Genealogy of Grief

How strange is your grief

Does it dash your heart

Does it benumb your presence

Do you name it

A tear answers all

Too familiar it all seems

Strangely too familiar.

You trace

Genealogy of grief 

Tic Tac Toe Love

Let us meet at the crossroads

Of life.

And exchange

And jumble

And criss cross

Some hard moments

With good ones.

Let us not

Dwell deep again

Upon the vagaries of feelings

A moment of meeting is far better

than death itself.

Let us

Exchange Breaths  –

Equally

Jumble them  –

Randomly

And then

Criss cross the equation –

Unhesitantly.

Come Dear

Come then

We have work to do

Come far

Too far

Where the noises of this life

take rest.

Come

Let us meet at the crossroads of life

Let us meet deep down the heart

In the scarlet abyss

Where love lies wounded

Waiting desperately for help.

Chiasmus

The Tragedy is that...

...that is the Tragedy.

I love you...

...you love I.

I Survived

When my pen snowed

I broke its shishargaant

And wrote

About Our cold relation.

Words froze on the snowy page

My hands shivered

I kangried my thoughts

 I survived.

See love

How you have Wintered my life?

Alone

I tread the frosty lines of my page

Like chillaikalan

Ready to pinch strange vacuums.

(Shishargaant = Icicle, Kangri = Traditional Fire pot, Chillaikalan = Coldest winter period)

Farewell

Sooner or later
For one reason or another -
Everyone leaves you
like Life……

This World is nothing -
But
A Museum of Sorrows
Uff!!!
How antique we are!!!

  

Alchemy

I am the residue of your tricks

O!! My magician of sorts!!!!!!

I am

What you perform not.

Ersatz

I am not -

I am not 

the snow

that falls silently

in the wintry nights.

But the one

which obstructs your path

and is cleared to the margins

so that you could walk. 

Neither am I

the Chinar leaf

that falls swiftly like a poem

in that yellowy ambience.

I am but its heap

which is collected and burned

in the morning hours

by the still sleepy sweeper.

My Love

I am a ‘Rose’ -

a rusted rose

which craves for your Love

and which

you have forgotten

in the jungle of your Heart.

I am also one 

among many scattered stones

left on the road

after the stone pelting is over

which listens carefully to the 

cries of Blood

in the city of Screams.

My Love

It is quite good enough

‘To Be’ -

here

than ‘Not To Be’ -

nowhere. 

No Random Thoughts

I have forgotten

everything about you.

But –

I remember it too well.

*******

Love is more an aftermath

than an event.

     ********

You are too vacant in me -

Sometimes, I lose the space within

     *******

I have died long ago

In the cradle of your smile

        *******

Death has a style.

Due to various misperceptions

We, conventionally,

Call it Life.

Synopsis Of Love

Love via Love
A Comparative Study Of Love

Introduction
I Envisioned you
and fell in Love.
You my destiny
My design.
I will frisk
Why
“My Love is selfish [and why] I cannot breathe without you”[1]


Scope
I’ll critically examine
the deep sea of Love
inside -
Will surely ruminate over
Why
“I Love you as one loves certain dark things
secretly, between the shadow and the soul”[2]

Objective(s)
To be in Love
with you
Forever.


Review Of Literature
A lot has been
written and performed in Love
The stories of Laila Majnu,
Shirin Farhad and Romeo Juliet
will surely be my anchorage.
But my Love
will try to redefine
all this
I will thereby prove that
“There is always madness in love.
But [that] there is also always
some reason in madness”[3]


Methodology
I will adopt
an analytical methodology
and will probe
deep in the
soul of my beloved
and will
critically prove that
“Reason is our soul’s left hand
faith her right”[4]

Primary Sources
Our Love of sorts

Secondary Sources
Everything on love
with Love
as Love.
 

---

[1] John Keats, Letters  to fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819

[2] Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XVII, trans. Mark Eisner, The Collected Poetry Of Pablo Neruda (2003) FSG publication pp 513

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Reading and Writing, Thus Spake Zarathustra(1999) trans. Thomas Common ,Pennsylvania State University, pp 46

[4]To the countess of Bedford by John Donne, Volume II, E K chambers ed. (1896) Lawrence and Bullen, pp15- 17

I Love Loneliness

I Love Loneliness
It drives me mad

Madly I love u!

I like it

Caress it

with
your memories

I have made myself

An effigy of your absence

I burn it

Beat it

Torture it
to yield you

I sell my words

In the bazaars of intellect

They smell of you.

Again

I take refuge in loneliness

Again

It drives me mad

Again

I love you

Madly!

Politics of Love

The ‘uprising’ erupted
When
She ceased to be
My 'integral' part

The metaphysical 'newspaper'
discoursed about
Our 'tense situation'
And
conjectured about
Future emotional 'strategies'
People became 'experts'
Labelled it 'political' egoism

Meanwhile
We said "nothing"

Nowadays
As an 'ambassador' of emotional 'affairs'
She smiles 'diplomatically'
And I 'pelt' Words

Postmodern Sisyphus

The number
you are trying to dial
is currently
not answering
your call

Please call
after sometime
 (ad infinitum)

A Kashmiri Is Never Alone

Never

Never alone

A Kashmiri is never alone.

