in ictu oculi
(after midnight tonight)
there’s a little life caught in this wind
that carries the clouds you could pick off like cotton
floating in deep blue ink,
ink that refuses to take shape on paper
but if you hang your dreams to dry in this skyline,
you could reach for anything tonight.
i want to write
on every inch of your skin
i want to fill you
with half finished conversations
in the hope
that we will finish them
for the rest of our lives
together.
you are a star
blazing across this night sky
and i said to you ‘consume me’.
the city, lights up under
twenty lakh fireflies
suspended on strings
your tears,
through my sleep laden eyes
are a bokeh.
falling in love
falling leaves,
hold hope
spilling out like sand
in a tight fist,
in the shadows
in between sunlit trees
grows hopelessness,
and the seasons roll around, as ever.
so here we sit
staring into
the
setting sun
you and i
wounded
from our invisible war
here’s the rain
now to wash away
you and i
the waste of our world.
blank pages
flutter
over crunching leaves
by
sharpened pencils
no more tender exchanges.
So here we are again,
the same place, once again,
same conversations, same little confessions,
the same little cabin and cocktails,
collecting seashells for unmade necklaces,
white shirts over floral prints
over red lipstick
over transparent nail varnish
over oyster dinners and supermarket arguments.
The same spot under the same lighthouse:
red paint like our toenails and white like the shells placed in a line upon your back.
still investigating pearls under the bright sun:
golden sand stretched into the
crashing white waves into the
swaying blue surface into the
distant sunset;
year after year: one tight circle of security.
And then,
over the sound of roaring water
I heard you say you had fallen out of love with me.
Moments after Sherlock is seated and the jet’s door shuts quietly behind Mycroft—no ceremony there—and the plane begins to lift off the ground, he collapses.
His face pressed into his hands, breathing ragged, muscles stiffening under the strain of superhuman effort for control. Between frantic breaths, he scoffs at his outburst—but there is none of his usual sharpness of self-criticism.
He sits like that for long moments, letting his heart slow down, then he slowly decompresses his hands from his face thinking—
John
“Can’t you see what’s going on?”
—an easily missed crack in his voice as he whispers to the loneliness around him.
The early morning sunshine and you with your milk coffee—a vignette not quite for me,
Because baby,
I’m made of bittersweet black coffees
and late night film-watching sprees.
Dark skin, darker chocolates
and even darker dreams,
don’t really fit in the whiteness of your New York City penthouse dream.
And you with your love for neon signs,
forever oblivious to my trust in the night,
with your earphone music in your
tubelit office at midday never noticing the green garden below,
with your obsession with edges
and all the while I keep falling off them
with your sense of incredulity about my
daily contentment derived from a sunset behind cloudy mountains
with your mania for store bought yogurt
when I taught you how to curdle milk at home
with your compulsive notion of enforcing boundaries
while talking about breaking mine.
So, when I think of what it is I fell in love with
I think,
was it your light brown eyes that appeared a little skeptical in the cafeteria light
Was it
the (deliberately) unsure way you touched your perfect hair,
Was it
my misinterpretation of your confession for the starlit sky
except,
your love was of the patches seen through windows
and in between concrete jungles?
You knew and I now see,
our love was doomed from the beginning
Because baby,
you:
hate the pause of journey in between two cities,
the loneliness which you must fill with parties,
hate my bougainvillea filled balcony and
the occasional worms that crawl out singing,
You hate the sense of comings and goings
and that is the
gap
I exist in.
\the treehouse recluse\ 