खुद से जीतने की होड़ में, मैंने खुद से ही पीछा छुड़ाया
इस धुंधले , दर्द से सने, अंधेरों से घिरे रास्तों में,
अपना सपना कहीं गिराया
प्यास ढूंढते बादलों को , हथेली भर शबाब परोसी
उसने कहा : क्यों खेलते हो ईमान से मेरे, मोहब्बत ने ही तोह नमी खाली कर दी है मेरी!
फिर उठाया मैने. रूठे हुए किसान का आंसू बंजर ज़मीन से,
सपना उस बूँद को बना कर, संजो लिया बादल ने अपने दामन में
अब वही सपना
मेरा और उसका
हर रात बरसता है
उसकी छत पर!
–कांक्षी
I am scattered. Like dirt and air around you. The incense burning in my womb, is not letting me sleep. It burns slower than my cigarettes. These days, I cant even spell “cigarette” correctly. My first attempt in self-correction was when I was marred by my peer for using incorrect grammar. I have been self-marring since then. I change. I do not like most of my versions, and this is my umpteenth one. I almost wonder every night, what smell is my incense? Is it the taste of the soil after the rains? Or it tastes like golden wood? Like the leather of my purse, as I have clutched it between my teeth, when I use a public loo. Does my incense smell like a butter-piece scrub in the holy water bath? It must have a taste. One that defines the scent. I want to eat the fragrances, when one crosses the two wide holes of my nostril and bundle me up. I had seen a dog in my elevator day before. He sniffed and rubbed his nose over the elevator wall. I thought, he purred over the rusty element. He licked it innocently. I was told, he was enjoying the fragrance of some other dog or probably a bitch, who had been taken in the same elevator before him. He lurked.
I direly wish I could smell all humans who have lived before me. The fragrance would have spoken of their spilled blood and scoosh. Of the kisses planted on their skin, also the ink in their tissues. They would all have written letters to their loved ones, and etched it in the pockets of their limbs and calves.
I get tied to things very easily. But things, they do not string me for long.
Half way, the dreads unbundle.
I fall lose.
Over the ground, almost breaking.
Not me!
The bundler’s spectacle. It broke. His judgement too.
He had bent down his arrogant head, to see how a thing of such menial confidence, doesn’t breaks. It cuddles itself, cross the two arms across the heart, shuts the eyes, and stare deep within her womb at the little light coming from the incense. The smoke filling up her conscience, leaves her body only when she opens her eyes. Puffs and garlands of suffocating smoke, had turned into tears, stranding her eyes red, and lips salty. This thing, this me, this I. I have been kissing my own tears, like the water from the brook. Brook, the poem I read in school. It flows in my dreams. It sometimes look murky to me. But I never get worried even when it appears so.
Brook has been painted so beautifully, that it has camouflaged the reality. Concepts are attached to things we wish to derive meaning from. The “ever-flowing” concept of brook, it makes me believe, that anything that comes down a hill, sprinkles and tumbles, carries with itself the moss and ferns, and sunshine dances over its shallow, and it brims to join the river can be called a brook. I see the inherent incense in me, becoming the brook. Because men may come, and men may go, but the loitering lust in my womb, to carry the world like an unborn baby inside me, goes on and on and forever.
~From the land of mystical hiraeth, Kanksshi.
#weavingabsolutereality
Mystical Hiraeth 