Season of Migration

To think about you
Late nights
Is to snatch foreign lands
By the fist.

Countless mornings
I’ve woken up with
Migratory birds in my mouth.

Metaphysics of Communication

Rest of the times

I just trust them

You know:

Stormy weather

Low energy

Cosmic events

Heavy traffic

etcetera etcetera

Usually

However

I wonder:

Doesn't the sweet taste of our words

Disrupt the technology at heart?

Were phone calls

Designed to transfer this much love?

Misunderstanding

It takes ages
To understand.
Some don’t understand
Even after decades.
Others only pretend they
Have understood.
I have seen a few who don’t even
Pretend to understand
They say it is not that important.

But I believe:
The trench loneliness digs
Inside in search of wisdom
Is far significant
Than the innumerable puddles
People make in you
So as to feel good about themselves. 

One-sided Poem

Treat this

As a gentle reminder 

From the 

Secret Society of Unrequited Love Poets. 

‘Don’t unnecessarily read stuff!

Not all poems are about you. 

Your eyes are precious to us.’

Reductio ad Aesthetic

Sometimes
I want to reduce
Everything to basics:
The earth to amoeba
Life to survival
Windows to trees
Beauty to perception
Grief to poverty
A building to brick
Happiness to pretension
Love to poetry.

And you and me
To the moment when you said
“I am reading three novels simultaneously”

No sentence has made more sense
Since then.
Everything else seems irrelevant.

Aesthetic Workload

Times are harsh

Mubashir 

You may have to work overtime.

The world needs more love poems 

Than you think!

Lovers/Strangers

She said
“I like talking to strangers more
Than familiar faces”

“You mean to say
You like conversing with everyone?”
I replied

“What do you mean?”

I mean
Who knows who in this shit hole
After all
We are all strangers
Pretending to be lovers.

In Place

Everything has to be kept 

In place

Keys, soul, braclets, ear rings, 

Heart, voice messages, feelings. 

It won’t work any other way.

A slight difference 

And she would come to know:

You missed her more than you fake. 

People usually do the Otherwise

I came home

And you were weeping

In the corner of that tiny room.

Remember the day?

The barber had cut your hair way too short:

That you wanted it to be a ghazal 

But it had turned into a haiku.

Well

I fell for you that day

Without thinking

Almost instinctual

Like fish falls for bait.

I fell for you

Not because you were weeping.

You were weeping for something

That would definitely grow back.

People usually do the otherwise. 

Raqs-e-Bismil

They say

Don't scratch the wound 

When it is healing.

They just don't know 

I scratch 
so that

It doesn't go away.

I scratch so that it

Stays where it is.

I scratch its edges so as 

To feel it from the inside.

Love being the wound thus

I'm both ill and healing 

Simultaneously.

Most Metaphors Kill

He was like the Samuel Beckett of twenty first century in love with a postmodern Jane Austen. Words walked with them like oxygen particles. Sometimes they would intuitively confuse one with the other. She had this amazing ability to turn every subject (no matter how trivial) into an intense tale of biting romantic self-reflexive confessions. Even a subject as ordinary as nail biting would be turned into a complex tale of love-lynching. He, on the other hand, had this ability (or lack of it) to turn everything into searing one-liners thus symbolically depicting the atrocities poverty had committed on his personality. Funnily, his acquaintances used to say that he’s so irritated because of poverty that he can’t even afford buying words. 

They had met through a common friend of theirs, a kind of a friend who would listen to any shit you say and not judge. In the very first meeting, contrary to clichéd stories, nothing as such happened in regard to their story. The first thing she noticed in him was his (in)ability to pronounce certain words like laugh and love correctly. As she was not the type who’d pinpoint mistakes in someone (that too in the very first meeting) she kept mum and judged silently. Whenever he spoke these words, she, in her mind kept repeatedly voicing it as they mean to be pronounced. She was also not the type of that girl who would like and fall for someone in the very first meeting. But looking at him somehow changed the way she should behave in the first meeting. No first meetings were same after that. She felt as if the book of her body had finally found a reader. Later, however she regretted the way she had behaved. 

“So, what are you interested in?” said she.

“Not in girls like you”, he whispered.

“I heard that” said she.

“I’m really sorry I said that, I love books and movies”, he said.

"Wow! You are the last human on earth” she whispered.

“Thanks! I heard that. You too look like a zombie from a third rate movie” he blurted.

“I put up like this 12 times a year. You interested?” she said.

“No, Thanks, I don’t want to be competitive.” 

