A story for your grandchildren

It starts easily enough
A chat on the balcony
An exchange of numbers
One of you asks the other out for a meal.

But it's lunch break at work
And it's hardly food you're hungry for.
You bag it, you hurry to one of your homes
Chinese take-out cools in the flat summer afternoon.

Things are crazy from there.
You are hard-pressed to find a place
Where you haven't pulled over by the road
To steal a kiss, a fumble, an entire blowjob.

Then you misunderstand.
A conjuring's at hand; and you,
Forever sick from love, hungry
For curlicues of an ordinary life, miss the trick.

Your careless arrangement grows ugly things now.
Beautiful, ugly things. Lies like muslin
Anger like a rain, a building up like a journey
A tearing down like a broken garden

There're oceans now, and people.
And a splash of a cold, a shock of heat
As you forget the exact degree
Of the warmth of each other's breath.

Your desire builds futile bridges over choppy seas.
And your yearning plumbs tunnels in blue depths
You label stars and find a way to use them
To be markers on your way.

Morning comes.
Stars disappear, your pathway a joke of light
A tree sways and the breeze brings sadness
And an email. "How are you?"

A winding missive of memory.
A reiteration of remembrance
You'll always be the one, it says
I'll never be the same without you

I will never be happy.
The email promises; it continues: we had it perfect
And I'll always treasure it
It'll be the story I tell my grandchildren.

27 Aug 2015. 

Hidimbi by the River

Bhimasena: lover,  keeper of secrets, healer.
How burdensome your love for
The lotus-blue Panchali
To whom the Saugandhika
and it's quest were just another sorcery
Of dark eyes.

My skin lightens,  Bhimasena, draining
Itself of jet,  along with the memory of you
The seed grows,  Bhimasena,  and I grow big
Enough to envelope the forest in my womb
In an incestuous hope that you will enter it.

The forest, it grows dark,  Bhimasena
Dark as our love was when you chose
To walk away,  dutiful son,  loving brother
Absent father. Bhimasena

(Inspired by Bhima: Lone Warrior, the English of Randamoozham by MT Vasudevan Nair)