Piya bin chain

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

- W.B.Yeats

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

-Ted Kooser

Nothing

[ Stumbled upon this one. Written not too long ago, I think ]

Now. This moment here. I want to write.
Writing mustn't be a want, it must be natural, but I am unsure of using the word 'mustn't'. Must and must-not are just too exhausting to peg onto my fingertips. My thoughts, my only constant companions were waiting, floating like huge gas filled balloons on a lake, and now that I wish to rescue them they have streaked out into their original darker colors. Sometimes I can't draw comparisions and my metaphors and similies are absurd.
I've been thinking of many things, new and old. Several words have redefined their tight meanings and settled in new voluminous formless clouds. Several people have come and left, and some keep coming and going. Each time, they alter something, misplace a thought or two and in the end I am comfortable about gaining on more misplaced thoughts. One more feeling which will perhaps make the knowledge of myself more understandable. I've been thinking of you and I don't fear reading this a little later in my life. You could become more than you are by then or become several times lesser. Who's to say. I couldn't believe myself though it was me and entirely me who froze in time and then one day wore summer on her sleeves. I outshone my own dullness and thus proved that I can let things go.Of course I have you.
You, who seem everything. I do not see you yet, as a God. I see your absence, like a crater in my soul. Like something that grew on the surface of my soul has been removed.
But then, there is hope. Hope, is so new, so surprising in its magnitude. The moment it stepped into me, it paralysed several doubts. Hope itself, is so scary though. Why do we have a word like blind-hope, isn't all hope blind or isn't it hope that blinds a person? I am yet to know if my hope can see. I am on the course. The course which is blind, uncertain. Things I love must guide me.
Then there is courage, another word that is acting strange. I had known it, yes. I have called myself courageous on several occasions. This time though it seems to empower me, silent. I feel strong, and it has got nothing to do with muscles and their girth. I am returning to the words you said, Hope. Yes, leave that to me. Rather, let me have a share of it. I might as well hope. I do not see anything from here. Several years hence I do not know what this will looked upon as. If you read this now, I do not know how I will be looked upon. Perhaps, it'll fall as a pebble in a sleeping lake, or perhaps it'll come as a tide. Somehow I think the world must've been upturned. I think we might be hanging from the ground and water too hangs from the sea-bed, perhaps the air around us is thick oil and it lets us be. I cannot justify it though.
I now think of countries, warring, divisions. I think of living in a country that is not mine.I think of you outside your country and I do not like it. I think of us, in a room and getting bored of each other yet I long for your presence. [What is getting bored of each other? We might not talk too much but too much is what makes things boring.] Imagination or hallucination or whatever they call it is wonderfully spacious. It is never too small to hold the zillion figments of my future, the real and the unreal one. I claim that I never write what I do not see. But I do, I fear I will today too. Since I have some invisible part of me stay with you and it tells me the experience. And it scares me that I've given my senses, my perceptions to you, to stay with you, to be guided by you.I cannot, though, give myself entirely, or so I tell to give my unseen ego a temporary pleasure. I can see it smile from a nook, seems more like a mock. On a nice winter day when it can't snow since I live on the uncomfortable latitude it rains and that brings enough pleasant weather to me. I have been willing to continue but I fear I might recourse it, lest I say too much. I have quite forgotten the repercussions that follow a fountain of speech. I look at myself near a fountain, gathering the sprinkling water. I would like that. I might strike out or go back on a word or two. I might write an opaque poem. I might stop a rain. I might stop the Earth from turning. I might want you. In acknowledgement of the calmth you've brought to me. The calmth that envelopes all the words I have dug up from the mud.
Beauty is too heavy and pompous a word to convey the subtlety. I wish to live.Like the passing of a night, I wish to die.

"There is something about watching your mouth when you speak that excites me — and it is more than the knowledge of their touch.”

- Abandoned Books and Marginalia