Pursuit of Sanity

Visual delight from mind numbing thoughts,

Deafening cries searching identity slots,

Anguish for consternation that’s yet to come,

Pinnacle of triumph for voices that hum,

Treason is glorious, revel in the anarchy,

Escape reality, take refuge in the frenzy,

Imagine the carnage while mind wins over,

Gloating in prejudice at the sacrificial altar,

An inherent desire to retreat in the milieu,

Pursuing sanity for a reason to bid adieu,

Trying in earnest to harness the rhymes,

Yearning to hear the lost morning chimes …

Shadows of the Midnight Sun

Shadows dancing intermittently in the dark of the night,

Longing to join their hedonistic ritual in a drowsy flight,

Forgotten memories inscribed with deep chisel marks,

A penchant to erase the oblivious visceral landmarks,

Dance of death calling for the bleary and fragile soul,

Insignificant creations buried under the gravestone,

Crying for salvation from the pedestrian existence,

Being prisoner of our thoughts creates the pretense,

Specter of the midnight sun raises false hopes,

A mirage of continuity while conscience elopes,

Deafening cries of mortals trapped inside their own,

Enduring their futile search for the elusive keystone … 

অজানার উদ্দেশ্যে

চেনা শহর

বিবাগী লাল ঘুড়ি

Genesis of Eternity

Do you remember how it all began?

Strangers in a milieu without any plan,

The past, a pleasant blur with transient memory,

Drifting mirages trying to cross the shifting boundary,

Chaos reigned, just a mind-numbing rush,

Life was struggling with a desire to crush,

Hit by refracted light, staring into eternity,

A leap of faith that we took for posterity, 

The restless back-waters of life, trying to sail,

Two lonesome travellers with a story to tell,

Meandering aimlessly without any baggage,

Wish I could write all about that voyage …

Life

Life was a dream, I stay awake for the impossible ones,

Life was an unending story till the morning light beckons,

Life was lost in the unending crevice of emptiness,

Life is regained in the eternal search for solace,

Life was a song, whose meaning I didn’t understand,

Life was the flickering light from shadows that demand,

Life remained on a merry-go-round that never stood still,

Life is reaching its destination as the promise fulfills,

Life was the forgotten friend, who never turned back,

Life went adrift with memories in the backpack,

Life kept fading away in the mirror rearview,

Life is the Lost Star which will never bid adieu …

Journey

I don't remember when the journey began,

Following a beacon which seem to outran,

Hitchhiking myself on a path unknown,

Memories turned into muted headstones,

A storm came rushing through the silence of the night,

Slight hesitance in the desire to look into the light,

Pregnant with new lightnings it panned,

I was friends with solitude; did I need a stranger's hand?

To guide me through unending labyrinth,

Dropped my reins before hope's plinth,

I don't need to know how the journey will end,

The ventriloquist of my soul will figure the bend...

The Lamppost

Sounds of darkness wading through misty air,
A solitary lamppost on a road to nowhere,
With a marmoreal calm, against the ridges of time,
The lamppost awaits a morning sublime …

Why wait for some vague distant futurity?
The dawn may arrive with a vignette that’s sketchy,
Steal the darkness from the chasm of the night,
Turn into a beacon burning endlessly bright,

Shine against the tapestry of the path gone astray,
Chaperon the lost, bring an end to life’s crossway,
You are the destiny of the trinkets from past,
Meandering thoughts crave for you at last,
The lone lamppost on the pathway of existence,
A guiding star to fulfill life’s essence …

The Lonely Cloud

A lonely cloud once crept in to my room,

“I just want to be where shadows don’t loom,

They befriend my shadow and leave me in the lurch,

While I stand there like the lone candle in a church,

Facing a silent retreat into an oasis of stillness,

I pause to master the art of thoughtlessness.”

A touch of regression in the cloud’s monotone,

I was torn asunder by a spectre so lone,

“Just think of yourself as a for the nonce creation,

To embark on a nonpareil journey of redemption,

You achieve a concinnity of the earth and the heaven,

Intrigue us all and mesmerize without a reason,

Like the lonesome thought-messengers, who rue,

You are the elixir of eternity, the reason for being true …   

YOU re-gained

Time was trying to imitate my existence

Unfolding of reality was just pretence,

The lease of life was nearing its extinction,

Only a whiff of YOU could get back the admiration.

YOU ask me “How can I guide you? I’m myself lost,

Bilking from the thought of nights when they frost.

I upbraided the enlightened soul for baring it all,

Never wanted again to stake my wherewithal.”