Countless...

Countless Souls

Always accompany him

They prove his Existence.

Countless...

Countless unmarked

Unrecognized

Missing

Terrorized

Beaten

Raped Souls

Always accompany him

They can't Curfew Souls 

Every Kashmiri is a mortuary

Every Kashmiri is a revolt

Every Kashmiri is an instant death

But

Never alone

A Kashmiri is never alone.

Mortuary

The Moon is my dead body

fished out

after countless stars

from the sea

of your tears.

Coldly

I hang

on the peg of your eye.

Love

Sooner

Or

Later

Every Love

Is a part

of the

History of Sadness.

I have lost

countless

Civilizations of Emotions

in you.

Communicating Gift

I 'pick up'

your gift

Your cracked Voice

attentively toned 

to produce

Mein bilkul theek hoon  effect.

I see it

Carefully wrapped 

in twinkling tears.

Miles away

I receive

from the dilapidated balcony

your gift

as dear to me as your silence.

We stop talking.

Probably

We exchange same gifts.

The phone call ends.

Dasht e Imkaan

My blistered feet of Love

tread the dreaded path

again and again....

Again

Love takes me

to a labyrinthine journey

devoid of you...

Again

On the fringes of nothingness

I wait

for no one to come...

Scarlet footprints of heart

My love bleeds...

"The Liberty Tree"

SCENE I
That Tree
commercially painted
once green
dusty
arid
in the corner
of a crowded lane
kept thinking and
thinking of future….

SCENE II
One busy day
The Heritage workers
laboriously
cut the tree down
“A thing from the past
should, at least,
act old”
they kept assuring themselves

SCENE III
The Stump remains
Its roots are out
in the streets now.
They demand Azaadi

SCENE IV
Every moment
roots rage out
A tree grows inside me.
I keep thinking……

SCENE V
Cries

Sometimes You Meet Me Often

 Sometimes

When I need you - desperately

And you are not there

I do not weep

Or cry

Or cling to your memories

Or search you

in the abstract projections -

Of my silly heart

No

I do not do all this.

I...

I write it all down

This piercing,weakening

Benumbing disease.

I write it down on the

Page playground of my notebook

I write it down

Sometimes

Sometimes like this!

And

It all soothes down

To words.

Dear,

I am a poet of your absence

When I need you - desperately

I write you down.

And

You meet me

through words

In distant mindscapes

In the heart of hearts

And right there

The poem ends

It ends

Sometimes like this!

Diasporic Kashmir

Kashmir comes in ripples

As I imagine Dal in Delhi

Like a Phiran

Kashmir engulfs me

In this heat and dust

A distant Azaan

I hear

From Hazratbal

Like hope

I sit unaccompanied

Somewhere in a local mosque

I am a Char Chinari in Delhi

Here

Too afraid I am of these

Scorching roads

For

Kashmir walks barefoot in me

Interrogative Spell

To a Friend
who said "why"
and
later
apologized
for "what"

My Friend
You don't say anything now
Nothing comes from your side
Not even a blank Smile

But
I Hope
One day
Your stubborn "why"
will weep
in front of your
Paltry "what"
and
that day
I will be free
from your
Interrogative Spell !!!!!

Sisyphian Love

I have re-written my-self
frequently for you

For you...
I erased my each existence
I wrote again
and again
on the palimpsest of my being

Today
I am nothing
but your forgotten feeling

I re-write my-self
You mispronounce me

I love your dream world

You
You are
My......
most trusted illusion
I carry you
in the mundane realities
of my Life
And
everything metamorphosizes
into a 'real dream'
What else do i need?
Just a dream
And I know
This dream is enough
to set me mad.
Then
I start loving this 'honest
world' - Someone Else's trusted Illusion!!!!

A Grave of One's Own

Kashmir is an unmarked grave
Full of voices
Where everyone is born dead
With a rage to live!

I too am part
Of this grave business
But
I am writing today
Because
Some unknown people
Have arrived
With strange tools
To count the dead....

I protest
I write

Mubashir Karim

They say,they yearn/ I think, I die

http://dailykashmirimages.com/news-they-saythey-yearni-thinki-die-22922.aspx 

"Kashmir was a paradise you know"
I think of your beauty
"People lived in harmony"
And i think of those wondrous times
"There was peace"
And i think of those tranquil moments
"People used to loiter late nights"
And i think about mutual dreams
"Dal was as clean as faith"
And i think of your gazelle watery eyes
"But
It all changed in 90s"
And i think about those turbulant times
"People were forced to flee"
And i think of our 'encounters'
"Bullets,bullets and bullets"
And i think of your fusillade of words
"Things have somehow 'changed' now"
I stop thinking
Change the topic please
I die
So does Kashmir