Phantom Phrases

The tryst between comfort and chaos. The cowardice at choosing the former. Wanting to embrace the symptoms of your own delirium but being so disconnected from the self that you observe your own madness as an outsider. Finding shelter. In words. In humans. In dreams. The seemingly same sequences and how the brain refuses to be fooled into accepting them everyday. Singularities that you once breathed. Now you watch them perish. Not because they have ceased to exist. But because you have. Discourses with the body and the soul and how the world reduces it all to mere dysphoria. Disillusionment doesn’t happen when the world fails to replicate your ideals, it happens when your own reality crumbles into fragments of futility. I am no sun but pessimism doesn’t run through my veins either. All I am is a collection of my multiple lives- all lived through during the course of one single day. In life, I suffer but in my own death, I’m reborn.

Dog Days

A sweet mouth reeking of bitter coffee. Probing questions about life. Am I killing time or is Time killing me? My bones seem to be recovering from wounds I know nothing of, for my slumbers are long drawn and deep now. The sultry sky changes colours without even wanting to. Yet, there’s neither heat on my skin nor warmth in my body. Metaphorical meanderings, sigh. I crack open a Lager in the dead of the night and watch the city lights come alive. My brain is a brazen organ, it loves to flash erotic images and poignant memories simultaneously, a little too earnestly. To be alone from your own self, can that really happen? Thoughts continue to chase me without me asking for them. Where does one desert them? I keep scraping my skin, my face, my lips- an act of defiance, I mutter. Strange acts we do to lend meaning to our ever-growing insanity, I suppose. I go back between wanting and not wanting. It’s already difficult to operate in dualities but to be a highly functioning human at the same time? Well, I’ve pretty much deserted my old productive self now and there are guilt pangs from my actions. Or the lack thereof. Days melt into nights and it all seems like a never-ending ordeal. Too bad I’m a routine lover and a change hater? Or is it my blatant disregard for almost everything in life now? It feels like I’ve lost the sight of who I am. Or who I’m supposed to be. And so I’ve decided to cling onto anything or anyone that makes me feel remotely alive. Some would call it my road to self-destruction. Like I give a shit. All I care about right now is the granola bar I’m going to devour at 1 am before surrendering to the seductive serenades of sweet ol’ sleep.

Delusion

 

My fingers burn with the slightest touch of your hands and even when we are surrounded by personalities of guile and bodies reeking of obscurity, time somehow freezes. With every gaze into your hazel orbs and every touch that could’ve been something else, I speak to the stars about stories I imagine. They’re all beautiful, for they have you in them but it still doesn’t seem enough. Cracked smiles through silhouettes of the frayed doors and a poetic breeze that never blows, I mock myself for feeling something that didn’t exist. Anything that could go wrong did. The Earth has become The Sun for there’s only heat and it scorches and hurts. I see death in souls that claim they love each other and leaves that fall off trees lie there waiting for my tears to glisten their verdant veins. There’s destruction in gray buildings and the night sky makes me miss you. Songs at high frequencies drown the voices in my head but the aches just never leave. The heartbeats that were supposed to synchronize with symphonies died down and arterial bursts of love turned stone cold to leave fragments inside the ribcage. To find a haven in someone else is difficult. What’s more difficult is being left to decay in a haven you thought you had found. As I watched you leaving, I had but a box of abstract memories and the sound of your voice and old conversations to hold onto. I’m so glad you have found a haven now, I just wish you’d never left the one I made with dried petals and songs of the rain. Maybe you were right and I was wrong, for sometimes when you fall, you fall for the wrong one. I know I did.

Memories Of Midnight

Empty bookshelves and burnt-out bulbs hide in the corner of my study along with crumpled old newspapers stained with obscurity. A broken record lies nearby which once played lullabies of crooners helping my dreadful days melt into a tranquil night. I gaze out the window and distant streetlights cast shadows that float into different realms with every blink of my eye. The wind gushes past me in swift movements, it reeks of grey smoke and despair. All that’s left in me now is boredom and instability. I despise them both. Sleep should come easy but as soon as I find myself lying down, my ceiling becomes a haven for old ghost stories. They come one by one and I shiver and shudder with cold beads of sweat running down my face. A perpetually insomniac soul I’ve become and as much as it hurts to not being able to rid myself of this affliction, it does help in reminiscing. Retrospection has never been my friend but the warm summer breeze at night plays symphonies of solace that shield me from destroying myself. Delving deep into my complexities and turning incredibly self-critical with every passing hour, I wait for the horizon to send me its scorching new heat as I mutter swearings under my heavy breath for another day to become another night.

