‘tera na hona, jane kyun hona hi hai…’

01Mar09

Scanned the xyz book of contemporary world poems
for a poem that talks about my contemporary world.

For a poem that talk about my contemporary love for you
for a poem that talks about my contemporary difficulties
with loving you.

Dear reader, you aint the ‘you.’
i assure so
(“till the [flickering electronic display] lets you say
it speaks to someone else than you?’¹ lol).

It’s another Sunday and
Sundays seem like perfects days for writing poetry
even if this really ain’t a Sunday for me.

It is not difficult for me to love you because
i don’t love you.

It is not difficult for me to love you because
i love somebody more.

It is neither difficult for me to love you because
there ain’t a contemporary world poem talking
about our love.

There are some.

But they all masquerade as different poems
written by different people from
different contemporary worlds.

Mahatma Foucault once said,
why can’t i keep my poems free of ‘theories’?,
(no, that is not what he said)

“[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed…”²

Sometime i am in this poem
Sometime in that.

For example, last evening
the wonderful whirling spring pre-andhi
took me and the flying lady zooming into
Pablo’s
i-wanna-know-you-like-the-way-the-storm-knows-the-trees
not-so-contemporary world,
ignoring absolutely
the glaring absence of
the flying lady
in the first place.

Or say that glimpse-of-side-face
lady in black
smiling soft as i stroke the dog
walking away from the premier as abhishek
outbarks abhay,
i don’t know where she took me
but she clearly took me somewhere,
somewhere
where black is age and is good
and i get to mother
her
and the dog.

And i am all over these places
and more
‘dispersed,’ ‘juxtaposed.’

So it cannot be
‘main tha, tu thi aur thi dilli bas.’

i am not only in dilli
there ain’t no bas.

But my love,
so are you
you ain’t only in dilli
even if in dilli,
often
not in the same one
as mine.

We travel
over dilli
and in other places
and love all over
sometime together
sometime alone.

i know love
i know,
i really do
that
it ain’t just us two travelers out there
and you know some of them
and i know some of them too,
like the flying lady i just mentioned
(who is now busy zooming above evenings
other than
my pre-andhi windy one here ).

And thus we reach the difficulties of our
contemporary love,
is it that we two are in love
or are we two fellow travelers tangled
in this web of traveling lover-hoods?

Do we wait till that ‘golden’ moment
when the lover-hood
champions over
the traveler-hood
and pins us down
to
dilli bas?

Is this all then
a masquerade,
reverse to the one those poetries are into
while they are the same poem they appear as many,
are we actually separatist lovers acting
as part of the same group of travelers,
pin-downers acting as let-goers,
lovers of certainty preaching contingency?

I hope not.

I think not.

Nope.

It ain’t about getting
its about becoming.

Its not about becoming (lovers)
through getting (you).

Its about becoming
through coming together
again and again
sometime by design
sometime by chance.

We aint like the xyz book of contemporary world poetry
bound together within the same cover pages
out of contingencies,
like that of existing
in the same con-temporal world,
but more so because of the
physical ‘binding,’
the poems inside always under the fear
that the glue may dry up
and the pages might fall of
get distanced.

But we ain’t losing anybody here
because we don’t have anybody to lose
in the first place.

We are poems
who have (or will
or may)
come together
again and again
in dilli
and in other places
and through the synekism,
the energy
the stimulation
generated out of these
com-ing together
be-ing together,
we have (or will
or may)
become lovers
still traveling
still loving.

“… na hai yeh pana, na khona hi hai
tera na hona, jane kyun hona hi hai …”

>>

1. Vikram Seth. (1990) ‘Across,’ in All You Who Sleep Tonight
2. Michel Foucault. (1967) ‘Of Other Spaces’

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Tags: love, poetry, travel, vikram seth