A PRIMER OF LOVE

C for Clothes

Magar accha tou ye hota ki hum ek saath rehte

Bhari rehti tere kapdon se almaari humari

(Jawad Sheikh)

Clothes form an essential structure in the metaphysics of love because your beloved wears them. Just by that fact only they become signifiers of something transcendent  wavering between mystical and fetish. The cloth, the garment becomes a text, a language tailored by one adorned by someone else - a Barthesian language. Its texture is the texture of memory and desire - suddenly you remember, she wore that dress on that day when that thing happened. Somewhere in a closet hangs Rene Magritte's  Homage to Mack Sennett.

"I love your every dress

Because they do

What I wish to do"

F for Fingernail

Your fingernail grazes my lip and nicks my being. Last night the waxing crescent moon resembled your clipped fingernail. Was it destined to be apart from you because it was a part of you or it wasn't, like me.

"In love

I want to collect

All your clipped nails

As a souvenir of my excess longing" (Mubashir Karim)

Q for Question

Standing before God (who has all the answers), it is a matter of asking the right questions. Mythology and epics are riddled with questions, so is Love. I love you was a question when you said it. I inherited it as an answer and that has made all the difference. Here I am, everyday, standing before God searching for the right questions to ask. 

"To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)?

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought. . .?" (Barthes)

T for Time (and Place)

I love you is always incomplete. I loved you in Kashmir: the past indicator and the place. Love can never escape the spatiotemporality. To be in one place at the same time is essential for you and me to fall in love. Had we been somewhere else, say Paris, we would have loved differently. There's a particular Kashmiri way of loving that only lovers in its space and time know.

"Tumhari aankhoun mein

Nami aatey hi

Srinagar mein

Baarish hojati hai

Mausam koi bhi ho

Meri Nazm bheeg jati hai"

ENDURANCE

(for Raymond Carver)

It's always good to

Visit your neighbour and

When you're there 

Observe your own house

From that neighbourly strangeness:

See people living,

Laughing and bickering,

Doing stuff inside rooms,

To keep this house from falling apart.

So that you

Hear the occasional music

Slipping through the bricks,

The smoke waving

Through the chimney.

What is true for houses,

Is true for people too!

Montage (or The History of Love as Philosophy)

Plato -

You shone like the sun

Over the cave of my being.

The moment I saw you,

I knew all the epics

About us

Revolting against Zeus.

Aristotle -

Contrary to everything;

You were, are and will be

All my causes.

Ibn Sina -

In the contingency of this world,

You and me ARE.

Our love,

The necessary logical proof:

God exists.

Al Ghazali -

You

Are all my knowledge.

I memorized you

Syllable by syllable.

Descartes -

Society,

The evil demon

Deceving us.

Kant -

I see Me

As you.

Both should be counted

Both are true.

Romanticism -

To touch your soul,

I smell grass

At 2 AM.

Marxism -

Lovers of the world,

Untie!

You have nothing.

Nietzsche -

We are and will

Recur eternally

Through every lover

And every lover

Through us.

Existentialism -

Lovers;

One should imagine them

Happy.

Wittgenstein -

You are all my poems

Written, unwritten.

Postmodernism -

A mood,

An incredulity

Towards love poems.

Post-postmodernism -

You and me

Raising a family of bastards.

A BILLBOARD IN ATHENS

As mesmerized

By the black screens today,

People go on

Engrossed in the things people do,

While a voice calls unto them -

Calls for the Truth.

It is a pity,

the wisest man in Athens

Has to beg for it,

Search rigorously for the interlocutors.

The enemy of the Truth

Is not falsehood

But the glamour of it.

The appearances:

To seem speaking the truth,

To appear to be revolutionary -

The same formula,

The same equation everywhere;

The truth should be quotable,

The quotation has to be beautiful.

The face should make a good wallpaper,

The martyr has to be adorable.

While this lustrous flaunt goes by,

Truth appears

Beneath the largest democracy

As Kashmir,

As the face of Socrates,

Ugly and warted.

CIRCUMVENT

You run your fingers

Through my hair,

Like fatal thought 

Combing a suicidal mind.

One day I kissed you frantically

Raising a tooth-memorial

Over a blushing, soggy landscape.

The inevitability of music

When the bow touches the string:

A frisson running through the body,

Your touch,

Rain and blizzard hitting together

The glass of my being.

My poem, hanging hopefully

By the eave of your bosom

Over the peg of your heart.

Have I not lost everything?

I am balding and

Missing major molars.

The body slipping into mountains

Spreading silently,

Firm as a tree -

Ever increasing girth.

I have lost everything.

Everything you ever touched.

Except this poetry!

Maybe, I lost you

The day you were found.

And these have all been the attempts

To regain you, recover you

Line by line

Word by word.

CHLADNI FIGURES

Everything is in motion.

The heavens, the mountains,

The atoms.

Everything.

Beating to its own rhythm.

The emptiness, the sadness,

The pain,

Inside you

Beating faster than your heart,

Echoing excruciatingly.

Outside, 

The world appears calm, so serene -

You smile, greet people,

Listen to them,

Display the chladni figures

Of your face,

Pass the beating as sound,

As music,

As art.

SLAPSTICK LIFE

School, University, Airport, Bank and Prison - 

A same beam runs through the ceiling . . .

One day you stand in a long queue

To deposit the university fee

In a bank

An airplane takes off  beyond your control

One day you work through life

The penal labour 

To pay the bank

Before you are admitted to the hospital

(This all happens easily

As easily as a School or a University

Is converted into a Hospital or a Prison 

During a pandemic).

You are the patient, the student,

The passenger, the defaulter, the criminal -

Helpless!

A dot entagngled within

The colossal rib cage of iron and emptiness.

Just look inside those eyes -

Those Buster Keaton eyes

Hiding the pain

Under the sheen of vaudeville stunts.

KISS

I taste your lips 

On my tongue

Like dentist's tools

Long after the tooth has been

Extracted -

The throbbing

The wound

The blood

The steel

INDEPENDENCE DAY

The waste should go

Into the dustbin

Lying across the street

Sitting within its own rancidity.

Add a barbed wire.

A brave army person.

A poet carrying trash:

A heated argument.

The army moves

With rifles and batons

About to hit the poet;

Everybody knows

Where the plot of such situation goes.

But, in that frozen hanging moment

The poet IS the trash.

One angry syllable 

And he will go dead down

Into the trashcan of a rotting nation.

THE PLACE BENEATH

Beneath the scatological architecture

There's no breathing

The windpipe shoved down the mouth

Is the rectal passage where

The shit of politicians and 

Piss of leaders is cunningly whisked

With the blood of martyrs 

Beneath this shitty metaphor

There's no smelling also

You can pass

The putrid smell as fragrance

Make the roses blush -

Kiss the windpipe clean

And call it all a holy structure

Beneath this beneath

People live

And survive