LENS

Am I out of focus
You say to my blinking eyes

They were just taking
a good look
at the nearness in transit
of a distance

Relative theory of our beings
tricking us to a floating stillness

As palms concave from convex
eyes smile to other meanings

SHOES

Your new shoes
Invent a new dance
For your feet

Your liquid feet
Outgrow the spurs of pain
After befriending it

Smiling back to it

Life tapdances
On moonlit surfaces of our being

© nidheeshtyagi 2007

SHOES JOURNEY

Shoes have their own journey
Feet their own
Journey has its own shoes
Your writhing heels will know

After stiletto dance sequel

Shoes in their renovated rack
Will talk of thier own pain
Like your feet do to my palms

And the journey ahead

© nidheeshtyagi 2007

SAARANGI SOUL

Soul is a Saarangi
A Taan of living
Takes you to a lake
To the hill some times in steps
Some in strides

It has the keys and passowrds
To all the mystical warehouse of pain
Where it gets tears and punctuations to denser
Silence between you and me

Soul is a Saarangi

Releasing a hermit moment from a lost cave

Drawing a journey of a dusty track
On soles of your feet

Soul is a Saarangi

© nidheeshtyagi 2007

NIGHT ON BHOPAL LAKE

There is no music
Not even in distance
There are lights at the other end of lake

A night melts into nothingness
In a still life Bhopal

Punctuated by straying thoughts
Grazing through the memories

Of a moment spent
Of a life lived

In a city of dead people walking
You reclaim me from a Mohan Jo Daro existence
By our passwords of love

© nidheeshtyagi 2007

LINGUA

I speak to you in Latin
Read you in Braille

Alien ecstasies
Entwine us
Into an oxygenated shloka of life

I take your name
Plant 353 kisses
1294 flowers bloom
You seal my words

You become the kaafia
Of this lost radeef

© nidheeshtyagi 2007

CONNECT CALLS

Bohemian noises
Clog my lungs
Like smoke inhaled
Bitter twirling in my mouth
Of a wee bit long brewed Darjeeling

Traces of all my touches
Find sanctity in
The Latin script of Octavio Paz

Your touches flash in my eyes
Like redirected letters
Just before getting lost

Your tears
Take you to the digital
Analogue of
Long distance calls

© nidheeshtyagi may, 2007

BETWEEN

Between living and not living
There is waiting

For you
For the moment
Which seeks
Its meanings, completion, salvation

To vapour forgetting
Of this that and the other
Of the world
Life was exiled into

Without refuge

Between living and not living
There is waiting

And this moment



© nidheeshtyagi may, 2007

UNSILENCE

An unspelt word in a clutch of joy
A script shadows on the mirror
With wet feet a sun walks on painted wall

I bump into the layer of
My nudity in yours

Before going into the hiding again
Love unsilences peace gently

A pebble hops on stillwater
A touch ripples through jungle dreams

© nidheeshtyagi/ Feb 18, 2006

WRITTEN

They defy destiny, horoscopes, logic
All my moments with you
Yet they were written
Yet they rose from
The debris of hope
The ashes of banal existence

All my moments with you
Pulsate like fireflies
In a dark moonless forest
You can hear the river gush

Memories have a dreamrun
In cracked smiles
And misty eyes
Unwritten in dates and history

All my moments with you
Write their own eternity
Forgiving calenders for being too predictable

EXILE OF HER HUMANITY

Silhoutted against a raag
I saw her fingers scribbling on a notepad
Her thought strayed to the secret questoins
she did not have the right password for

Another raag brings her back
A tear wells
A text sent
A pencil fidgets in her hand

She was at many places
In that solitary moment

In exile of her humanity

YOU WILL BE FINE

Should have pressed your hands a little more firmly
Should have waited for another minute, hour, age
Should have touched that raw nerve a little more delicately
Should have looked away when you tried restraining yourself
Should have wrapped you in a shawl of woolly silence
Should have avoided mirroring your moonlit sadness

Yes we will get to the stiff hilt
Where reality will confront truth
In a dark dense forest at hazy heights

Your welled tear would break its surface tension
And fall through the abyss of our shared silence

With rapt quiet
I would see you pick the broken glass

Long after you forced 'I will be fine' smile

My fingers tiptoe
Over whispers of your name

(c)nidheeshtyagi

AGLOW

For a long time
There was this rapt silence
Words groped in its dark dense forest

Like sparkling fireflies

I had seen them in your eyes first

Long before the applause and ovation
Drowned the intense moment of truth
I gleamed in your smiling eyes

UNZIPPED TOUCHES

The zip drive
Of your touches
Opens now
Illuminates my dark solitude

Playing on my mind screen

Memories of a hushed moment
Ignites desires in
Another dream

One after another

© nidheeshtyagi

THE BEST BIT

The best bit is
The laughter epicentred
In your tummy

Waiting to happen
To let go the universe
To forgive the memories
To forget their pain

Hide that tear

The best bit was it needed no words
Or owed any explanation

Long after silence has
Clamped curfew on our being

Your laughter
Reverberates
In my palms

© nidheeshtyagi

Reading

Reading you. Fingers. Eyes. Mind. Wrist. Poem. Collar bone. Poem. Reading you. Words. Your earthen glow. Ribs. Trance. Poem. Moonlit gleam. Your pull. Words. Silence. Darkness. Pregnant pause. Undone hairs. Reading you. Soulful eyes. Your palms. Reading you. The zephyr of my life.

ELUDE

My hands wave
In breezy you
My soul stirs
In your misty eyes

My meanings take off
All their words

I borrow
A line from John Denver
Another from Neruda
A chant of Rumi
A strum of Leonard Cohen

To punctuate
Our shared silence

To wear you on my soul

The right word
May still elude me





© nidheeshtyagi