Word island

Words break with waves
On a distant shore.

A stream drowned in the sea...

The mountains had cried.

And a thousand stories 

Slept in a water grave. 

I was retrieved from the ocean
Hidden in a shell with a hermit crab.
Longing for days when moonlight
Traced it's fingers across my lonely back.

This is a lost island
Refuge for drifting souls
Sailors, without a map...

The amphibious me
Crawled up the sky;
And the birds flew upside down...

I see skyscrapers on the ocean bed.
Order that shames civilisations...
And an old woman sits at the bottom
Carving shells and colouring corals.

How do the fishes know
They're not swimming upside down?
How do they separate
Depths from heights?
Or is it the sky that is inverted...

Clamps in pockets
Salt on the face
In a dream that won't last forever
Nor would leave any trace...

Who would believe in my island
We are past the age for fiction;
I burnt my fingers and my net
When I tried to salvage the sun.

Saba

When her music died

The heavens were silent
And angels sighed!
In the calm of a night
Her music died.

The stars were shattered
The moon, too shy
A veil of smoke
And smokey eyes...

In the lines of kohl
A day summarised
Its charade of order
Its false pride.

And a bag of shards
On her shoulders laid
Carcasses of dreams
Pieces of dismay.

In the name of truth
To her heart she lied.
With a smile she fiddled
As her music died.

Saba

Escape

I curved my spine
And turned into a ball.
Rolled
From one end of the world to other
Till I was told it's round like me.

Escape. There's nowhere to escape.
Keep rolling, I tell my ball-self.
How many universes I've traversed
Never reached anywhere though.
Home. The mythical place of rest,
Left far behind, or maybe never existed
Yet, a summer evening lingers
With a bit of petrichor.
And voices long forgotten
Echo...
Calling me by a name
That no one remembers.

Maybe, I'm just a snail
For the universe, too slow, too small.
And yet time is but a theory
I live in the past, present and future
Yet, don't live at all.

Saba

Waiting For Winters

I drew a Gulmuhar petal
It set my scrapbook on fire...

I was just waiting for a winter
That lost its way
In the knotted bylanes
Of a twisted city
Trapped in air conditioning vents.

The sun is a harsh barbarian
And the North wind,
Now a gentleman!

Both Gulmuhar and Amaltas tried hard
But could not burn down the summer.
The zephyr needs some air conditioning as well...
My winter withered
Like the summer flowers.

The city

A poet's confession

A thousand voices shout
Inside my head
Like a Scrabble board
All words jumbled.

I live many lives
And watch my own
As a nonchalant bystander.

I'm a parasite
That feeds on the joys and pains
Of others.
I call myself a poet...
But all I do is steal
And fiddle.

From morning, I stole dew
And spinned the earth
A full circle
To steal a night.

I borrowed dreams
Created nightmares
But never slept.

Sometimes, I flow with the breeze
But mostly, I'm that stagnant stale city
That recycles itself
Through cheap marketing gimmicks.

Set the parchments on fire.

Saba

Vultures

Vultures were declared endangered
And there was no dearth of  dead bodies
They fed, and fell
Each carcass, claiming a predator.

The vultures were looking for a purpose in life
In a world where death was the only constant
Scavengers ruled

And yet, were never satisfied.

I tried to be a vulture
I tried to be the prey
Neither offered the salvation
That was promised for the doomsday. 

And then the vultures went on penance
While I counted my sins.
I had blood on my face
An innocent murderer or a victim.

The vultures looked at me with surprise and disgust
This morning, my breath smelled of carcass.

Wallflowers

A poet forbade the unblessed cup
Said something about love...
And a pair of parched eyes looked up
Horizon coloured with blood.

I see sparrows falling from the sky.
I blame it on their fate.
Fragile, sensitive, non survivalists.
They won't make it to the end.

And wallflowers, equally fragile,
Withering apart.
Blackened by car chimneys
Unnoticed, unevolved...

