Wilderness

That wild afternoon reverie….

I dreamed myself wandering –

faithless and tired, along the

desert sands of the twilight land,

Lonesome, hungry, yearning for some dust

between my fingers

which had withered away like

some unknown saintly flower…..

Bitten by my own lies,

Smitten with my own image

Suddenly, like a crazy midnight howl

of some stray dog,

the curtains lifted.

I could feel the whole world trembling between

my boot-heels

And then it came –

‘IT’

Like the realization of sawdust

Like the homeless orphans who die

Like the strife between my own ribs,

It came……

I could feel the mad spirits

staring at me from the other side of the sky

And those seven great serpents

hissing with blue fire

on their seven forked tongues

And the seven wild children of the night

were dancing atop those flames

with seven red roses on their hands

And on each petal of those roses,

bits and pieces of eternity were stuck

I tried in vain to scrub those bits off,

But then, I saw myself in a crystal ball

with everything I own,

and everything I have gambled away…..

I stared deep into my eyeballs,

which I had gambled away in

some long faded dreamy hour of

memory,

till I drowned in them…..

And then I reached a new world…..

Twenty nine sad conch-shells welcomed

me there…. but their sounds got burnt

in that blue fire atop which those

seven cherubs kept on dancing with the

mirth of life…. And that of death –

side by side, hand in hand….

With the charred remains of

those sounds, I built a castle

first, and then a kingdom….

and then a worship – to

fight myself……my faithless self;

The nights were ancient,

But the battles were medieval…

and the battlefields were empty,

with rows and rows of public lavatories

with the words ‘Victory’ and ‘Defeat’

etched on their closed iron doors…..

When these seven cherubs will grow up,

they’ll become seven seraphs….

And they’ll carry all the nights, all the

meaningless dreams and all the droplets

of time and tide waiting for none save

those who had gone inside those

public lavatories and had painted

blue sunflowers and butterflies on

their inside walls,

in their wombs

And everything else shall vanish

in the mist….

And I shall be engulfed by the great

oceans of nothingness…. Where even

those blue fires which had burned

the twenty eight hollow sounds of those sad

conch-shells of which one was silent refuse

to burn

But it was not a haunting midnight

dream,

It was a late afternoon reverie,

nothing more and yet nothing less….

And when I woke up,

The blank wide world

stretched to the horizons before my eyes….

That was all…..

That was it –

‘IT’.