beyond sky and colors

eyebrow speaks,
from the museum of memories.
for I had placed it there
the very moment it fell off
your burning eyes.
you don’t rhyme in any end
You escape from poems.
but let me scribble a note for you
on this sepia stone,
beneath vintage rain 
With a phoenix's feather.

And when I write, my love
Ink may wrinkle but never fade.
simultaneous stillness and motion
you don’t know how this is.
eerie night or twilight,
thoughts of you find their way to me
plague me digest me.
unpronounced echoes of
love's sigh revolve around.

every time you took eyes
off the book
I thought of irreconcilable distances.
when you smiled, I wondered
how to recreate it out of memory
in meditated eves.
I put your smile
in museum, wrapped in crystals.

Amidst these downpours
grows my love for you.
rain translates everything.
but I'm afraid if forget you
before another rain walks in
don’t you please fade away
like an half formed word
in the forgotten language,
like a stammered thought
or like an incomplete ghazal.

what is the name of those
stars in your eyes?
What season brings that
smile onto your lips?
Which anthropology knows
your speaking malayalam?

Was it just another rain?
Or you ??
aloft your colors and laughter.
If not, then why these wet mango leaves,
fresh paddy, ripples and pebbles
remind me of your presence?
I have never seen such colorful rain
plants dancing so poetic
and every droplet kissing flowers 
as passionately as Orpheus.
Is that rain or my love ?
as I've never yearned for a season like this
after her departure.

You, yes you jaan-e-man,
are flower and I, sand where you live upon.
let me multiply
to contain your wholesome.
I am that neglected stone
Etch your beautiful self over me.

don't love me
for that makes us together.
I want this distance, not-belonging.
had you loved me, angel,
I would've stopped singing
I would've waken up from endless dreams
I would not look at flowers,
see colors, grow with autumn
Sweat in summer afternoons.
had you loved me, hamna,
Meghamalhar raaga would not
intoxicate me.
Had you loved me,
ethreal poets, like Kabir
would write about Us,
not me, about You.

Do not love me
for my love to you be ceaseless.
you leap across time and spaces
to tell me stories of
my other self I left with you.

You send me to a world where
even gender can't divide us.
a world of poems beyond rhythms and syllables.
a world of arabian afternoons,
of dreamless nights,
of full of you, your laughter.  timeless unconditional love, this is.

You, a stirred dream on butterfly wings
and Me, a droplet on dead leaf. 

An empty rattle: too many access[ories]
not enough content[ment]
for every bauble a vacuous bubble

Some days I dress in vowels.
Other days, in expletives.
Today I dressed in both.

Feeding her blanched face
spoonfuls of sky
skin swallowing the glow.