This is no fool's paradise
It's a wise person's hell
And yet they hope for sunrise
At every day's end.

I laugh and I pity
In my petite arrogance
No barter, we use currency...
The new age religion.

Market sells desires
Drenched in sweat
Covered with perfumes
Cheap bargains.

Wallflowers are free
No one needs them.

Saba

Monochrome

Today I tried to see the world in monochrome.

All was grey.
But some were more grey than the others.
Some, a bit lesser.

Aligned, all shades of the same hue
Complimented each other
Competed to be darker
Cells... rebels
Exploding organisms
In an orgasmic unison
Grey stars, grey planets.

In a cosmic dance
Darkness and light entwined.
And together said
"There is neither black
Nor white."

Saba

Catastrophe

I have two versions of the poem, and posting both.

1. How do lights from the heavens fade
On grey concrete.
And divine music is buried
In traffic choked lanes
And calls of a market
That sells joys
To those who can afford.

My destitute indifference
Stole a moment
And a smile
By the Volga.
The wind roars
And birds scream
All in jest
But my petit existence
Trembles.

There are things bigger
Than rulers coming to power
Or civilisations collapsing.
Scarier than stock markets crashing
Or bubbles bursting.

If the Volga
And Ganga
Conspire to break their barriers
A thousand uprisings noted in history
Would be insignificant.
There was only one great flood.

2. How do lights from the heavens fade
On grey concrete
And divine music is buried
In traffic choked lanes
And calls of a market place.

I steal a moment
By the Volga
The wind roars
And birds scream
All in jest.

There are things bigger
Than rulers coming to power
Or being dismissed
Or stock markets crashing
Or bubbles bursting.

If the Volga
And Ganga
Conspire to break their barriers
A thousand uprisings noted in history
Would be insignificant.
There was only one great flood.

Saba

(Written on the bank of River Volga, Uglich, Russia.)
July 20, 2017.

Let us forget...

Let us forget
Who we were
Or how we met.

Let us season
Drenched with desire
Dried by separation
That looks not towards destiny
To cross paths again.

Love is neither a norm
Nor a rebellion.
A fossil of memories
Never relived, never forgotten.

In a moment without a past or future
Let's wrap our bodies and souls
And whisper to each other
The night is not yet over...

In the silence of a morning
Pure as dew
The breeze sweeps the garden
To bid adieu.

Let us exist
And not let each other know
Like a kiss that never left my lips
A flower unbloomed.

Let us be a story
A fictitious truth
In different universes
Our togetherness exists.

Saba

Souls of stars

Behold me in your dreams
As you hold me in your arms.
The night shall not be deprived
Of love

Nor shall the stars die
Without knowing
How mortals cheat death.

Entwined
We shall be forever
Even when the flesh parts
The skin shall bear the mark.

Only the breeze will know
How we hid
Under an open sky's shade...
Whispering, so that no one hears,
What to solitude, lovers say...

Kiss me so that I don't fade away
When the morning falls apart...
From dust we may have risen
But we are the souls of stars...

Saba

My loneliness
Looks for you
Through the corridors of my mind
Isolating moments
Revisiting memories
Recounting dreams.
The hearts does not know
The rules of the game.
I leave half written poems
Here and there
Wishing that you would chance upon one
And read your name
That I never wrote.
My love is brave
Does not mind isolation
But it can't speak
Fears company...
And it stabs me
A thousand times
To find an escape.
There is none...

Saba

Naked

In silk and satin
They wrapped me...
Covered
From head to toe
My skin was sin
Too sordid to show.

A veiled life
And a veiled death.
When nothing mattered
In my best, I was dressed.
And yet, no one told me
How I looked...
At the end of it all
The soul
Was naked.

Saba

Breathing

Have you seen how wine
Gasps for breath...
Scarlet... Dead or alive
As I soak my lips in a sin
At sunset
Weaving tales
Whispering sweet lies.

