The Binding Problem

I stared into the glass beads.

I watched my million eyes as eyeballs placed on my palm.

I watched as I controlled my vision with an arm’s movement, now to see millions of consummate mes, entrapped within crystal cells,

Fossilized only till I live to see.

I could watch myselves watching myself.

It felt strange to be able to hold my multiplicities in my hand,

To be able to hear my personalities clash unto the next,

and experience all this from a third person’s point of view.

It felt strange to be able to feel myself as inanimate existences,

solidified in a tangible consciousness that I imparted.

I, as a unity, into myselves.

While all they could do was to engender the rays that intersected at a virtual point of their reality.

Me.

Inject

She held the needle on my arm, creating a depression that concentrated my fear to that one spot where the tip was ready to dig into my flesh.

She held the needle of power, the power that glistened in the circumference of the steel.

She held my life, not because that needle was supplied with poison.

No, fear of death is merely fear.

It is fear that is death itself.

And the only fear one must live in is the fear of fear.

Paradox?

Inject.

Of Hope

I cried and gathered my tears in my palm.

I stared at them and wondered what to make of them.

I just sat. And stared.

And stared. And stared.

Till that one day, when they crystallized into shiny little objects of hope.

Perfection

I took a sheet of rubber and painted the world on it.

The perfect trees with streamlined leaves,

The perfect hills, with daffodils,

A perfect view with an orange hue,

Just the perfect life with a comely wife.

And then I stretched the rubber from either side.

What seemed perfect dissipated into elongated nonsense.

The leaves became branches,

The orange got jaundiced,

And my wife grew fat.

And yet, I was happier.

Because I had stretched it to the limit.

This is perfection for me.

The woman in the saree

She looked so beautiful in her blue and gold saree.

Her face radiated like the reflection of the sun in the waves of her pallu.

Her stomach glanced from behind the cloth like a shy bride.

Her curls grazed her shoulders like the fingers of a maestro on his instrument.

Her feet slithered on the ground like naked children on a rainy road.

And her hands stroked her knees to ignite the first sparks of life-

That life that I saw in her eyes,

as she slowly looked up..

Towards me.

How long had I been in love with her?

How long had I been?

Home

I’m home now, and all I want is silence.

Silence that reminds me of all that I felt yesterday, when I looked at that waterfall. The water rushed into narrow crevices, and the bubbles seemed to coalesce right before it was sucked into the vast expanse of the lake. They were lovely bubbles because they reminded me of how people are: how they come from different places and garner just for that brief moment before they are thrown into an unending void of the Future. And as they collide with that edge, they change colour from blue or red or whatever they fancy reflecting, into a pure white enragement that is froth.

Even such simple things in nature connive such paradoxes. It is these intricacies that entangle my coherence. It is the gushing sound of the water, playing in my head over and over, that shushes me and reminds me of the beauty of the unspoken.

I felt like I was home then.

And in the silence of this instant, I am home even now.

Clown

The leaves brushed against the sky,

Perception, no, you never lie.

Flowers bloomed to diffuse the scent,

Reality, I know what you meant.

And then the world went upside down,

Imagination, thoust think I’m a clown.

I am a clown.