Onto where angels sing...

Do you remember?
The day we hiked up the hillock
Where the angels flew down,
And many a winged fluttered by
Brought out their harps to string
Like larks luring with love
They began to sing
And in a trance, hands locked
We finally let go in sync
Heads tilted we swayed to the song
Our hearts thumped love along
And in a kiss we wrapped our soul
And far withdrew the world, cold
Do you remember?
Oh do you remember, all along?

Today I hiked alone to the hillock
But no angel I could see
The wind was dry, I heard no melody.
Was it just fantasy?
Or did you mean so much to me?

I exist

Yes, I will marry you.

Those were the words I said and with that his face brightened. He looked like a kid whose parents agreed to give him a new toy. New toy alright! I was shrinking inside.

I do

I muttered those words as a tear crossed my cheek. He was happy. He knew not why it rolled across my face.

He held my hand as we lay united in wed lock. He slept like a child gripping my hand as if I would leave if he let go. Little did he realize that I wasn’t even there to leave him. I lay awake for nights. Sleep did not show any mercy on this possessed soul.

I existed.

My eyes only closed to wake up in a dream. Something once pleasant that it haunts you forever. It is not the nightmares that often cause fear but reminiscence. I close my eyes to be one with the one. The one whose dark arms covered me, seeping with warmth; the one who let me cold now.

I close my eyes to remember the last day I felt alive. When kisses were reciprocated from the soul, when in the dark whirlpool of his eyes I let go.

I wake up to life.

I wake up to feel him grip my arm. Smile another fake smile not being able to respond every time he says “I love you.”

I exist.

I am an island

The lights couldn’t stop flashing. It was hysterically noisy. I sat there on a bar stool feeling alive. That’s all I needed, a glass filled with intoxicating alcohol, no, not the sweet one, not the warm one but the stinging kind. Yea I felt alive!

My so called friends were swinging their hips on the overly crowded dance floor. A few were socially groping the ones who dint mind. A few were just blurting out their drunken existence. Where do I fit in? Nowhere I was just there away on the bar stool, with a glass of stinging alcohol in my hand feeling alive.

There was smoke everywhere. Partly caused by the dry ice and water combination which was supposedly release to liven the party but ended up annoying ones nostrils and partly because of the cancer sticks everyone seemed to suck onto.

Egregarious was the word. I have learned to be a social loner. The kind who embraces public solitude. The kinds you would see in every social occasion, the kinds who by being in system are still absent. We are the most widespread. We could be the next person you meet in a crowded bus stop or air kiss in the next fashion show. We are all the extroverts who you meet who live in their worlds, who keep who they are to themselves.

I am an island.

There he came by emerging from what seemed like a sweaty whirlpool of drunken people. “Come on lets dance” he said. I could only read his lips his words were drowned in the ear drum hostile music. I smiled and took his hand.

There we were your average couple dancing in one of city’s happening clubs. There was I, still in my own world and dancing in ours.

No questions asked

It was then I rolled off his dark arms to see his face as we lay there timeless, like lovers painted across the Grecian urn, forever hungry and latent with reality. I looked up to see this dark skinned man, who held my hand through my woman hood and with his reassuring eyes hypnotized me to follow him.

Here was I in his bed, naked with nothing to hide looking at him still in a haze. It was a mixture of admiration and disbelief. He rolled over like a child, nestling comfortably. It was surreal, probably because the room décor was so.

It was a large empty room with rather minimal furniture and a large white mattress that was dropped right the middle of the room. The whole room was painted white, everything was white, the slim wooden table, the large flat screen TV, from the table lamp to the extra fluffy feather filled pillows. Everything was pale white except him, and there he slept like a baby wrapped in a white blanket with me staring in disbelief.

What will happen if someone knocked on the door? Or if someone called? Should I answer it? Will I get him into trouble? It dint matter then. For I wasn’t really thinking, just staring, it was like falling into a deep abyss but even the fall felt so beautiful.

He opened his eyes. Smiled sheepishly. Yawned like a child. He looked at me. There was just silence. I wrapped myself with the blanket as I stood up to look for my clothes. He walked out to grab a smoke. I gathered my stuff and left.

No questions asked.

No this was not a one night stand. Not for me. I had longed to be in his hands since the time I was sixteen. I had waited long, too long in many ways. So what if he was married. So what if his wife dint know. I loved him just the same.

I was 22 when I was forced into marriage, too young to realize what my parents had pushed me into. I did not know on the day I said I do that it was the only two words I would say for the rest of my married life. From laundry, to the kids, I had no choice but to chant those words.

I do.

A drunken sales representative was no source of solace or any comfort to a broken wife. I had decided that very day I could kill myself if this was all I was worth. But my memories kept me going, haunting me till I was obsessed with him and there was nothing more.

Nothing less.

