The pain you caused me
The embarrassed emotions, deep anguish
Or the torture that torments me within
As I walk past the dull frescos
On the walls of my mind.
Shifting lights I have watched
At the drift of emphasis
In the host of memories –
The bright, the luminous
Turn into blurred images
The dark uneasy emotions
Tease me like a specter
Seeking me in a nightmare.
To know where I am
Will be blissful calm
Would know whom to blame
Or to withdraw my claim
To those eager closed eyes.
It is the twilight hour -
That sudden encounter
As if shaken out of sleep,
I know not the hour of the day,
Can’t tell the dawn from dusk.
There is only to wait and watch
The next hour alone will spell
The dazzling delight of a day
Or the anguished darkness
On the vast sheet of space
I run into an unceasing dialogue,
Straining hard to shut my ears
To the clamoring demands of ego.
I squirm uneasy at words of feeling
My agony turns immune to all healing
For I keep staring into the distant land
There is neither utterance
Nor a single vision, not a glimpse of you.
It was a shining sequence
Of sudden moments, warm hours of winter,
Of quiet sittings, whispered nothings,
Sharing feelings, reactions, moods.
The choked tears of stifled emotions.
Like a tree,
It all grew slow.
When we met, it was just in time:
Nothing bloomed sudden, out of season
The greetings and the partings lacked
The passionate pull down in the heart
The leaping flux of vibrant emotions
Never drove us into intimate raptures.
The ultimate terms emerged
Like the seeds that burst open
Shoot out twigs and tender leaves
Above the warm bosom of the earth –
We saw and we discovered.
Each new leaf filled us with mirth
It grew and spread wide
In the vacant spaces
Into dreams and reveries:
Reveling in the very presence of thought
Seeking desires in dreams
Finding hints like links in a chain.
The vital urge in the unconscious
Drove us to each other
An aroma hung in the air
A curious feeling kept gnawing inside
Hours before we’d suddenly meet
Unannounced yet foreseen –
Dreamt or teased by intuition
Caressed by feeling unawares
Like the sudden soft breeze.
And then in a dark lane
On a murky hour after sunset
It became all too plain:
Your words, it seemed to me,
Wriggled out gasping
We were to call it quits
The reasons are useless
Like splinters flying about
As the hammer falls on a rock
A block of stone.
Relationships are chiseled
Given shapes that all can name
Recognize trees in landscapes
Eyes lips hands
Drawn clear in a portrait.
Perhaps we two had tried
To draw an abstract
On the well-defined canvas
Of our deep relationship
So one day down a lane
On a murky hour
It seemed clear and sane
The canvas was rather short
The portrait stretched hands
A foot extended into a stride
You wheeled out the grinding words:
Let’s abandon the canvas.