Light makes love
To stained glass pieces
Shattered yet together,
And stones carved, hurt, broken
Stand tall.

All seek comfort
In the arms of a night
But the light, never leaves.

The wine is bitter
Like people who have
Breathed too long,
Salvation never comes...
For an unborn night
There is no dawn.

Saba

I sold my heart and bought a soul

There is no happiness

or sorrows I was told

For the wise, the world

unchanged unfolds

April Lilies

and January Rose

The pains and pleasures

are just to behold. 

Paper tigers 

And paper hearts

Origami people 

Crooked folds. 

In a market place 

The shadows danced 

Far from Plato's cave 

Yet chained to the wall. 

And in the market 

Keys were sold

And chains of silver 

And locks of gold. 

In ink and soot

My shadows dance 

On unfolded parchments

All unmould. 

When dreams were cheap

And hope was old

I sold my heart

and bought a soul.

Saba

Fading song

The sun had bloodshot eyes
And on the horizon
Swelling with red clouds
Birds could barely fly

Heavens have been vacated
Burnt down to ashes
No rains to soothe
Parched earth
Crumpled flowers
Castles of thorns.

The philosopher
And the oracle
Are both quiet.
The future was foretold
Utter loss and dismay...

But the poet still writes
That spineless uncaring creature
Survived the downfall
From civilisation
To being the animal
And still sang...

The zephyr cried
So did the dawn.
Love failed in delivering hope...

I cry to the songs
Of what is left
The odes of love
And ideas of rebellion
A seer promised.

But the poet smiles
For the fading lyric
Of a lover's song
Still echoes.

~Saba

Frozen

The cuckoos sing
Their saddest song
An ode to a spring
That never came.
On a mountain lost in time
Clouds visit
But never stay...

And flowers that wither​ed
Before they could smile
Sleep in coffin-less graves.

All shall return to the elements
And rise from the dust again...
But frozen carcasses
Neither breathe nor decay.

Saba

A poem's muse

#worldpoetryday2017

"The Rebellion"

I live somewhere between
The margins
Of a page
That has not been opened
For years.

Yellowed, but crisp
Like March sunshine
When it has freshly arrived
From the doors of
A mellow February
After going through
An icy January.

I am that word
That you marked with a small dot
Of your pencil.
Looked up a dictionary perhaps
But never bothered
To unsolve me for myself.
An unwritten meaning.

And like the countless frail flowers
That take March to April
I smile at every passerby
Just to fade the next morning
To be remembered,
If at all,
In the next spring.

I blotted the skin of paper.
Stabbed through its heart.
Dying to see myself etched
To be with thousands others
Fixed on a spot in a line.
A word
That now stands alone
Confused.

Like May, that is neither June nor April.
Roses are scarce
May always draws some blood.
Which June shares,
And July, washes.

I smell old
Ageless though
I wonder if you remember the time
When you laid eyes on me.
Ablaze,
Sultry.
Like August in the continent
Then mellowed
As September just announced its arrival.

I have the marks of a leaf
That you left
When you embraced me.
Tainted. Like my page.
I put my head upon
A misplaced bookmark
And rest.

I dream of an October
Red like Hibiscus
White like grass flowers.

I sit
Unmoved
Feeling your hands
Within my folds.

As November melts into December
And chilled winds try to
Enter the sealed room
I never flutter.
I never let the winds touch me.
And yet,
As I long for the moment you decipher me
Read me aloud
Touching me with you lips...
I also long
For the breeze
To be violent
Knocking me off my
Feigned sanity
And the pretense of order.
As I sleep
In a cover
That says
"The Rebellion".

Saba

Promiscuity of Innocence

In darkness' embrace,
I still hold on to light.
Promiscuity of innocence
The story of a thousand dusks...

As the light melts
Through valleys, goldened
Darkness creeps in
From the other end
Of the horizon

Somewhere in the heart of
The sky

I hold on to both
My demons, and my angels.

