But I flow…

I read this quote “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can”. – Charles Bukowski

Its real, real like the breath that has always been around since I was born but I realised that this was named as an activity probably in some science class some 5 to 6 years after my existence. I carried on absolutely fine, without the conscious knowledge of my breathing.

Until one afternoon, while I was trying to sleep I started concentrating so intensely on the thought of breathing that no matter what I could not sleep. For two relentless hours I tried to break away from the breath that wasn’t leaving me. I stopped breathing… Started again almost involuntarily.  The precocious child in me wanted to know and perhaps meet this breath around itself, in itself and then out of itself. Perhaps I was trying to say hello and console it with the fact that it was okay if I didn’t see it, I could still be friends with it. And now I realize what it was answering me back with- Transience.  It was saying to me that nothing is permanent. It was telling me that what went into my lungs isn’t the same as what came out of it. That this relationship is more ephemeral than a low tide wave in the ocean. Life lies in this flow. Time is a concept only because of this permanent transience. If I try to hold the breath that is inside too dearly, I wouldn’t survive. If I refuse to admit what is outside, then too I would cease to exist.

“I want us to flow,
I want us to settle.
In frantic waves,
You reach to me.
I can’t hold you down
I can’t see where you disappear.

Have I ever met you?

Outside in the fog,
In front of my dorm room
Cats keep scowling
At each other, at us.
I lie wide awake
In words, in my punctuation.

They call this language.
It cradles the young art,
Keeps it from running wild.
Deft and clear, are the chains
that pin us down, ladder us up
but only up to a certain height.”

I was having so much to do today, and when I found myself lost and saw my hands trembling with no specific reason, I resorted to Jagjit Singh’s song “Jhuki jhuki si nazar” on loop. And no more do I believe more sincerely than now that poetry is what happens when nothing else can!

Where does this urge come from? To leave everything you are doing and type away all that you are feeling? Has a small thing ever hit you like sharp, pointed piercing of lightning in a needle? Do share if ever you felt this way.

The time of choices!

Time churns its stories in a weird way,
Spinning on the top of surprises,
Making one wonder what we are doing with life;
When its life’s doing something with you.

With auguries of the future held in hand,
We peruse the lanes and bylanes of this life,
Solve the same puzzle a thousand times,
Count the bunch of coins from all dollars to dimes.

At times there is a game of chess going on..
Between the mind and the heart,
Between black and white,
With eternal pauses and resounding moves.

A game repeated every day and hour,
Like the same story told in different lingos.
It shows up in every new step round the corner,
Every decision and choice reeks of its wood.

When you broom the path and stear it clear,
Nature makes sure to spatter it all again.
To test you or maybe just to make you wait ,
To let the perfect timing seek and come to you.

Like rills in sands and freckles of the shells,
You come to see your choices as ripples,
That will soon be settled with the changing wind,
But not without leaving its trail to peck for.

It’s always a timeless chronicle of choices,
A garland of oxymoron hung around forever,
A question to be or not to be:
A choice to do or wait and see.