Consolation

You are at age when nothing holds you,

Any slight contact with the world bruises you

You write

 but it's not quite writing

More of strange words disconnected from each other

Each word sitting alone

Unable to reach out 

and form a sentence.

There is too much thrashing and clawing

 for things that are too early for you to grasp on to.

And hope and belief seems fraudulent words

Your young heart is wary of them already,

Suspicious, watchful and stays away.

You dread the cold immense nights stretched out infront of you,

with daytime so far away

You still haven't gotten used to loneliness

Not yet.

But there are certain consolations, you tell yourself

Soaking in the warm winter sun with the book

 you were supposed to save up for the dreary days of December.

 And walks, long solitary aimless walks

 in which you end up dreaming out loud to yourself.

But what you really have

you don't know yet.

And that partly makes up

For what you can no longer call your own.

Dreaming from far away

Grief comes
and recedes
like waves
The eyes forget
the contours of your face
Your smile is etched briefly
Then fades, smudges over
We are the broken columns of sunlight
Illusions of youth,
 holding fire in our hands.
As though all our lives have been
building up to reach this point
Spilling over, falling over
like schoolgirls running up stairs
 late for class, brimming with mirth,
jostling ahead of each other,
uncontained.
Like stepping over an edge,
 Hesitating, but quite willing
Certain till a point but certainty has
 its limits, like all elements.
Love is but a paint coated over stone
Lying near a puddle
Being stepped over by hundreds of foot
Yet you remain
 Longing and falling and changing
Like creatures shedding their skin
and growing them again
Deciphering words from shadows
in places that you have long
 outgrown but continue to hold you.

You left abruptly

You left abruptly 

Left with the dark of the night

Before sunlight found its way to me

Through the slight parting of the curtains 

In your room which is so full of you 

Even when you are absent 

I woke up without you 

And I haven't heard from you since 

Your letter i carry with me 

Holding on to the last of you 

Panic rises and subsides like tidal waves 

Thinking of how fragile our world is,

That two years worth of everything can disappear without trace 

In that unknown place between sleep and wakefulness 

there is too much and too less in what we are 

You vanish so easily from my world 

But I m terrible in my love for you 

That you are gone 

And that i have to do these all alone-breathing, waking up, laughing, smiling, frowning, 

There are lives that i collide into 

Your friends,  our friends

The places which you filled 

And fitted into, so snugly so effortlessly, empty now, abandoned 

As though things were dying 

In your absence i tell myself that i am imagining things

Even though silence rings loud

Disturbs, hurts, like the clinging of metal on metal 

But I hang on to the promise 

you had kissed me before you left 

If nothing else
Poetry betrays you.

The things we tell ourselves

We tell ourselves when we fall in love

 that it couldn’t have been with anyone else,

 that it was fate or destiny or written in the stars

 or such-like. We try in this manner to create

 an unchangeable, permanent legend of ourselves,

 of our stories, of our love. But it strikes you

 how arbritrary we are at choosing the objects

 of our affection. A glimpse, a smile, a dream 

could have had you choosing someone else. 

Anyone else but the one you fell in love with

 and eventually eloped with on a day drenched with July rains.

 Or is it love at all? Isn’t it some kind of a skewed sense of finality
 that eventually led to whatever arrangement
 that we define as love? Don’t all love start selfishly,
 terribly, chaotically? It is jagged around the edges,
 it doesn’t fit quite well into our lives.
In our distinctly Manipuri lives, trapped
 in our essentially Manipuri bodies,
 whatever that we did were never good enough,
 love was never a good enough reason for marriage,
 there would be so many relatives picking
 on every bit of our lives, yours and his, turning it over,
 examining the unconformities, the abnormalities,
 the lover and the beloved would have to stand
the strain of being made public. Privacy was a luxury
 we could ill afford to maintain. Love was a price
 to be paid for together-forever-after; marriage
was larger than one person, it was many people,
 Ekubok, Enembok, Ibenthou, Enamma, Etei,Mou Ahan,
your nephews and nieces, your marriage was the establishment
of relationships and camaradie with these strangers
 who might like or might not like you, who might
 make your life easier or worse; knowing the man
 you had married was the least of all the tasks involved in a marriage.

Always

You lost your first friend to years, and absence mostly,

 Growing up, you turned to books, drew yourself close

There are people you lose to places,

 They stayed, you left, 

You can taste grief like a tablet

stuck in your throat, choking you

There is grief for love almost lost,

 Then there is the sensation of numbness

The disbelief that leads you to a state of nothingness

Vacant spaces in you that you try to fill with words

 But it's inevitably their words you chance upon

There is a constant contradiction of remembering and forgetting

Remembering a certain winter afternoon spent soaking up the sun

And forgetting the details- the mouth, the eyes, the hands of the person

You, who all these times have never turned to prayers,

Are found following the rituals you have seen your mother perform.

At this moment, events are unfolding over which you have no control

 They will leave terrible imprints on you

You lose people but you cling on to the notion

 That you will find them again.

Run into them in a crowded street, perhaps in another country.

Perhaps twenty years down the line.

 You lose people to death

Which seems the most bewildering to you

 Because it is so final that you can't get a grip on it.

It evades you like morning dreams on waking up.

He had last asked, "Will you wait for me?"

 You had said, "Always".

This is how the body loves you

This is how the body loves you
starts missing you from the moment I pull away
 from your embrace, by the time I turn and walk away,
a choking sensation arises in my throat,
 by the time you reach the gate, my body feels
 a slight shiver, that uncontrollable, irreplaceable
 longing for the familiar, beloved presence.
There are nights when I lay tossing and turning
 not to have your slumbering body beside me,
not to have my arms around you, snug in your warmth.
 It is even more so on days when I see so much of you
and so much never seems good enough for my heart
 or grieving body, the immense sadness that takes
 a physical form in this way when you are not with me.