I said, “The fruition of our life is through its passage,

Doubts - the traitorous craven will cause a ravage,

But if YOU can feel your lotusland come alive,

Embrace the wind that was so eager to deprive.

The wind will be the harbinger of your essence,

My life will no longer be, just a pretence …”

The Lost Ship

A lost ship on its elusive search for freedom,

Found itself hesitant while crossing the chasm,

It had wandered off to the trodden road,

Tried crossing the waters with a light borrowed,

The light got dimmer, remnants of the shadows remained,

The chasm grew wider while tethered clouds volplaned,

To bottomless perdition lay the road ahead,

Just open spaces with nowhere to tread.

The predicament of the moment was where to be,

Forever ruing the unanswered calls of uncertainty,

With destiny in sight it was difficult to stray,

A vertiginous perspective led it to doomsday,

While the ship reveled in its abyssal sense of loss,

The still cerulean waters continued to crisscross … 

Fragments of YOU

Fragments of YOU lay scattered in the mind’s landscape,

A visceral feeling enshrined and I stood there agape,

Light from the bright eclipse brings a new dawn,

A bewildered soul found the visages were gone.

The kaleidoscope of YOU had a dizzying effect,

A poetic license for my mind to finally defect,

I wandered off the trodden path trying to go astray,

This is where I find myself, amidst glorious uncertainties I lay.

I was groping for a flicker of hope and time stood still,

Then realised that it was YOU who made me feel,

The sun and the mirror within the realm of your space,

Lit up the colors of life and against time they race,

I don’t believe there’s a Heaven, but if there was to be,

It would be the journey of life in pursuit of YOU for eternity … 

A picture

The giant wheel of time was on its whimsical spins,

Left imprints on the empty roads going widdershins,

White swans in the black water were just an illusion,

But the mirage says adieu and dreams beckon.

The keys to my verdant dreams got lost in the milieu,

While I was waiting for someone, sometime to show,

The road ahead to the never-ending Armageddon,

When a LOST STAR made me realize all of a sudden …

A picture of YOU is all that matters,

For the kite to follow the rhythm of feathers,

Their imprints overshadow all my failures,

While time lost its way and life ushers,

All the moments of realization turn into nothingness,

I step out into the world to find YOU in this wilderness … 

Here’s to YOU

I looked into her eyes with a sedulous spirit,

Shadows of clouds were beating a hasty retreat,

The rigmarole of life didn’t bother me any more,

Me and myself now had the eternity to soar.

All this while I was going widdershins around YOU,

My road of life was lined with conurbations that rue,

This syncretism had obscured my view over the hill,

The wind had euchred me making time stand still.

But then YOU came with your zeal to constellate,

My pointillistic dreams were back to narrate,

The story of how they had lost sight of the sky,

The light from the clouds made these revenants fly, 

Your words doused the color of hope on me,

The refection of me had now only YOU to see …

Travesty of dreams

The air around me smells of eternal existence,

That’s when I agonized it was YOUR presence,

Dark alleys were lit from the light of the (lost) star,

The pains of destiny left the door ajar.

YOU were a recumbent goldfish in a fishbowl,

Looking for a place to hide, to caress YOUR soul,

Winds of change came riding through the open door,

YOU woke up in my arms being washed ashore,

The portentous sea in YOU wants to come out,

The gushing waves of emotions discomfortingly shout,

“Let us go free, we don’t want to desiccate,”

YOU know they are true, but you still procastinate.

The mirage of YOU thought I was a pariah,

Threw me down to justify their Karma.

I fell into the lap of never-ending reality,

The moments with YOU were there for eternity … 

A touch of YOU

Today you showed me a reflection of me,

You were standing on the roadside, nowhere to see,

A red halo surrounded your soul, the color of sun in a cloud-filled bowl,

Your feet sounded like the cries of my shadow for the eternal soul.

Your smile was shining on the stairway to heaven,

I was walking with you and eternity felt like even,

I cried out, “All I want from you is, you”,

Me the morning grass, you the morning dew,

Your touch from Heaven eases my pain,

Like the big black smoke coming out of the train.

I hide from the morning sun as it makes me cry,

You soak my tears in your cradle, and back to Heaven you fly,

Your touch paints the color of hope on me,

The refection of me had now only YOU to see …

A feather’s fancy flight

The wind had brought a whiff of schwarmerei from the past,

Dust had obscured the view of my journey till the last,

The boat was rocking in the turbulence of life with nowhere to anchor,

The never-ending roads like a Matryoshka led to the solitary Preacher,

A white feather from nowhere lay on the edifice of rationality,

And tried to decimate the pains of emotional instability.

