On Solitude

On this promising day,
as the sun bathes
the reluctant sky
before the cold airs of the season arrive
their wintry little hands
extending unto us unwished,
delightful it is, we are gathered here—but
I have been yearning,
with all this glaring emptiness,
to know what exists between us,
to see what really exists.

No longer do I care,
in this land of the strangers,
how the sun is sought after these days,
greedily on the verandas and balconies,
and how the winter will be missed so much afterwards.
Waiting all along, all around.

But when you talk of love,
I’m occupied
with how I should not hate you;
When you talk of peace,
there is always a clarion call for war;
When you talk of justice,
is there an seething frustration
to break all the division;
To love is not to not hate.
To be peaceful is not to be not violent.
To live in a just world is not
to be not unfair in living.
When you talk of freedom,
I’m tied up in a chain of boredom.

Between me and you, there is
a world that flirts around with us,
with our cockeyed tease that it gets tickled.
And to my cold comfort,
I know that I know nothing at all.
Life’s been just a repast
that reeks of an otherwise delicious dish
that has turned simply sour, sans the salt.
And your company, out here, is purely redundant.

Andro, Manipur

.............................................................................................................................

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it 

in the slow movement of the hands of a clock” 

― Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell

.............................................................................................................................

Lansdowne, Uttarakhand