For a moment,
The contours of his face were blurred
From the smoke rising from his cigarette,
which was a coil of secret desires.
That can only be burnt away
Lest they burn you from inside.
Ah! Either way they do!
My eyes ablaze
With the smoke that met me,
and a curiosity
born too suddenly
that I thought it would take ages to sort
out,.
Could just see two beautiful eyes,
framed in the glasses of wisdom,
Behind a veil of his smoke and my breath,
both
merged in the air
Like things half hung, conspired to fall.
Those eyes weren’t deep.
They were beyond depth.
The immeasurable vastness that they held
Was like the black hole,
But one that had sucked itself,
And was now, powerless after self
destruction.
In the process of finding something lost
It had lost itself
as
well as the power of finding the lost.
While they were still searching,
I thought I found what I did not know I wanted
A truth that I had hidden from myself too.
A secret revealed unwittingly.
A secret that should have remained efface
Like most secrets.
But I am not sure if he saw it!
He was too tired of watching keenly though.
Too tired of searching day in and day out.
His eyelashes restlessly falling from a red
shore,
like waves that have been woken up
by the deadening lull like a horrid dream.
He might have known, he might not.
A secret whose recipients are unknown
Is no more a secret
But at the same time is a dangerous one.
And so
Our eyes spoke reluctantly in a language of
truth
On the island of dialogues.
It seemed they had already held a
conversation of ages.
When they had met,
Loved, fought, quarrelled, lost, and
resigned.
Now they were tired.
But somehow the unfulfilled desires still
sought vengeance.
Mine still pleaded for what they wanted,
His still spoke of a rejection,
arising not out of choice
But out of no choice.
They knew not what the core wanted
And we stared and waited
For the universe to disturb us.
Until the thought of pity made way for fake
pride.
And pride my dear friends
Is a fatal blow to all weaknesses
including lurking desires of the past.
Except one-the desire to love
Which is more powerful
Than the desire to be loved!
And just the moment when
I was about to fall in love with the trance
The spell ended.
The winds of reality gushed in
to clear the mist of thoughts
and everything was gone.
.I could have materialized the shadows
But abstraction decided to remain abstract.
He crushed the remains of his cigarette
Under his feet
And the ashes of my dreams too.
Nothing was real
nothing was the same
and I thought I met him
but I had met only smoke.
