4 AM conversation with ghosts of old lovers

Resemblance to the ghost of your being.
He is flesh and bones, only flesh and bones
and I stare at him, bewildered.
His eyes are amber, the color of tree resin,
volcano spitting passion,
the blood reeks of loss.
"Hello, good old friend.
Where have you been all these years?" I ask him
and I watch, as the recognition fades away from his face,
it is swallowed in dark thickening cracks,
like the claws of earth swallows all the life
sustained on its face and I stare
at his ash struck face.
I am waiting alone at Purana Qila,
and the sky is crying empty tears.
Suddenly, I am in a crowded street,
beggar children are caressing my hair,
weeping for me.

(c) Ayushee Ghoshal

Remembrance

Perhaps, remembrance is sickness,
to constantly think of forgotten faces,
a distant something of a rainy afternoon,
stroking your ruffled hair and whispering,
"say something" in a dim lit corridor.

A punctuation in the brief history of time,
a wretched attachment to remembrance,
I keep staring at blank spaces,
I hold the hand that stretches from the blind.
I return again and again to find you
standing by the shore,
the moon rises in the drunk glass of wine,
you part your lips to say something
but in an instant, years pass away.

What I can't touch, remains a memory
I am blinded by an imagined light,
A remembrance of what can never be.

(c) Ayushee Ghoshal

In a verse

Against this world, You and I, Against time and tide, peering into the night time sky A million possibilities of the story, where you had once loved me in a verse. (c) Ayushee Ghoshal

Words

These words are my home. I have tried to find out the purpose behind these infinite galaxies in my heart. I have tried to drown them in whiskey, wash them out with indifference and then I have wandered for days, looking for myself, for these words. For I can exist only when they do. In their absence, I have begged for poetry to happen to me. The inevitable conclusion has been that these words are here to stay and to make them go away will be to ask the earth to kiss the sky. These words tip toe on my flesh like a fresh morning breeze, plant soft kisses like an old lover, whisper secrets in my ears like a long lost friend. I have tried to bury them in packets of smokes and yet when I have woken up, they have been my string of sanity. They've brought comfort to me on days when the coldness of someone's heart put a winter morning to shame. The world can't make sense of my flesh and bones and these words have given me the courage to walk out of places where my company wasn't desired. While the crowd has failed me, these words have clung to my weary bones as I have stared at the constellations of thoughts and reminded me to embrace every emotion. In the happiest of moments and the saddest, these words have filled up the empty spaces in my heart. And while my flesh and bones will turn into ashes, these words won't perish with me. They will inhabit the air and whisper our secrets to every lost star, trying to find their way out of the chaos. (c) Ayushee Ghoshal

Staring at the sky on a rainy evening.

A sense of loss clings to our bones, loss of the hours that swept our feet like tides, like time that waits for no one, like a day out of time. Despite of the ash cold remnants in our palms, we try to reach out for the green ray of an impossible hope.
Sometimes, the answer lies in accepting the end of the road, in making peace with the truth that all of us are meant to live with our set of incomplete stories because reciprocity is a lie, in ignoring every voice that beckons us towards the wretched promises of "forever".
There are little worlds inside our head, dark lanes adorned with wilted flowers that howled out a name. We stare out of the ram-shackled cabin's windows as the world gets drenched in a perpetual rain.

The sense of loss flutters louder than ever. The 'never again's", the stubborn thumping before the submersion continues. The chances that we never take, the effortless mistakes, the assumptions, the weight of unspoken words, forgotten conversations inscribed on our flesh, the concluded sigh's of rainy evenings, a thousand wishes, a million possibilities.. 

Delusions: An excerpt from a short story.

Even in your absence, you are a part of me. Even though you have found your home in someone else's smile, I am trapped forever in that moment when you gazed into the blue of my eyes and swore that nothing would change. 

Music blares in the background. There's a track change. A sudden emptiness swells within me. I stir the melting ice cubes with an orange straw.
The choice was your's. Always.

To forget what you had never believed in. Your forgetting, my remembrance.  Your laughter, my tears. Poles apart, miles away. You still linger in my veins. 

There's a track change. I am lost in the darkness of the bar. The dazzling neon lights draw a light headed and almost choked up sight of us locked in the corner of the world. Unaware and content. I am left tapping my feet urgently against the corner of the cold steel table. I fidget with the straw, swallowing balls of hurt in a crowded room which smells of all the love that we left behind. I plaster a smile tinged with apprehension. The distance and emptiness looms in the darkness.

A springtime tale

The distant, unfamiliar look in your eyes

My paradise lost in bitter reveries of faith.

Spring blooms outside our window,

Crimson, emerald, patches of cherry red

scattered like snow

Brief reminiscent of the past, 

an old Christmas tree and indelible marks 

of coffee on the table.

/Rustling of leaves and the fresh fragrance 

of grass and wet mud doesn't break your thoughts.

By noon, you leave. 

And here I sit, telling my springtime tale of

a paradise lost, somewhere between my 

stormy thoughts of a bleak tomorrow 

and the winter of your ice blue heart.

(c) Ayushee Ghoshal