A memory of your smell :
an enslavement, so clandestine.
It tunes my arteries to sing,
like the waves sing,
for purposes unknown.
I ebb away , from this nonchalant madness
and turn into a moon-kissed star dust,
wishing there were no sun or stars,
Cause I now abhor the lick of light.
It separates us unknowingly.
How come I still dream of you again?
At what cost?
At what price?
© Shashank Bhardwaj
The wood savours its taste
Of the tasteless liquid.
Fireplace dreams
of its malignant kingdom
In the heavy cold downpour
I, rise as a sparrow,
To drench my non existent feathers.
My eyes dilate and reverberate
as a nonchalant child seeking
an incomprehensible vision.
The trees are showering,
Land is drowned in its brown ashes,
My dog peeks at the drops by the window.
His tongue is restless as my heart.
To stay, indoors
And bear the longing
Of this cold touch.
© Shashank Bhardwaj
The curves begin to melt,
Its astounding we remember
Everything we touch.
So your memory is a trace of fingertips,
From the callous neck, to the sculpted collar bones, you are a like a hidden lake in an island forgotten, where I dip to forget myself,
The curves extrapolate like rays of sunlight never knowing why,
From the breasts to the fine arch of the back,
Everything dissolves again and again,
My hands aren’t wet with your touch?
Are you really what they call as magic?
For my hands disappear within you,
Tracing every tips without whispering you,
Touching everywhere without telling you?
Making it a dream, with dreaming you,
Do you feel it all, or should I be dissolving you?
Not by touch, not by shyness
But by a pool of shyness and leaving you?
I never knew how to withdraw, so the dress is leaving you?
Maniacal? Sensuous? Are you mad?
All sound same. While your eyes teach you.
They served excellent crabs,
For they usually them boiled alive,
till their skin turned into fresh dark oranges.
Nothing tastes better than a submission ending without an ordeal.
Amidst the hullabaloo of the never closing cash counter, sun-baked foreigners awe over this never seen massacre.
The server, a lady of forty spews half broken greetings all over the table.
Her overnight dreams sweating from her eyebrows.
A mistake would be her beloved nightmare, soon.
I gulp down a dry martini and observe the horizon.
Beaches were always terrifying for me,
A place where I could drown and never be found.
Becoming a bitter aftertaste to my existence.
SB
Salt, bitter like fumes,
of a fire built of nostalgic warmth,
cures my homesickness.
I am again a toddler,
eyes blue as a turbulent sea.
Waving the currents
an untouchable goodbye.
A blank maritime flag,
holds a thousand words
dipped in indecipherable voices.
The language of longing,
Yet to be invented.
– SB
Warmth is a long sedimentary pause,
sip it,slowly,
through eyes that have learned
the craft of forgetting.
Too much of an interlude
and the spaces around you
start spewing nostalgic visions.
The Sabbaticals turn to never ending
regrets.
I turn to a normality I feared:
A morning in April with no rain.
I should have woken up,
when It was winter,
and my heart still booming
with the summer’s dream
– Shashank Bhardwaj
If all the beauty in the world
ceases to exist someday,
You would still be the unwritten poem for me,
The one I could never finish.
For I fear, that if I do so,
You would be lost forever in this world,
in the unseen books and the untouched pages
and in the hands of all those admirers,
whose fingertips have forgotten,
the art of patience.
© Shashank Bhardwaj
Writings to Heaven 