Lonely man

The world swims in the sky of stars
as I lie, prostrated, unassuming on the fields of grassy, green grass.
I have walked a long, long road
and my feet are as weary as my soul.
I have left too many pieces of me strewn around in the universe.
Through time, through time…
I have left pieces of me, broken and lost,
along the way.

I have walked and tended to the wind,
as it sang that strange melancholic song of whistles,
combing through the arms of lost and ancient trees.
I have tended to the weariness of that strange wind.
The ground lay burnt and bare. It bears the scars
of a thousand farmers, present and past.
Its seen drought and its seen them starve,
I have also tended to the loneliness of that immortal expanse.

I have walked streets of traffic. The cars they give me a headache.
There are bill-boards all around.
Beggars, eating leftovers, are all around.
I sigh and walk on.

With every tick of the clock, the silence grows on me.
The chasm widens and my scream disappears as if it were a dot.
There is a massive black cliff hanging on my head,
it grows and grows and never stops.
Waiting to drown me.
Waiting to obliterate.
I no longer have any more points to state.
I no longer have any more reasons to wait.
So, I sigh and walk on.

Madness rarely has a name.
Madness, everywhere, is all the same.
Madness, has a grammar
Madness, always has a time.
Madness is therefore, always sublime.

I lie on the grass and make a note,
a note of all the notes I wrote.
Far beyond the struggle of laughter and of forgetting,
far beyond the realm of history and of understanding,
I count the pieces of me strewn about.
There have been many. Oh, so many.
I quietly count them and make a note.
After all, the world’s still hung on Gogol’s over-coat.

I count my loves and I count my kisses.
I count the days I spent wishing beautiful wishes.
I count the nights of ecstatic rain washing the streets.
Loudly as it crashed upon a corrugated roof close by,
I have heard that music.
I have kept it in my soul.
And I have left a little piece of me there…

I count the days I lazed around by my window.
Looking out on a cobbled path of bricks,
under a maze of branches and leaves.
I have smelt the absurd smell of dust on my window grill.
I have breathed softly on the delicate cobwebs,
full of symmetry and a profound will.
I have kept that smell in my soul.
I have frozen that wobbling cobweb in my soul.
And I wonder now, after all the thousand years
that have come to pass since then…
does that cobweb still wait for a spider?

I am scared of the pyre. I am scared of being reduced to ashes
that the sacred river carries away to the sea.
My hands I have loved all my life,
my face I have argued with everyday.
All that effort to hide it with masks,
what a pity, if it was all to be washed away.
No body. No form.
Only a photograph, forgotten and forlorn.
So, I hope to be buried someday
on this very spot where I lie today.
Where I lie and
I wonder now, after all this time,
what would make a good epitaph on my tombstone.

10:07 PM
1st July, 09