World's gone beautiful;
Yes, the world's gone beautiful.
The flowers bloom
And the sun shines brightly,
While death slowly opens the door.
All we have is time;
Yes, all we have now is time.
Look to the future
While the past lurks nearby,
And we can't tell what'll be in store.
World's gone beautiful;
Yes, the world's gone beautiful.
We count our days
And we count our blessings,
For we don't know we have much more.
It all gets clearer;
The clouds roll by,
She feels like she is falling,
Farther,
Faster,
Freely,
Falling,
Time keeps moving,
She feels lost,
No way out,
No one to help her,
No end,
Lost,
The seasons change in a blur behind her,
She feels like her life is slipping away,
Fast,
Fading,
And when
our lips crashed,
it's like
the world fast forwarded
and we paused,
not minding
the tic toc
Like sugar, you continue to be the only thing in my life
that pumps my bloods with adrenaline everytime i consume what you utter.
I just hope that i don't stop
feeling like this....
and that i continue to feel this way
as if I'm stuck in a time loop.
Behind the rectangular glass case
A bent head, lit sideways by a lamp
A lens, stuck into the socket of the right eye
A forceps in hand, drawing out
The innards of a dead watch.
Tickers tick loud
Tolling, the impending doom.
Watches lie about
In various states of disembowelment.
Old, huge clocks hang in the walls
Like Capuchin monks in the catacombs.
How precise! His fingers wield the tiny tool
And stab it into the underbelly of my watch.
I stand still -
My time is at his mercy.
Sharpening my knife,
I plunge it
into the flesh of time
chopping
chopping
chopping
chopping
chopping
me, in thin, fine slices...
Life is a continuum
Extending
from a nanosecond to trillions of millenniums
from a bacterium to bacteria
from a star to a black hole...
In between, you and me, my dear
we weave our lives from eon to eon
how naive
to think our love is eternal!
how ephemeral are our lives,
our loves
when just beyond our fingertips
the void waits to take us back-
you, cosmic dust!
He climbed up the ladder, one, two, three
The ground fell lower, three, two, one
The sky came closer, one, two, three.
Up went the kid, four, five, six
Down went the ground, six, five, four
Up was the Future, bright and bold
Down was the Past, dull and dead.
The kid sat at the top
And the slide took him down
In one smooth rush,
On a roly, jolly ride.
The wind hit his face,
The ground zoomed up -
And thud! He was back where all it began.
Flipping through Henri’s* pictures,
I see how desperate he was, like me,
To freeze time.
Fleeting are our lives - the ones you see smiling,
Crying, frowning, deep in thought, their inner selves revealed
A glimpse offered in these frozen images
And then taken away in the flood.
Faster, quicker than the flowing water,
Life flees, swirls and then disappears -
All that remains is a dash between
A year and another...
In the fleeting moments that fall
In between fleeing from one task to another
At the back of my mind, desparate, I wonder
How to freeze Time to an eternal Sunday!
How silly is it of science
To say that senses are only five!
How insensitive is it of science
To censure those beyond the ken!
Eyes screwed up tightly
Head turned sideways abruptly
Lips clamped firmly
Trying to shut in momentarily.
Would it, please, go away
Images, sounds, the smells,
Words uttered, heard, this sense
Of pain, wrenching my heart?
Time exists only in our minds
In the recesses of memory
Facts of past and fictions of future
Time stands still only for those
Onam*- festivities and happiness,
Dresses in colour, TVs and fridges
Cars and bikes in a spending spree.
Respite from a life, lived mundane.
Onam, my first, without my mother
Forty-six Onams I spent with her.
Her age not counted in mouthfuls of rice1
Her last was a ball for the crow to eat.2
Onam- a week a year, from one to next
Sky so blue and fields so green.
Clouds have gone, weather is mild
Onam will come, the dead will not.
But trees do flower, waters do rise,
Hills turn green, despite the droughts.
They mightn’t be the same, yet they are,
Despite the deaths, life doesn’t end.