I could hear the feather trying to say something,

Diapasons of happy voices echoed out of nothing,

The feather while in motion appeared so self-consciously solemn,

I stood and gazed in amazement at the genesis of eternity’s realm.

Radiance from the feather lights up the alley, the wind in its flight clears up the dust,

Happy voices were talking to me, telling me the story of a future gone past,

The lightness of the feather gave me the strength to weigh anchor,

The Preacher in this world of brevity finally became the Sinner … 

Wishing for YOU

Shades of your voice echo in the hallowed halls of hope,

I gaze up at the stars and saw a veritable chaos in scope,

The oracle in you had grubstaked the act of me being me,

Without you now I find myself in a tourbillion of mimicry.

While the eternal fortune-teller was trying to pretence,

I now felt the bedizened misery of my fractional existence,

Now when I cannot see you sparkle like the morning drizzles,

My dreams are lost in the smorgasbord of rhymes and reasons.

But then when I see you up there in the starry eolian sky,

My dreams all come back to me as I see you happy to fly,

The leitmotif of all my wishes have always been this visage,

I wished not to see a moment of sadness in your entourage,

Your shadows will light the nidus of my road ahead,

Our yesterday will be your tomorrow is a wish that I made …

At The Crossroads of Dreams

The lament of peace is the essence of the sempiternal posterity,
The sky wails while the volplaning time personifies unsung mortality,
Clouds maunder unhindered in their endless winding path,
The impervious life tries to bind them with a comfortable wrath.

The prepossessing free fall beckons me to the cradle of nothingness,

An adscititious spirit of freedom gives way to the noisome darkness,

I was cocooned in my tower keeping a watch for impending disaster,

Never realised that the foundation of my tower was going to fritter.

I found myself at the crossroads of desire and the clouds,

With only a divarication between the two eternal doubts,

The clouds show me the winding road to never-ending peace,

While my desires are always given away on lease,

The disparate soul chooses to let go off the acquisitive desire,

My eccentric dreams are still dreaming for peace to retire …

You (2)

My expectation from life was that of defeat,

The voices in my head went on to repeat,

“You are just a fleeting moment of time,

In this bewildering web of reason and rhyme”

But then I saw the sun shine with your borrowed light,

My palaver with life was now a mere existentialist fight,

Your voice was floating like a zephyr of hope,

My deflagrated soul was just learning to cope.

My defeats suddenly formed wings of their own,

Went off on their fancy flight - I could hear their incessant drone,

Their departure made me agnize the worth of defeat,

My expectation had been buried deep inside life’s retreat.

But then came the vision of YOU in this mélange of life,

That’s when I surrendered my desire for immortal strife …

The Lost Star

I was walking on the way to eternal nothingness,

When a star came and said, “I’ve lost my darkness,

Without darkness I can’t see the light,

The night just pauses in its own endless flight.”

The harbinger of faith borrows a soulful of flame,

I was coming back to life from the halls of fame,

With the flame, darkness in disguise comes along,

The visage of the star in misty white met it headlong,

The darkness illuminated the road ahead,

The star was caught in too many threads,

Her limitless mettlesome spirit became an oriflamme,

The chaos amidst the silence made her proclaim,

“I am no longer the lost star in eternity,

I am now your solitary posterity…”

Light from the shadows

I saw your shadows on a star-filled night,

With a caesura of a drawn breath I held on tight,

Shadows can’t lie, they couldn’t even exist,

But I found myself immersed within your mist.

The chains of my past were drifting me apart,

While I was dreaming of yesterday depart,

The chains of glass had a reflection of YOU,

A little girl with wings above you flew,

The candle in your soul ‘cracked’ the glass chains,

My shadows crept out and cried “Freedom reigns,”

The light from your shadow kills my past,

I revel in this menagerie of life at last.

My argument with life

Life and I were having an argument,

“I did not know you were dead, so I didn’t lament,

For me, you were just a history of contradictions,

For others, you might be a source of addiction.”

Life smiled and said, “Haven’t I taught you to be you?”

Gave you dreams and made you see HER in the milieu?”

I came back from the distant eternity and realised,

For whom the bells tolled, for whom they chimed.

It was life that made me see YOU, walking on the morning grass,

Beautiful beyond hope, beyond all dreams surpass,

Life whispered in me, “I am your shooting star”

That’s when I realised, life just got closer than ever…

And everything came to naught

I looked out the window it was raining,

Could it be my tears, like raindrops falling?

You know, once I had been there to heaven,

Everything I saw was normal, pretty much even,

Life there also was a bricolage of events,

They were just people around, those considered saints.

And I cried, oh my God, I cried,

The clouds hid my tears and there they dried.