He loved his wife. So he said as he slipped the wedding ring into his pocket and gently leaned to kiss my lips. I smiled and gave in to the much awaited kiss. I dint want to know. He dint have to prove to be good to me. It dint matter, for I loved him anyways.

As I hurriedly wore my clothes, I looked outside to see him stare into the sea. Smoking. He had worn his ring. It was over.

No questions asked.

A thousand candles burnt that night

A thousand candles burnt that night
The flames danced and burnt the dark
Made her weep as smoke.
A thousand candles burnt that night
When he dark-skinned did bloom
Into a four armed idol that bowed
And prayed to the craving of flesh
When he dark-skinned amalgam she
For they now moaned and groaned
With salty sweat drops that seeped
Onto each other’s writhing bodies
Drenching each other with he or she

For united they lay, like animals slain
Unfathomed was lust, and hence slain

A thousand candles burnt that night
When morning waited by the aisle
Lest it should hinder darkness; Ah! Servile
Darkness wept a heap of smoke
And he and she, lay unite
A thousand candles burnt that night…

Tumbled down castle of glee

Everyday I sat aside by the banks of gloom
Where the waters ran grey, lifeless and grey
Perched beneath the hovering black walls
That stood in mid air, suspended
I sat and pieced he together

No wind blew in that torrid land
No spring did bloom
Colors lay stuffed in a thimble
And I sat there, amidst the dusty plains
Shunning my heart, bleak, plain
As I pieced he together.

Card by card I drew from the case
Knowing well what I was to phrase
Haunted by the seas misty ways
I breathed by mistake
And there fell my duty
Along with all pieces I had built he
Tumbled down from gloom
Shattered spilling color on the ground

Colors traced my skin,
The walls trembled and writhed in the color
The ground gave in and there was color
The thimble let go and spluttered mirth
Ah the beauty, for I did breathe
I looked down and saw he, disparate
In tumbled down card castle I saw he.

The woman

Another tear crossed her cheek. She was pale, pale due to her anemia partly and partly out of shock. The knife dripped blood onto the floor. It had formed a bloody puddle on her what looked like a brand new marble flooring. I guess in the corner of her head she had known why, she looked down to chubby fleshy palms, now blood stained. Her nails had seeped with blood. The blood however had not really dried on her nails, making it look like the last sanitary pad she threw away a few weeks back.

She remembered how her mood swings never bothered him. She now figured out why. For years she had spent her life bound in her house, scrubbing the dirt out of edges that settled marble floor with ammonia, cleaning the kitchen top with citric acid which made them look whiter, rubbing the filth out of the toilets with her old toothbrush… Indeed she was obsessed with cleaning.

Married at the age where there was no television, she was repulsed by the sound of it. She read very little and wrote even less. The grocery list was probably one of her literary accomplishments. She resorted to cleaning as a therapy. Something that kept her occupied while he was away, or drunk on the couch, and of course he dint mind her obsession for it took her away from him. Now, she dint dote on him and he never complained.

It was a chilly night. She had left to clean the kitchen top. Leaving him to entertain the guests. She never liked playing hostess but it was the greed for cleaning up later that made her accede to his party habits. It was late after the party, when she retired to clean the kitchen top. This would have taken a hour or two of scrubbing on to the kitchen top with a hard hog haired brush, and then a hour to make sure the acid is washed out with the soap. But today it took her ten minutes to figure out that she was out of citric acid. How could this be? She always checked her stores timely, she couldn’t understand it then.

She then decided to go to bed, and quietly walked up into her walk in closet to change, when she heard the bed creak. A mouse she presumed, and her greed to watch the mouse hide trembling in fear made her tiptoe silently as she flip opened her large wooden bedroom door.

She stood there. Like a statue stuck by lightning, only that it did not char her black but turned her pale as snow. I guess her blood rushed out of her soul. I looked up, I knew she was here; I quickly covered myself with her clean white blanket and rushed out of the other door. As I left a smile saw its way on my lips. I too like her had turned a deaf ear to his explanations which now grew faint as I moved towards my car.

She did not cry, it was as if she had turned into a living mannequin. He stood up and tried to explain, but she could only see his lips moving. The words were lost in between. She turned her head left, his face disgusted her. There she saw it glistening on top her bed stand next to her antique tiffany lamp shade. She picked it up.

He died that night. His guts spilled on the floor, as he gasped for his last breath through his semi slit throat. Soon his body withdrew.

A tear crossed her cheek finally as the knife dripped blood onto the floor. It had formed a bloody puddle on her what looked like a brand new marble flooring.

She dropped her chilly hands into her pockets, she felt something. It was my brooch she had found in the kitchen top next to knife rack. It had dawned upon her how the knife had found the bed stand.

She fell onto her knees. She was free. Her knees sloshed on the fresh blood. Her cheek on to her clean marble flooring. She closed her eyes, as the tears fell by. She was satisfied. Her eyes opened now, only to see the bottle of citric acid I had left below her bed. Beneath it was a single slipper which bore my initials, IS.