1
Time grows old and heavy in my hands Jugnu,
the sofa stares at me in sympathy, the desk clicks its tongue at the burden of my chaos while I look at myself with befitting surrealism from a self-portrait on the easel,
I cajole and bribe the mirror,
my memories, my mood, nothing works, in the corner a shadow lurks,
I recognize it as the shape and silhouette of my soul,
perhaps our existence is all but a dream,
perhaps we are all characters in separate books and the author is in truth a smart lunatic,
writing our stories on a hysterical afternoon,
crafting our astonishingly ludicrous lives with spontaneous whimsy and cunning,
often drowned in my own noise of loneliness,
I wish to step out of my book and climb into yours,
but what if I cannot find you in this paper landscape of curly words,
what if I reach the chapter you’re in when you have already slipped into the next one
and the next and the next till you leave your book and walk into an entirely different one,
like shedding lifetimes but keeping your soul,
in this gigantic, bizarre star-spangled whole
2.
What a story we would make, scorching the chapters with their ends still shining in neon blue,
from the beginning serendipity would play Cupid, I would
jump and crush grapes with you during the Harvest festival in Malta,
Salsa all night in a Swiss chalet, have a meal fit for Royalty in Venice,
make slow love in hot steamy Turkish Baths,
run wild on the Santorini beaches with smouldering desire,
burn, burn for you in the white heat of my fire,
but then again I deeply ponder Jugnu,
what good is intimacy without the jewels of longing and love,
the endless invisible volcanoes that erupt in the spaces between words,
the way I would touch your face with that faraway wistful look,
looking at you, into you, through you, beyond you,
like you were my everything,
everything that meant anything,
everything that came between twenty galaxies and their milky ways and more,
I would gaze at you as you slept next to my bare skin,
your shoulders warm, comforting, hard, athletic,
and I would lose myself in your geometry, in your chemistry, in your symmetry, in your ecstasy,
climbing atop your body and throwing myself at your mercy.
3.
There would be chapters which would stay blank,
for no words would be prolific enough to describe their reality
inside the fantasy, inside their hybrid, inside, deep, deep living it’s full bursting life, in splashes of rainbow inside the hybrid, hidden inside the compressed crisp white pages,
making it imperative for the reader to let his imagination run its course to explore their veracity
and then there would be other chapters where cactuses would breeze in and turn into line art,
as the faint strains of a moonlight sonnata would reverberate from the swirling sands to the skies in the wilderness
and the blue desert and I shall begin glistening, listening
for the movement of your Khakhi boots coming closer, closer, closer still,
so close now that the book trembles with the thumping of my heartbeat,
the reader shall sit on the edge of his seat in explosive silence,
tawny eagles would awaken by the crescendo rising to a fever pitch,
but like the rude snapping of a dream, crumble shall it all just as suddenly,
for you are not real Jugnu, you never were, you never will be,
but maybe you might be, maybe you are,
although perhaps you won’t be and perhaps you will,
I await you notwithstanding at my window-sill.
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