So I came down to land and said, “I won’t pray”,

I don’t want my destiny to be an endless day,

That was when the clouds began to weep,

My teardrops came down and soaked me deep,

Then I realised, drenched in my thought,

Apart from YOU, everything comes to naught…

You

Your face was a mesh of darkness and light,

My mind was flying like the small red kite,

Streetlight on your face shines like rays of sun,

I wish I could unwind time and finish what’s undone.

The red kite gets entangled in its own thread,

Something is pushing it down towards its own death,

A streak of red light falls on your face,

A reflection of the red kite from a far distant place.

If your eyes was the destiny of the small red kite,

Why let it go away in its own fancy flight?

Your soul burning bright shines the road ahead,

But that’s a path which I never want to tread,

I would just like to be the small red kite in the sky,

You just hold on to my lifeline, don’t let me fly.

The Dot

“I’m so insignificant!” screamed the tiny speck of dot,

Nobody understands me, never gives me a thought,

I wish I could be the creator of me,

I’ll still be the dot and not change humanity,

But I’ll just want to give myself away,

Just consider me a part of the whole, a part in the play,

Maybe now I’ve fallen from grace,

But once I was up there, someone with a face,

Before you erase me with a sleight of hand,

A word of caution – beware, it’s a quicksand,

Just remember these stairs going down,

That’s where you’ll find me, that’s where I’ll be gone…

The body or the soul?

I am standing beneath a ray of light,

But somehow I just can’t see,

A mordant figure with a cross,

Is showing me the stairs to flee.

Submission is the theme of life,

There seems to be struggle inside,

There’s always a bloody strife.

How I wish my soul could fly out,

Beyond all these reasonable doubts,

I say, let the soul get trapped in this riddle of lives,

The body is free to soar…it still thrives…

Is anybody listening?

I am singing in front of an audience,

All of them are TVs; there is no silence,

I am singing, but there are no words coming out,

The audience is just chattering beyond any doubt,

Who will I sing for? Who will I lie?

I need someone for whom I can die.

Nobody seems to listen anymore.

There’s no blood on the streets, why are they so gore?

I have seen streets that race beyond time,

There are dead people on streets, they just seem to pile,

How can I sing when people don’t listen?

I’ll live someday, please don’t hasten,

I just want to sing all alone now,

I’ll live for somebody, someday…that’s my vow!

The color of life

All my shadows are in the dark,

They’re just screaming, they seem to bark,

They are saying “Take what you get or get what you want”

I need some answers, but I just can’t,

Life somehow loses all color for me,

Was there ever a color or was it just me?

Have you ever heard a color speak?

They do cry, sometimes they weep,

What’s the color of life - the colors ask me,

How can you say when you just can’t see?

The shadows from the dark cry out,

We are here – does our existence means naught?

I don’t believe that shadows have color,

Without them the world seems so smaller,

So I ask them, what is life’s color?

Life? What life? There’s only a vapor…

A story of hope

The morning becomes darker, the night becomes brighter,
Suddenly it feels like the world is all over me,
And everything seems to be more hollower,

It's a pleasant feeling to be all-alone,
It feels like you are etched on a stone,
A mid-summer night's dream – does it really exist?
Are all of us alive, or is it just a pretext?
The music suddenly loses all sense to me,
All that it stood for, all that it's meant to be,

Hold on, there's still the morning sun,
It'll play all the songs for me…
It just seems that now I can see…
The morning becomes brighter, the night doesn't come,
Suddenly it feels like I'm over the dome…

Travails of life

Beyond the shattered earth does lie,
My dreams, my body, my mind, I…
I can't seem to see the morning sun,
Clouds seem like ashes in an urn,

Over the hills, there seems to be a valley,
A valley that is trapped, like a mind in an alley,
Just can't seem to remember me,
Just can't see no reason to be,

I wish I could make my soul flee…
(So that) beyond the shattered earth didn't lie,
My dreams, my body, my mind, I.

Illusions of Reality

The wind ahead was a harbinger of the clouds,

Delivering the omen of the omnipresent doubts,

The smoked windscreen was graying the view,

For a vision of reason in the misty morning dew,

Why is it so difficult, to see the morning sun?

In unhindered light, where shadows don’t overrun

To crowd out the scenery and make the day grim,

Faith, perched atop the hourglass, just below the rim,

You look aside to catch a glimpse of Time,

It speeds along leaving you far behind,

Empty roads don’t beckon you any more,

The sun’s reflection was a mirage that tore

Through the swarm of clouds and tipped the hourglass,

The leap of faith leaves you at an impasse...