemlock and cats on green leaves.
The postmaster said I have gone mad.

It's December
And it's winter finally ,
My window has turned out to be a grave of all our memories ,
The wall paint is now worn out and dank ,
I got a place now to hibernate properly with tears and caffeine , its under my pink quilt.
I try to watch movies until dawn and wake up with the stars hiding behind wisps of cloud smoke ,
You still remind me of hemlock
And dead soul ,
Which is the last thing alive in my mind.

Daydreams and Paris

Let's walk in to Paris!
It would be 20th century and I would be wearing the skirt you would have gifted me
A Victorian skirt probably,

By the end of dusk,
You would write me a letter and ask me to meet you by the bank of that river you loved,
I 'll have a small room crammed with books and yellow pages ,
My bedsheets would smell of you each morning ,
And we would dance under the street lights ,
Listen to the workers work and rumbling of cars.

The letters wouldn't end and the sand clocks would have stories in them .
We would be meeting in some cheap coffee shop then walk along the streets till our feet hurts ,
Talking about Hemmingway and lost painter's last words.

Under the lemon like moon we would write poetries for each other or gift each other words with cigarette smoke and kisses.

We won't crumble and throw away our  worst poetries then ,
We'll keep those crumbled paper in a box and lock it safely.
A coffin of our Paris memories.
With Dead keyholes and rusted bookshelves.
Burnt out cigarette butts and yellow pages that would reek of vintage love and memories.

That's how "Let's walk in to Paris "

That night the alarm clock didn't ring.
You see theres something about broken alarm clocks, it has the beauty of timelessness.