The Forget-Me-Not Plant

Sometimes, 
the act of forgetting
is self-preserving
and sometimes,
a return to presence.
Involuntary
and subconscious.
Memory and remembering
make stories
to fill spaces
in the mind.
Why do we hate 
vacuum and nothingness?
Aren’t we all
simply specks 
with too much self-importance?
The urgency
to go nowhere
like an ambitious electron
imagining it will float
outside its orbit.
Maybe,
being aimless
and wandering
is the balm
life needs 
to carry on living.

Uff

Halak mein saans atakti hai
Seene mein uthhti hain daraarein
Akelapan sisakta hai
Gala ghot’ti hain yeh deewarein
Marr jaayein toh 
Shaayad saans aaye
Jeete ji toh dum ghut’ta hai.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

 I’ve been thinking, we all meet crisis — major or minor — the same way: self-protective, spring-loaded, already rehearsing the worst case, fighting or fleeing what is. We become ER doctors of our own lives, stiuffing cotton into the open wound, because the animal in us is certain the bleeding is the whole story.

But a small zoom-out, even mid-chaos, shows that it never was. Every actor in our lives — an event, a person — moves by their own script, not ours. And the wound itself has more than one author: it could be self-inflicted, an accident, or simply what happens when the blood was already thin. The cause may not even live at the site of the injury.

So the work isn't to attack the one big thing with an intensity the nervous system can't hold. It's to widen the frame — from the cut to the whole body, from the body to the whole lived life — until the single cause dissolves into many, and the pressure quietly goes out of it.

Yeh jo lagta hai na kisi-kisi moment mein, ki WTF, life khatam, because ek bada loss ho gaya — that feeling comes from handing all our power to one prediction: that a single event, a single person, decides the course of everything. But what decides our life is what we choose to live out of the many stories running at once. 

There is never only one story unfolding. Just a tilt of the head and — oh, yeh bhi hai.

Committing to memory

Time is an eraser 

of memory

But if you,

like me 

write harder

pushing through 

the page every time -

Your memory will 

also have gullies

that cannot be erased.

This morning

I wondered

If you forgot

my kisses...

Did my lips not

make soft

meandering gullies

on yours?

Did my breath

not burrow

through yours

and turn desire

into an exhale

that you would 

never

let 

go?

Fragile

Go slow my heart
Rest a little
Stay here
Silent by the brook
Where the wind is cool
And the water flows
As if nothing happened
No one 
gave it their tears
No one 
silent yelled into the trees
Nothing bad happened here
Not that anyone remembers.
Except your tender walls.
Go slow my heart.
You are love
Even if no one remembers. 

The River

The rush sometimes Isn’t in the water

But in the glacier

Sitting up high

Atop a mountain

Frozen in time

Molten by noon

To fall on stones 

It doesn’t know

Making its way

To the sea

Growing trees

On banks

Washing the grime

Off rocks

Only to become

Nothing when it 

Meets its end.

Falling in Love

Falling never felt this good
Love is a beautiful place for it
And joy an obvious outcome
I could make a home here
The hands of time however
Remind me to pause desire
Longing isn’t an investment
It decays time in the most
Loving manner
Bringing profits
Only the soul knows.
I could make a home here
Yearning that as I pause
Cherry blossoms will bloom
Fall on my cheeks 
Like a gentle kiss
And rain on me 
All that I have missed.