My demons bless me
While my angels curse.
In the red hue
Of the sunset
As I smoulder
My ashes
Turn the day into night.

I hold on to faith
Of a promised zephyr.
In a garden of a thousand sins
As the dusk retires.

~Saba

If

If truth would know

What truth looks like

Would truth not want to

Dress like a lie?

If life ever saw

The grime on its face

Would it not seek comfort

In death's embrace?

If light knew it's lost

And the darkness infinite

Would it not hide

In the corners of a night?

If I knew myself

And you could see you

Would you not hate me

As I would hate you...

An ignorant slave

To life's delights

I hold on to my wrongs

And name them right.

~Saba

Looking for Buddha

I was looking for the Buddha inside me
When the other night
I fell in love.

But my lover
Like a lucid dream
Was far away
Unaware of me
Drinking from love's cup perhaps
Holding in his heart a dream
That wasn't mine.

That night
An ocean churned
And raised a volcano.
Revelling the pain
Of my unrequited love
I prayed for a tryst
From my undeserving lips.

I knew love is a cruel master
And also a hermit.
Returns are neither promised nor sought
The master disdains
The ones that come to it
With a self proclaimed right.

With broken dreams
And a stabbed heart
In a moment where love and hatred
Were not apart
Nor was despair, or desire
The layers of my soul
Exfoliated...

I found selfishness
Ego
Agony
Lust
Envy
And yes, there was love...

Hidden deep within
Amid everything so un-Buddha...

When the layers of skin, bone
And emotions were removed
I got a glimpse
Of the Buddha
Tranquil, not angry at my inability
Impassive of the weak me
That may never know what love is to be.

I saw the Buddha
Still distant and unfound
But not the way I wanted
Not how I was told.

~Saba

A city and a forest

Stuck between the romance
Of running away from the city
And being comfortable
In its chaos.

Everyday
I walk up to a forest
That gives an illusion of being free...
Just to walk back to the comfort
Of busy, crowded streets...

Loneliness in the city is easy
The crowd never cares
Here darkness makes love
To a thousand moons
And my emptiness is lost
Amid drowning sounds

But I still look for solace
Chasing the woods
That glitter like emeralds in sun
And silver threads weave the night

Where silence holds me
In a loving embrace
But the darkness laughs
At my hollowness.

My demons have no distraction here
No souls to feed upon
My joys and sorrows are both illusions
Solitude, is a fickle minded mate

I return to my city
With my forest in my dreams
I curse it every day.
I love it every day.

~Saba

Solitary lover - The one I could never be

If only I could be
A solitary lover...

Confined to the walls of my own heart
Never looking beyond myself
Seeking no destiny...
On an uncertain path, content.

If love could be so wild,
So confident, so free
If a poet could be the poem
Have faith in melancholy...

If love could be my rebellion
My struggle to be free from myself
If love could be a liberator
A messiah,
Benevolent, noble...  

If only I knew,
My lover is same as me
If I could listen to the universe,
If only I could believe...

But the flesh seeks flesh,
And eyes want an image
Hallucinated, I dream
My journey, no pilgrimage

In my nomadic wandering
I revel in pain
Wanton, disillusioning
Real, and yet so vain...

If only I could be Ghalib
Or Rumi, Gibran, Shams...
I could have spoken to my heart's content
I could have loved just words...

Or Heer, Sahiba or Laila
Meera, I could have been
If only I trusted love
Could get the better of me...

But look at me,
A mere mortal
I fear, I seek returns
I look for you,
My muse,
Unaware of my own existence...

Do I exist?
I ask myself
'I' is an illusion they say
Do you exist?
Who would I ask
Hopes, disarray

But in this moment,
Of desire,
I seek peace
In an eternal fire...
There's longing, and faith
The bitter-sweet poison...

I cannot fight both

Do I surrender to one?

