Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Dreamversation


 


Can I borrow a couple of your moments,

Before the moon picks up its beaming glow?

Can I ask you something,

Before my winging words lose the courage

And find the floating mist in a hiding flow?

Though, a lot of things I’m dying to know,

But, a few or a couple will be just fine:

You’re so busy, and I’m in such a withering time.

All you need is to respond in just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Sounds so simple, aint’t it? I guess so.

 

I’ve got so many questions getting spiralled,

Squeezing my heart: at least I feel that way.

Do you ever feel suffocated,

With thousands of questions in a boiling bay;

Tangled and the words severed off their wings,

Before trying to fly out off their death?

And that makes me feel just out of breath…

But, can you please tell me

Before the white dove

Sails past all the seas of lives;

Before a wandering soul

Walks past all his miles..?

 

Suppose, there is no oxygen issue;

But still, you are feeling out of breath for someone,

Someone keeping a deafening silence.

Have you ever experienced anything like this?

Anything that way, in a camouflaged patience?

Do you ever feel

Kind of taking in a breath of peace,

With a long sigh of relief,

Just after seeing someone online-

Like discovering an island

After a series of storm in a troubled sea-

After hours of impatient attempts

To feel someone’s virtual presence:

And still without texting any single word,

Sharing just nothing,

Nothing but a bunch of frozen sighs?

Unreachable, indeed, but there is still something.

 

Do you ever check your WhatsApp account

Just to see the login status of someone else?

Do you ever feel the craziness,

Making you feel like a bubble

With the burden of an unfathomable emptiness?

Have you ever found your feelings got stuck

In a one-way ride to the moon?

I don’t know if you ever feel the way I feel;

For anyone, ever in your dimensional zone?    

 

Have you ever been in a conversation

With someone, without uttering a single word,

For a soul laden with passion,

Breathing so hard to find a catharsis?

Do you believe anything like telekinesis:

Like sending the words from soul to the seas?

I wish I could send you my wingless words too;

Not the feelings, just words,

Millions of words,

As my feelings can hardly be painted with letters.

 

Have you ever talked to someone

Entirely in your imagination?

I call it dreamversation,

That I keep doing in my subconscious mind,

Or may be in my unconsciousness too,

With you: several times a day and at night

In my lonely leisure or whatever,

With the moon rising high

Or hiding somewhere,

With the monsoon rain

Drenching the soul of the earth

And of mine,

Or without it:

 

Without ever thinking the Meghbalika

I see in the canvas of my heart

Belongs to a parallel world,

And I’m just nowhere,

With all my dreamversations

Landing in a nothing-sphere.

 

 

©Atique R.


Friday, May 23, 2025

Death by Thunder on Such a Night




 

I planned it a long ago

To make a voyage with Death

Into a deep blue sea

To give away my breath;

And to brave the dreadful uncertainty,

With a farewell to life and its labyrinth:

May be in the twilight

With the splashes of melting gold

Into the relentless blue,

Ushering in a moon blanched night,

With a derailed drizzle in a dreamy light.

 

But on such a night

With all the shadowed dreams

Floating like a bunch of foamy clouds;

With all those unfinished jobs

Dwindling into the droplets of moon shrouds;

With all those meaningless promises

Hiding in the flow of enchanting jasmine;

With all those maddening night bloomers,

Glowing like fireflies in a starry shine-

Too beautiful to be real in a floating light,

With a nightingale and an aura of taking a flight…

 

But on such a night

After waking up from a beautiful dream

With an intense feeling for one more ride

Into the flow of an eternal stream;

With the blissful drops of a monsoon rain

After a long lingering summer pain,

I feel like walking alone,

Along a river in the rain,

With all my melting memories

Streaming down from the valley of my heart

Into the rivulets of a singing cloudburst…

 

On such a night

The ocean seems to be too far.

The relentless blue

Can be forgotten too

Like many other things for an unreal future.

On such a night

I feel like taking the short surreal sleep

To wake up to eternity.

Just a fraction of a second…

And the night looks so fairer to surrender.

Just a random bohemian thunder…a death by thunder.

 

©Atique R.


Wednesday, May 14, 2025

One More Reborn


 


Under the new Moon,

As I was flying high

Above the Mediterranean,

I happened to meet

An accident       

With a mountain

Of shrouding clouds

From heaven.

 

I lost the track

In the enchanting trail

Of a familiar smell

That I was mad at, once

A thousand years back.

 

No more blood;

No more sensation

In the radiation of warm flesh

I want now yet another reborn…

 

©Atique R.


Dead Enough


 


I had a dream

With the mirage

Of a dark red ocean

Confined in

A many-layered den.

 

And with colors;

In so many shades

And variations,

Splashing in

Like a stream

With a bunch of frozen sighs.

 

Then I woke up

With the cold touch of

A cloud passing by;

As I was looking

Down from the sky

At my blood stained body,

Lying immobile in a relentless blue:

Dead enough to see

What the dream could signify.   

 

©Atique R.


Parisian Perfume


 


The half-eaten Moon

Was crawling past the night

When I met my dandelion girl

Walking along the forbidden street

With the flickering shadows

In the shimmering light.

 

And it was blood all around

Spreading the smell of Parisian perfume.

Amidst the drizzle and a muffled sound

I found my smeared body

Lying prostrate on the blood-soaked ground.

 

Then my eyes full of red flung open.

 

© Atique R.


A Dandelion Girl


 


My derailed dream

Was gliding past

The autumn blast

Over a pink-flowing stream.

 

Then the wings

Of chameleon colors

Got trapped in a whirl

And shoot the dream

Down, overlooking

A dandelion girl.

 

Now, in the piles of

My many layered vision

I keep searching that one dream

I lost my autumn in...

 

©Atique R.


Friday, April 25, 2025

My Tell-Tale Love


 


I can see you with my eyes closed;

I can see you with my senses dozed.

I can feel you with the weakest beat of my heart;

I can feel you even with my mind forced to shut.

And my insolent eyes still keep searching you

In the crowd or in silence,

In my helpless impatience;

In the chaos or in emptiness,

In my harbored loneliness…

 

Once I saw you in black,

And you were looking stunning.

The other day you were in pink

And suddenly I knew

Why roses were so mind-blowing.

I saw you in red, blue, white, green,

And many other colors-to me unknown;

And I kept feeling the autumn calm or spring within,

Sometimes a tornado and some other times a cyclone.

Hundreds of such images are there in my heart or somewhere,

And I can keep shuffling them one after the other.

And still, I want to see you in red, blue, pink or green

To feel the flow of jasmine or the nor’wester

For a million more times by a timeless ocean…

 

I watch my heart falling to pieces

In the break of every single dawn.

I see my winging dreams crashing

With my befooling imagination.

I see your nonchalant look

Doesn’t seem to know me anymore.

I see your magical eyes going far and far,

Though close like a Moon; yet nowhere near.

And still, I wanna dream you in the Sun

With the sweat of a searing summer noon.

And still, I wanna fall for you a thousand more times

With the glowing hopes of every new Moon.

Still, I wanna love you with a maddening obsession,

And a passion going beyond every reason,

And I still want to love you, dear,

With my eyes taking in the whole monsoon.

 


©Atique R.


If I Were a Wild Swan

  ‘If I Were a Wild Swan’ is a translated poem, with a slight change from the original one (Ami Jodi Hotam) by Jibanananda Das, the pioneer ...