They both laughed. Throughout the ride, they talked with ease. That’s how it all started. With whisperings. As if, they were both convinced, from the very start, that no real conversation in the world happens while talking. Only in whispers do people talk sense.

They loved each other like those centuries the information of which was part-myth-part-legend-part-fossils. Sometimes, it seemed to them as if they were an essential missing link of that civilization of love which had thrived on the banks of passions – a civilization which gathered pages by the day and ate books by night.

But, no matter how passionate your love is or seems to be – it so happens that while you are busy composing symphonies of moments for each other, your doubts (including self-doubt), your grand life plans, your past or present seeps into your story and suddenly you realise Poe’s raven seated somewhere on the cosmic branches of your love life. And eventually you meet Kafka and Hedayat sitting on those exact spots where once love seemed to thrive. You try avoiding them by looking away but can’t – after all they are masters of their craft.

Being a friend, I met him a day before yesterday. He very casually informed me that they were not together anymore. After that, he gave me a lot of reasons, I couldn’t understand,as to why it had happened, one out of which I could remember very clearly. He said one day she had come to his apartment and found him talking to someone, he later confessed, had met few days ago. 

With what he told me, I came to the conclusion that whatever had separated them was not as important to their story as the fact that he would still talk in whispers (to whom I don’t know). I said you are not at all making sense. 

When I was leaving his apartment, while latching the door he in a morose mood whispered: Before writing anything you should thoroughly read history carefully. Most metaphors kill. 

Chlorophyll: Pigments of Love

Sometimes I wish 

I was the tree

The leaves of which fall on your balcony.

That way I would 

At least photosynthesize properly

Because 

Like this 

Far away from you
Breathing seems all too human.

Poetics of a Kashmiri Love Poem

Lovers walking side by side 

Holding hands by the bund

Telling each other their worth 

And at irregular intervals 

Walking distant and pretending 

not knowing each other.

And then again trying to catch up.

That's how a love poem is written in Kashmir:

At times obsessed with the craft
At times banal.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Mubashir 

She asked politely 

"Why dont you write longer poems?"

"Kyunki"

I replied 

"Meri jaan 
Halaat kharab hai"

Doggerel

"On a scale of 1 to 10"

They asked 

"10 being the highest 

How lonely are you?"

I am as lonely as him

Who sleeps curled on the bonnets 

Of expensive cars

Thinking where have all the cats disappeared.

"10 being the highest"

I said 

"I am as lonely as any Delhi dog."

Tearful Smoke

"I never weep in front of people."

She said 

"I can never do that."

"Even I only smoke when people are around."

I replied 

"Never alone."

We are that similar.

Puddle

Memories splash all over
Whenever I think about you.

A loveless life
Turns your body
Into puddles.

Écriture

Writing about you is like

Filming you

With a hand-held camera

Where shaky shots come out

Like throbbing sentences.

Writing about you is like

Asking a poem to behave properly

While giggling inwards

Because the poem

Is throwing away metaphors in love.

Not writing about you?

Well!

Who would risk that?

Broken Umbrella

If the sky is anything at all
It is a broken umbrella
Of a person
Who has graver troubles to attend to
Than buy a new one.

There's no warning:
Bad weather is life.

Running in Circles

What has been said
Will be said again.

I love you
Never goes out of fashion.

Death Rattle

You mix in me
The way
The smell of isband
Mixes with drizzle in the morning hours
By the jhelum bund.

The only problem however with this is that
You mix in me
The way
The smell of isband
Mixes with drizzle in the morning hours
By the jhelum bund.

The fragrance is the death one smells.

War of Love

In the war of love
Body you said
Was collateral damage.
Not something to be cared about.

Now that
Nothing remains of us.
Has the war ended?

Labour of Love

Now that
You are gone
Everything has to be done manually.

This beating.
This blinking.
This writing.

How does a Poem die?*

How does a poem die?

Does it die

By not talking about you?

Does it itch itself to alphabets

In your absence?

Or sleep between the lines waiting for it to come.

Or does it die because of misinterpretations

Or lack of it?

Maybe it dies

Due to the sheen of paper.

Or does it just end?

*For Langston Hughes

Scribblings

Whenever you come

A poem writes me off 

From the pages of this over scribbled world.

I am but

The spaces you've touched.

Where it Ends

One should always start

Reading the poem

From the point where it ends.

Believe me

So much remains to be said.