Lovers are never apart
And never together they can be
Misled on a path not taken
I search once more for me...

~Saba

Music makers

To the sparrows that sing no more
And the snowfall I could never see...
To the bit of me I left in the past,
To the one I would never be...

Letters, that we send no more
And thoughts that die unsaid...
A tale of love, I never wrote,
In memories, a life unlived.

How you shatter my illusions one by one
Hanging, between hope and despair;
Every breath, a moment lost
Life, you're a disappointing affair...

And yet, the sound of rain makes my heart sing,
I talk to my dreams in the silent hours,
And yet, I remember fragrances and colours,
Words, that bloom like paper flowers...

Faith, where do you come from,
I smile and cry with the same ease,

How did you find your way to my heart?

I live, as if, for eternity...

The breeze, stuck in my hair,
Brings to me my own scent,
I stop by trees, to say hello;
Each withered flower I lament...

And like those flowers, I must wither
Yearning to be one with the wind and earth,
I close my eyes each night to die,
Each morning, they say, is a rebirth...

How would I die, if I never lived,
If I never loved, if I never failed...
How could I live, if I have to die?
Is fear my mate, or hope my foe?

From the rainbow, I picked the brightest red,
From sky, a passionate grey,
Silver linings from clouds I stole,
My adornments, for the dispirited clay...

And together, with wind and rain and clouds,
I sang the lost sparrow's song...
My stay shall be quiet, but not silent...
My music shall echo when I am gone...

~Saba

P.S. Energy is never destroyed, just transformed... even the clattering of a keyboard creates sound that shall never die.

Opium

Your Love is like opium
Makes me feel hollow
Craving for your touch every minute
My skin,
Has started drawing your hands
I can feel your fingers
Long and firm
Holding my neck
As I take a deep breath
Poisoning my soul...

I cough
So that I don't choke
Filing my throat
The dense air...

Invisible marks on my body
Burns like glowing embers
I rub it against the wall

To douse the fire

The longing too harsh
The wait, too long...

My back is sore
My soul is heavy
I pray for a tryst...
Even if just in dreams
Defeated, I smile,
Hallucinating, drugged...

~Saba

Too much about love

You have written too much about love.

Who?
What?
When?
Where?
Why?
How?


I wonder if love was a news article.
A crisp intro
That would sum it all.
And unnecessary details
In the end.


Defined, definite, concrete.
Like etched on a wall.
Or written in the pages
Of a holy book.

Often gods are involved,
Definitions sought...
Your love has its rights,
More often though the wrongs...

If I call your ideas fantasy
You would call me a sinner.

But for you
It is not a sin
To steal divinity
Out of my body
Taint my soul
For seeking life
Curse it for breathing
Love in its every breath.
For I do not love like you...

My love,
Innocent and naive
It knows not you diktats
Or what your gods like...


When my own fire consumes me
You see it not as a Yagna
Where I burn like the
Holy offerings...

And when love pulls me
With all its force
To fly
And then clips my wings
To fall and perish in the soil
You see dirt on my face
Not the crisp smell of wind
And gold of sunshine
In my ruffled feathers.

You talk too much about love.
Slaying with each of your words.
Your beloveds...

And then you seek returns.
While love that is sold in a market
Is never love for you...

The hermit loves everyone.
So does Buddha, detached though...
And would not a madman...
And would not the whore?


Each one on a path unseen
As lost as a soul could be
And yet, to seek is to find,
To the same end they lead...


My soul once spoke love's language...
Which I quite easily unlearned.
As ignorant as you,
Its path for me undiscerned.


Though I still remember what it is not to be
A well wisher,
A twinkle in the sky
or a promises.

With the ferocity and power
Of the big bang
It can create and destroy;
Shiva and Brahma in one...

But all you seek is merriment.
And all you find is pain.
Understanding neither
Living none of it at all.

You think too much about love.

And yet
All you seek
Is another shelter
From your fears.

~ Saba