Bittersweet Symphonies

Her hands feel the cold metal strings of the guitar. I see her sitting by the windowsill and I see her mellowed face, with eyes fixated on her instrument, lips moving in silent whispers and eyelashes fluttering pensively.

And then she begins. A voice like the warm comforting summer breeze, swirling gently through the ears, a thing of beauty.

I gaze with absolute wonder. A voice I am accustomed to; yet every time I listen to it, I can feel the shivers down my spine. Breathlessness. Words elude me. All I can do is smile and feel grateful. To be able to hear something like that voice, it’s magical. I close my eyes and let the musical symphonies invade my heart. This simple voice has been my solace. And now that my life is devoid of this sound, her voice, I feel empty. It’s not just because of her heartfelt absence. It’s the voice that I miss more. It hurts to miss it but it’s worth the pain, worth the bittersweet torture.

It’s funny to realize this. But I guess I never really knew that a singular voice and the source from which it emanated could become the reason for my smile and as it turns out now, my sorrow.

So let me stop writing for I can’t go on any further than this. Not today. Let me stop writing. Hopefully, the tears will do the same…

 

Dedicated to an old friend and someone I’ll always remember.

Purple Rain

The guitar strings of ‘Hotel California’ feel akin to sounds of mutterings an angel makes in my drowsy head at midnight hours. Lying on the bed, I make incomprehensible symbols with my hands, imagining them to mean something special from the brutal days of the first world war. I think of all that I have seen and felt- warm summer beach days, the sweet smell of black current icicles, the idle sounds of bicycle horns, the distant crimson horizon lined with unceasing mysticism. I remember riding in cabs at night time when the city lights appear blurry and out of focus. Cruising past vehicles, be it on countless highways or dim-lit streets, the way scenes rush past me with hurried movements and hazy visions- they spell absurdity to me. A bizarre sense of alienation strangles me with its hands clasped at my neck. Sometimes, my head becomes a center of throbbing activity so wild, so uncontrollable that I am compelled to laugh at my own insanity. Thoughts have wings. They flutter like butterflies in a summer garden. And the sooner you let them fly away someplace else, they get lost, or worse still, die. My thoughts make me. They mar me. But they supply oxygen to my lungs. Toxicity would play its ace if I don’t put pen to paper. Yes, my thoughts are irrelevant to proportions of extremities but I need to survive in this world somehow. It’s not the way this piece is supposed to be penned down but when destruction comes, I feel obliged to gulp down my creativity like one strong shot of vodka because I too, am perfectly aware of how I’ll have to give in either way; better do it the easy way. It’s funny really. This entire stream of consciousness makes no sense. Maybe I’ll try again some other day. For now, the fact that I managed this is enough for me. Let the skies bleed purple rain tonight, filled with incoherent thoughts, for that’s one good way to smirk at my existence I guess.

Doomsday

Moaning while passing through streets filled with schizophrenic souls, I gasp and inhale boredom with unflinching brutality. The darkness falls from the blackened sky and as I see people around me becoming self-obsessed with every passing hour, it just makes me grimace. I could milk a tear for this humanity so vain but why bother? We all blink with stars in our eyes that spell inevitable doom. Some of us bite the wind and accept it and represent it through woeful love ballads while others sip on the suffocating seductive cocktail of poisonous denial. It’s simple to fall prey to either of these, heck, to both of these things. As the conspiracy materializes further through each numbing minute wasted, the freckles on tired faces deepen furthermore into the cavities, the blood-shot eyes reminisce of the faded bygone eras and permanence presents itself as the mockingbird dancing playfully. Our fates were carved into the stars. We were doomed since our whining days. It’s just that now we have alcohol and cigars and drugs to sing us psychedelic sagas. Things we carry, they overburden us. And we let them. The worst part is that we blame the cosmic gods for drowning us at the sea when we don’t even care to see the broken mirrors for ourselves even once. If I could, I would vaporize these words and set them free in the pale grey skies. But this is the only way to quieten the howling hyenas of thoughts bellowing, crying inside my head. When I wake up tomorrow, there will be yet another hundreds of thousands of lives lost and all that’s going to sustain in the aftermath of this destruction will be the fresh echoes of distant screaming hurling at the tip of my ears, playing spells of a perfect storm called Doomsday.