The one for Bukowski

A lot of people
Are busy performing
Average love.
One can't even call it fake - 
They make it seem real.
Average love drains your soul
It expects a lot from you
What you are actually not.
Its worst thing?  -
It makes you feel good at times
Which is very bad.
Love is never meant to be good.
For that there are romantic movies.

Love has to kill you
One way or the other.
If it doesn't
It is not love at all.

Ignore

It's funny
How you wake up in the morning
Dress up
Walk out in the streets
Meet people who've a lot to say
People who've nothing to say.
Do your work
As if you were meant for that.
Walk back through nothingnesses
And cars and traffic jams
Through winking street lights
Reach home and realise
That it was that kind of a day
Which will blur down the memory lane
And one day cease to be.

Sometimes
I believe
The secret of making money
Is to be a good ignorer
If at all that's a word or a thing.

Ignore yourself.

Lessons in Anatomy

In this world
Of stomachs and intestines
Heart
I believe has
More duties to perform than just beat.

Life
It seems
At the end
Is nothing but the battle of organs.

For Mansoor Baya

How strange and uncanny it is
To come to terms
With the fact
That from now on
You would never come to our house.
Ever.
Even though
They'll continue telecasting
Cricket on the TV next room.

But
One day
If you feel like coming
Don't forget to comment:
We changed the position of the sofa
The way you wanted.

Sitting Cross-legged

Old age makes a
Sloth out of you.

Whenever my grandmother sits
Cross-legged
It takes her legs
(which she thinks
Do not at all belong to her now)
at least
Half an hour to
Come back to their usual position.

Not a good sight to experience.

It however made me
Think about poetry in general.
The style in which I write about you
And the way the poem comes out.

For example
If I make this poem sit cross-legged
By making it think about our intermittent tiffs
It would take the poor soul
Enough time for it to come back to
What those tiffs were originally intended for:
To display to the world the side effects of love.

For Greta Gerwig

One day
If I meet her
I'll tell her
"Greta
Live life a little
Don't always act.
It disturbs
The equilibrium of my heart."

In return
She would say
"Mubashir
Live life a little
Don't always watch stuff."

Together we'll giggle
As the California sun would go down.

Puzzle

One day I'll
Assemble all
Your oddly shaped emotions
Interlock them with my moods
But never ever complete you.

One day
My love
Ill buy you as a jigsaw puzzle.

Adversary

Of all the contemporary loves
That stand between us
The only one giving us tough time
Is as ancient as the feeling itself.

Our love only has God as competitor.

So buckle up baby
We are here to lose each other.
But
Let's lose each other in love.

Balcony

Our balcony
Is nothing like any other balcony
It's not posh
Nope
It has no expensive railings.
No fresh flowers bloom at the corners.
No swings either.
No chairs no center table.
None at all.

Actually
It lacks everything a balcony should've.

It however is full of pigeon shit and love.

Bluetooth Love

You may find it funny
But the other day
Even a puny bluetooth speaker
Reminded me of you.

You get the idea na?

Source there
Sound here.

That love!!

Happy Parasol

You know
When it is
Windy and rainy
And someone is out
With a cheap umbrella
And its canopy flips up
And it yearns
To be free and floats away
In the limitless sky
As if the umbrella
Has a life of its own to commit to.

You know that? Na?

Well
I feel like that
When you memories rain inside me.

Successfully Installed

This is
To inform you
That your love
Just received
A major update.

You both can now
Roam inside each other's bodies
Without disturbing the universe.

Regards
Ministry of Destiny

Chronos

Which is not to say
I didn't love her.

I loved her a lot
From deep down the dust ridden
Dungeons of my heart.

The only problem
I had
However
(Or rather she had)
Was that she had
Clocks nestled
Into the pupils of her eyes.

I
On the other hand
Never believed
In the vagrancy of time.

We were never made for each other.

Subtle Prop

You won't believe
What saved me that day.

The day when you came
And raised a tumultuous storm
In my life.

What saved me was
A cheap second hand
Paperweight.

How flat was my world before you?

Loneliness

At one point
In the never ending history of hope
Each one of us
Has somehow happily presumed:
That day's first raindrop
Fell on me.

(We are that lonely)

Résumé le Amour

If Love had a CV

Mine would have
Your details all over.

Minus 6 Degree Celsius Poem

You know
That's the thing
Which I like about
A minus 6 degree celsius poem:
The moment a pen breathes it out
It suspends itself
A bit longer in the air than the normal ones.

Touch its cold structure and you feel
The warmth of the words.

Concentric Cartography

She says
We will go south
When we are old.

She doesn't know that
Since I met her
I've broken the compass needle.

She's all my directions now.